Talking with the Trees: John Muir’s Nature Spirituality

The iconic hero of the wilderness, John Muir, held an ecstatic relationship to trees. While Muir’s writings about trees helped lay the foundations for federal laws that aimed to protect wilderness forests as national treasures, they also index Muir’s deeply religious response to trees as living, sentient beings. This talk explores Muir’s nature spirituality that endowed trees with a kind of personhood—an attitude that was often mocked and satirized in Muir’s day—and how Muir’s "language of trees" anticipates current scientific insights into the ways that trees can communicate with one another.