[pct-l] John Muir's Birthplace

[Brandon McGinnity]

Eh, Nature's not in any danger, she's always waiting in the wings ready to
spring back in, waiting as weeds in the cracks of sidewalks and rats and
coyotes in the alleyways. All we gotta do is give her a chance. That's the
key. But Nature can't die while we live on, that's a contradiction. We'd be
gone long before she was in peril.

But you make a great point, about depending on the water out there and
finding lawn-ringed lakes. In fact it often seems to me that the point of
environmentalism isn't to save Nature, which doesn't need saving, but it's
about saving ourselves. That is, keeping the world in a way that is good for
human life. of course that helps the greater biome, which is great and noble
in itself. But if the world went through an extinction event all the way
back to cockroaches, that's only bad to the human mind; Nature is
indifferent.

Anyways, sorry to get heavy. But you should turn in your article. It's an
important point. Our own hypocricy is the hardest to spot, usually.

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 8:11 PM, Diane Soini of Santa Barbara Hikes <
diane at santabarbarahikes.com> wrote:

> Thank you, Shroomer.
>
> We had an article in our local Sierra Club newsletter that basically
> said that people who lead hikes aren't doing the dirty work of
> activism. They are just having fun. Of course, Trailhacker, being the
> Outings Chair, wrote a response that was quite good. His point being
> that leading Sierra Club hikes is not easy and we have as much a
> shortage of hike leaders as the political folks have of activists.
> Still, I agree it is way more fun leading outings than doing
> activism. I am simply not an activist. At the first sign of
> difficulty, rather than try to work for a compromise, I would cave in
> and run away in tears.
>
> I wanted to write something about my PCT experience, about how it
> showed me in a visceral way things like access to clean drinking
> water were only intellectual exercises for me before. In regular life
> no matter how much they talk about pollution, clean water always
> comes out of the tap. When the tap is gone and your life depends on
> water that comes from a stream or lake instead, the horror at seeing
> green, fertilized lawns ringing a lake really sinks in. (And yet, how
> many Sierra Clubbers are out there putting fertilizer on their lawns
> every weekend?) But I never turned it in.
>
> Hiking the PCT also gave me a lot of hope. There really are a lot of
> beautiful places still left in the world, nature isn't completely
> dead. Sometimes living in the regular world you get the feeling that
> there's nothing left of nature, that we already pretty much killed
> it. Spending 6 months out in it not only made nature a hopeful
> reality but it made it a welcome place I called home. If nature is
> still alive, and if people understood it was still alive, maybe they
> wouldn't be thinking in the back of their subconscious like I think I
> was thinking, that well it's pretty much gone, we lost, may as well
> just forget about it and wait for the end times.
>
>
> On Jan 22, 2011, at 4:41 PM, Scott Williams wrote:
>
> > That is such a right thing to do Diane.  Muir was consciously doing
> > the same
> > thing with the early Sierra Club summer camping trips.  He was
> > motivated to
> > get people into the High Country for just that reason.  He took
> > Emerson's
> > ideas, and made them real, touchable, and personal by giving people
> > the
> > experience of the wild.  When you take people up there, or anywhere
> > beautiful in the woods, mtns or deserts, you make "converts," and
> > political
> > allies.  Or you at least begin what for many becomes a lifelong
> > love of
> > nature.
> >
> > What you are doing with folks has a long history and great
> > validity.  If we
> > want these great places and trails preserved, we need more than a
> > few thru
> > hikers to make it happen.  I lead weekly hikes in our area, and up Mt
> > Diablo, partly because I'm hiking anyway, but also because I'm
> > really very
> > missionary where it comes to getting people involved in Nature.
> > Your posts
> > always come from that place, as do many of the old timers, and
> > young timers
> > on this forum.  We just want others to experience it and love it as
> > we all
> > do.  It is fun, and it isn't complicated, it's just wonderful.
> >
> > Shroomer
>
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-- 
~ Moccasin