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Record W4205776939 · doi:10.1353/ohq.2009.0097

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster

2009· article· en· W4205776939 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Mark S. Harvey

Bibliographic record

VenueOregon Historical Quarterly · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicAmerican Environmental and Regional History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsWildernessBiographyPassionScholarshipWonderNaturalismArt historyHistorySociologyEnvironmental ethicsPhilosophyLawPsychology

Abstract

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about how the history ofmiscegenation law can, and has been, used to argue for a "color blind" approach to legal issues, and how this approach can work against various liberal causes. Pascoe's book will be of value to those who are interested in issues having to do with race,gender, legalhistory,andAmerican social history,and it is suitable forclassroom use. Paul Lawrence F?rber Oregon State University A PASSIONFORNATURE: THE LIFE OF JOHN MUIR by Donald Worster Oxford University Press, New York, 2008. Photographs, maps, notes, index. 535pages. $34.95 cloth. The lifeand work of naturalist John Muir has long been fascinating to scholars of the envi ronment and champions of nature preserva tion. Born in 1838 inDunbar, Scotland,Muir emigratedwith his family to theUnited States in 1849,eventuallybecoming a leading advocate ofnational parks andwilderness and a prolific author of nature essays. His writings, richly descriptive ofCalifornia's SierraNevada range and especially the incomparable Yosemite Val ley,formed the basis of his published books, including TheMountains ofCalifornia (1894) and Our National Parks (1901).He also wrote two autobiographical works,My First Summer intheSierra (1911)and The Storyof My Boyhood and Youth (1913). Numerous scholars have contributed to the rich scholarship on Muir. Among them areMichael Cohen, Frederick Turner, Steven J. Holmes, and Linnie Marsh Wolfe, whose 1945work, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir, remains a classic. Those familiar with such works may wonder what Donald Worster adds to our understanding ofMuir. Author of a prize-winning biography of John Wesley Powell and pathbreaking books on the dust bowl, western rivers,and thehistory of ecological thought, Worster provides fresh insights into this seminal figure inAmerican environmental history. Of course,much of thenarrative isfamiliar. Beginning with and devoting an entire chapter toMuir's early life inDunbar, Worster traces him from his youth to his years at theUni versity ofWisconsin, from his pilgrimage to Ontario during theCivilWar tohis longwalk through thedeep South, and from his first years wandering alone in theYosemite high country tohis laterlifeinCalifornia with family,friends, and kindred spirits involved in conservation. Worster unravels Muir's relationships with his siblings and thevariety of people he encountered. His increasingly troubled rela tionshipwith his father Daniel, whose religious and social views were at odds with his son's more liberal outlook, comes under close scru tiny. In addition,Worster carefully examines Muir's friendships,especiallywithwomen such asCatharine Merrill, with whom he had "many intensediscussions" about religion during his time in Indianapolis, and JeanneCarr, who encouraged his writing and exploration and shaped his "moral imagination" (pp. 109,346). These relationships expanded Muir's knowl edge of theworld and liberated him from the rigidlyorthodox views of his father. Worster's most original contribution is in analyzing Muir's experiences with themany places he lived,worked, and traveled.Other authors have described Muir's places of resi dence and travels, but Worster takes pains to follow his pathways closely and tounravel the meaning of each place to Muir's changingviews about nature.As a young boy inScotland,Muir rambled on the seashore and in thewheat and barley fields as away todeclare independence fromhis father.Still,his father's strictparent ing continued in Wisconsin, and resulted in theboy identifying with theoverworked oxen and horses on thefamilyfarm. Ultimately,Muir rejectedhis father's"antagonistic stance toward thenatural world" (p. 57). 296 OHQ vol. 110, no. 2 Worster shows howMuir's longwalk from Kentucky to Florida had an indelible impact. The diversityof people in thewar-torn region opened his eyes to issues of race and class while he also encountered markedly different climates, flora, and fauna. His observations of the South's animals and plants, so differ ent from those he knew in northern states, convinced him, asWorster puts it,"that all creatures great or small ... no matter how useless or ugly theymight seem . . . should be free to enjoy theirown place on earth" (p. 137). InCedar Key, Florida, he worked for the Hodgson familyuntil developing a bad case of malaria. Worster argues that Muir reached a kind of epiphany there; suddenly aware of his own vulnerability,he gave up his plan tovisit SouthAmerica and itsexotic landscapes,which Alexander Humboldt's works had inspired him todo, and...

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How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.312
Threshold uncertainty score0.485

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.194
Teacher spread0.189 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2009
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