John Burroughs
John Burroughs’ books and related materials are the highlight of the Collection, in terms of breadth, uniqueness and, I would argue, perhaps importance as well.
Burroughs today is considerably less well known than Thoreau, Emerson, Muir or Walt Whitman, the men who represented his most important influencers and contemporaries. And yet in his time, JB was perhaps the best known author of the lot of them - if for no other reason than his essays were part of the curriculum for a generation of American students.
I would argue, as others have, that JB’s focus on his immediate environment; his appreciation of the ordinary, natural, pastoral world of the countryside; his appreciation, his gratitude, for the small everyday miracles of nature all around him; and his insistence on truly seeing and understanding that world, had a profound influence on his contemporaries and all who’ve come after, whether they know it or not.
Among the more profound books I’ve ever read is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (20–). Kimmerer describes a nature ethic centered on Native American values. Nature is to be understood as a whole, humans as latecomers to it with much to be taught by that which has already been there for eons. The relationships are to be based upon reciprocity, gratitude and mutual respect - each element of nature having its rights, its qualities, its lessons to teach.
JB did not go as far as Kimmerer, but at its core he taught that observation and understanding brings with it appreciation and respect. “By rejecting institutional religion and by bathing in ‘the current of the sweet-flowing nature that is always near at hand,’ Burroughs felt that humanity would ‘lose the God of a far-off heaven, and find a God in the common, the near, always present, always active, always creating the world anew’ (LT 233).” [From Justin Askins’ essay in Sharp Eyes (pp. 260-1, see References)]
JB was not a mystic, but he came to posit a cosmic intelligence: “Is not man’s wisdom also older than himself?…may we not infer that every spark of intelligence he shows, or is capable of showing, is part of, or a manifestation of, the intelligence that pervades all things?” (SY p. 207…)
JB was a “literary naturalist” with a focus on the “literary” as much as the “naturalist.” He saw himself as an artist first. He was a naturalist because he loved to see, and understand what he was seeing. As he wrote in a letter to his “literary confidante” Myron Benton:
That Thoreau business will play out pretty soon, there is really little or no resemblance between us…. This is the way we must be set apart, each on his own pedestal; Thoreau’s is mainly ethical, as much so as Emerson’s is. The aim of [Gilbert] White of Selborne was mainly scientific. My own aim, so far as I have any, is entirely artistic. I care little for the mere scientific aspects of these things, and nothing of the ethical. I will not preach one word. I will have a pure result, or nothing.
[Source: From H.R. Stonebeck’s essay in Sharp Eyes (p. 272, see References) quoted in turn from Barrus’ 1925 two volume publication of JB’s letters.]
Atkins writes that “the key to Burroughs lies in his direct emotional ties to nature…. Compared to the polemic force of Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir, Burroughs seems passive, but his goals differed: ‘I think it is probable my books send more people to nature than Thoreau’s do. My enjoyment is more personal and contagious. I do not take readers to nature to give them a lesson, but to have a good time.’ (Barrus 1925, 2:336)…. Burroughs helped fill the need for a sense of permanency and psychic value with…a balance of naturalist and nature - a harmony Burroughs quickly came to prefer to the exclamations of the transcendentalists….” [SE 251-2]
Writes Bill McKibben in an important 1992 piece (originally published in the ‘New York Review of Books’ and reprinted in Sharp Eyes) which was an important catalyst in the revival of interest in JB’s writings and influence on the environmental movement:
“We must preserve the wild lands that remain, but most of the nation will be neither pristine nor urban but somewhere in between. Learning to appreciate the middle ground should be one of our chief goals - and this is where Burroughs speaks to us. As his vast popularity demonstrated, he found a language for making others appreciate the small spectacles of nature…his moderation, his calm observations, and most of all his seductive and accurate descriptions of the beauty and order around his Catskill cabin should give him a central place in the environmental movement…. ‘Read correctly the moral of the solar system - this harmony, this balance, this compensation - and there is no deeper lesson to be heard,’ he insisted, an argument from ecological bedrock that preceded by some decades the popularization of ecology.” (SE 17-18)
Interestingly, at times McKibben disses Burroughs’ environmentalism. In an excellent and spirited essay, Frank Bergon directly rebuts this. Noting JB’s work spanned 60 years, from the Civil War to post-WWI, Bergon points to the environmental maturity of JB’s later works. He quotes various bits from JB’s writings, such as “Life is intensely artificial…. The ambition now is to get wealth and die a Christian - become rats if necessary to achieve these ends.” And “the time may be coming when man’s scientific knowledge, and the ‘vast system of artificial things with which it has enabled him to surround himself, [will] cut short his history upon the planet.’ (TC 239)” (SE p. 21). In UM JB shows incredible foresight, as he yearns for wind and solar power instead of oil and coal, when “Our very minds ought to be cleaner.”*****
Bergon writes: “He catalogues our civilization’s terrible waste of natural resources and looks ahead to when the planet’s ‘coal will be about used up, all its mineral wealth greatly depleted, the fertility of its soil will have been washed into the sea,…its wild game will be nearly extinct, its primeval forests gone, and soon how nearly bankrupt the planet will be.’” (SE 22, LT 204). He adds: “To be blunt: Burroughs did assume a stance of environmental concern in that he publicly advocated preservation of natural resources and protested environmental destruction.” (SE 23)
Bergon concedes “Burroughs’s few public actions, of course, do not compare with those of John Muir. Rather than as an environmental activist, Burroughs must be appreciated as primarily an environmental artist who was also a teacher…. In such feeling for the natural world, Burroughs’s awareness and sensitivity establish, even today, an essential standard for anyone aspiring to become a fully engaged environmentalist.” (SE 24-5)
Charlotte Zoe Walker argues that “Burroughs’s clear-sightedness and his free use of his own voice, expressing his delight in nature, are the elements of his writing that have been most influential on later nature writers.” (SE xxviii)
JB was not an environmental conservationist in the mode of a Muir or his intellectual progeny. And yet his appreciation for the cyclicality of agrarian life led to a cosmic respect for the natural world - a respect perhaps more important to engender going forward than the Muirian focus on protection of the sublime to the exclusion of most of the rest of the planet. The coming environmental challenges demand a new ethic more than discrete protection. They demand a mindfulness, a gratitude, a respect for the natural world as a whole and holistic system - an approach that draws on Leopold and Kimmerer and McKibben and, yes, Burroughs as much or more than it does on Muir and Brower and Roosevelt.
So who was John Burroughs? What made him him? His bio can be summarized as follows:
He was born on a hardscrabble farm in New York State’s Catskill Mountains in 1838? His parents, especially his dad, were intensely religious. He left home at age 16 to teach school, which he did in various towns in the Hudson Valley as well as NJ and IL, hoping to earn enough money first to further his education (he mostly didn’t), then to support himself and his wife (he mostly couldn’t). He read voraciously, especially Emerson. During the Civil War, which as an ardent abolitionist he supported but like Muir had no interest in fighting in, he went to Washington DC to earn more money, working as a Treasury Dept clerk. In DC he became very close friends with Walt Whitman. He also started focusing his writing on natural themes, seeking to differentiate himself from Emerson. He wrote the first book ever written on Walt Whitman. Whitman helped.
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John Burroughs was not an environmentalist or even conservationist in the true sense of the word, even given the standards of his time. In fact, on one of the few occasions where he was asked to take a public stand, on the damming of the Hetch-Hetchy Valley, he declined - although it should be noted this occurred when he was quite old and his mind perhaps beginning to fail.
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Notwithstanding that fact, JB was enormously influential on the EC movement of his day and the days to follow. This came about because of (1) his influence on the thought leaders of his day, most especially Theodore Roosevelt, to whom JB was "Oom [Uncle] John," friend and muse, and (2) his enormous popularity and the broad exposure his writings received, being even more true in that Houghton Mifflin published many of his writings in widely used editions specifically aimed toward elementary and high school students.
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Burroughs was a naturalist certainly, an observer. He was a pastoralist, less interested in wilderness as we define it today than in rural and semi-wild places in which humankind could live in relatively peaceful coexistence with nature. Renehan in his outstanding biography John Burroughs: An American Naturalist, argues that in many ways Burroughs "wanted less a country that was wilderness than a country which was a garden...a lost possibility from an age before the dominance of machine industry." [p. 253]
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Burroughs taught American's how to observe and otherwise interact with nature. In an influential essay published as Burrough's fading legacy was being reinvigorated....Bill McKibben...
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[Renehan on Packard and Van Dyke]
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Burroughs' was born and raised on a farm in New York State's Catskill Mountains. His parents, and particularly his father, were strict and very religious in a fundamental, Calvinistic way. Burroughs grew up working on the farm but he yearned for more education than the local school provided. When Burroughs' father reneged on a promise to send him to a boarding school at 16 years of age, he left home and got a job as a country schoolteacher in order to raise tuition funds. He taught, studied and wrote for several years - during which time he discovered Emerson, whose philosophy had an immeasurable impact on Burroughs - so much so that much of his writing for a long time were derivative of that of the master. [So much so that before publishing one essay by JB, Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell wrote Emerson to confirm the work was not plagiarized. It wasn't but the ensuing piece, "Expression" which as was common was published anonymously, was for years attributed to Emerson.]
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JB had three friends of particular note as he grew up and reached maturity: Jay Gould, who was a neighbor and close friend until each went off to find their separate destinies; Ursula North, who would become JB's wife in what by all accounts was a generally unhappy marriage; and Myron Benton. Benton was a farmer of unusual refinement, a published poet described in his NYT 1902 obituary as "beloved by all who ever met him: a friend and helper of humanity, and interested in all that concerted it, as well as a half maker of the idyllic landscape about him which he did so much to preserve and heighten. He was friend with and correspondent with many leading literary figures of his day - in fact Thoreau's last letter, dictated to his sister and published last in Letters to Various Persons was to Benton.
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JB and Benton began corresponding after Benton sent JB a congratulatory note on some of his essays emphasizing rural themes. Benton was born and raised at Troutbeck, a Hudson Valley farm near the Connecticut border which was and still is considered one of the most picturesque ever seen. On his first visit there, JB brought along a newly acquired copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. As Renehan describes it: "Although Burroughs and Benton had seen Whitman's poems,..this was the first chance either of them had to pour through the length and breadth of Leaves....They hiked to a distant pasture of Benton's farm.... With a bag of chestnuts to snack on, the two friends spent several hours taking turns reading aloud to each other...." JB's first book, the self-published Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, which is the first book about Whitman ever published, describes that day of discovery. The copy of the book in the Collection is inscribed to Benton, who has marked in it that reference.
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JB and Benton also contrived to spend a few hours with their hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson, when the latter traveled to the Hudson Valley for a lecture. Around this time, JB had begun to read Thoreau (as well as Audubon's Birds and essays by Wilson Flagg) and began to "try his hand at turning nature study into literature" [Renehan p. 65]. However, neither writing nor teaching was providing enough income to support JB and his wife. And so, in 1863 at the height of the Civil War JB moved to Washington DC, getting a job at Treasury. He lived in Washington for a decade where his closest friend became Walt Whitman, who was working as a government clerk but who spent most of his money and free time ministering to wounded soldiers in the Capitol.
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TBC
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