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Show 243. community of organism and environment. All of these observations were prerequisite to ecological thinking. But Muir would not make outstanding contributions to the science of ecology. He continued to write standard taxonomical botanical notes about Alaska, for instance, in the eighties. But in his more popular essays, he began to present essentially ecological arguments about the community of the Sierra. This was implicit in the Stormy Sermons, though I have not dwelled upon it. Muir looked at rain pouring off the trees during a flood storm and saw the microcosm of a watershed. In fact, many of his near views constitute ecological vision. Merriam would present a theory of "life zones" as they are called, in an engaging theoretical way, but such an idea was implicit in Muir's view of the communities of the Sierra, and in his diagram of concentric zones on Mount Shasta. So I begin with a paradox, that Muir was a practitioner of ecological thinking when he wrote about the Sierra in the 1870's, even though he was not a theorizer about ecological themes such as "life zones," "diffusion," "climax communities," "symbiosis," "succession," etc. Muir did not speak ecotalk; his ecology was implicit in his vision and writing. Perhaps the way he studies was more important than what he saw. His decision to immerse himself in the flow, to soak himself in rain and freeze himself in snow, to become part of the landscape "like a bobolink on a reed" - this method of study guaranteed an ecological perspective. Paul Shepard has argued that the human skin is "not a shell so much as a |
