Professor: Barbara Mossberg

credits 4.00

• CRN 22668: Monday & Wednesday, 8:30-9:50am @ CHA 301

Scientist or poet? When he died in 1914, John Muir’s death certificate listed his occupation as Geologist. He was known worldwide as a botanist. He stands in the California quarter as a mountaineer. He is iconic in climbing first ascents lore. A leader of the environmental movement, first president of the Sierra Club, he is credited as grandfather of our national parks. John Muir is associated with dozens of laws, court cases, public policy decisions, and cultural controversies about conservation that still are national headline news today. Featured in Ken Burns' documentary on our national parks, his name is on Smithsonian walls and Disney exhibits, schools, ships, trails, glaciers, forests, flowers, hospitals, and hotels, his image is on U.S. money and stamps.  Yet it is as a writer that his fame came, endures—and grows. Although he lived over one hundred years ago, his lively words continue to influence and inspire presidents and Congress, business and civic leaders, journalists and artists, scholars and scientists--and us. 

What was the power of his words? Taking our focus from the backpack he shouldered when he set off on his lifelong journey to engage with the natural world, our course investigates John Muir as a writer in his own right, Beginning with his epic ""thousand-mile walk,"" we explore his backpack’s contents as a clue to how he inspired a nation to preserve and protect wilderness. His “thousand mile” backpack had a plant press, journal, and three books. Drilling down into the bedrock of his abilities to interpret the natural world as a scientist from multiple disciplines, we examine his journals and the books he carried literally and in his mind (many memorized). We will read Muir as we read an Emily Dickinson, from an eco literary analytical approach and taxonomy of ways to characterize our environment.  We also will each identify a tree and describe it from multiple points of view to impact its fate in our world today, and construct our own backpacks of works and scholarly tools that support our causes and academic and lifelong goals. How can our own reading and writing in our majors impact decisions and ideas in the public realm--and what does this have to do with Mars? Bring a backpack and journal, and our "walk" begins!