One hundred years ago, in 1914, we lost one of the most famous and influential persons in the work to preserve our natural world, John Muir.

Stillwaters honored his life with a special presentation at Feb. 27 in the North Kitsap Fire & Rescue Paul T. Nichol Headquarters Station.

John Muir loved all that was wild and free, from the smallest flowers along the city park walkway to the Giant Sequoias. He lived or walked in the wilderness as much as he possibly could, and wrote about the amazing experiences and about the love he had for the beauty of our country. His writings and his work helped to found our national park system and preserved vast expanses of land for future generations, including ours.

As he wrote in 1901 (in “Our National Parks”) to encourage the safeguarding of park lands:

“Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed -— chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests.”

“… It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries … God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools — only Uncle Sam can do that.”

Muir was a great leader and a greater inspiration for the environmental hearts among us. He could do that for us because he himself spent so much of his life hiking and living in the wild and knew so much about the precious natural world that fed his soul. He tried to teach us all to absorb all the bounties that our natural world had to offer, in the peaceful, respectful way that he did — by just being in nature.

“Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings; nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail.” — “My First Summer in the Sierra” (1911).

Today, we absorb a lot of the bounties of our natural world all the time. Some of it is as basic as the air and water that we breathe and drink. Then there are the other natural resources we devour as quickly as possible, it seems: the ancient sunlight in the form of fossil fuels, the trees in the form of paper and building materials, the animals for our food, and so much more. Our insatiable appetites just keep on consuming our Earth home.

This doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to interact with Earth like we are standing in front of the vending machine, deciding which of her resources to extract next for our pleasure.

“Most people are on the world, not in it —- have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.”  — “John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir” (1938).

We may not want to live in the wild like Muir did for so much of his life, but we can decide to quit living apart from Earth and become a part of Earth. We can learn to respect and love our sisters, the trees and our brothers, the rocks. We can spend more time in Nature in order to learn our place as a part of Nature.

Keep close to nature’s heart, yourself, and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

Join us on Feb. 27. To get more information, go to www.stillwatersenvironmentalcenter.org, or call us at 360-297-1226.

— Naomi Maasberg is director of Stillwaters.