John Muir naturalists are those with John Muir’s beliefs, as extracted from his collected writings and applied to today. I have spoken for them in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.159:
John Muir naturalists want people to wake up to the danger of gradualism. Gradualism is how things get beyond shocking without shocking us. A string of small degrading steps, with pauses for acclimation, and by grains we land without protest in a condition that a full step to would repulse us.
Gradualism threatens every area of morality. People slightly descend from a moral principle, and that eases the way for another slight descent, and that to a third, and so on until they have descended entirely. Think of the man who cannot bear to think of killing his wife, but for some while yells at her. Once reconciled to that, he sometimes hits her lightly. Reconciled to that, he comes to knock her down regularly. Reconciled to that, he shoots her. Gradual reconciliation happens to the wife too. At the start, she would have left him if he had knocked her down once.
Outside the home, gradualism is behind our acquiescence to heinous crimes done to persons and animals. It is why we sit on our hands without outcry at the irreparable ravaging of species and wild places. How to strip the Amazon forest bare? Don’t do it overnight while we are sleeping, or tomorrow there will be hell to pay. Do it as it is being done now. Pilfer it.
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For a brief biography of John Muir, click here.
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