Drinking This Champagne Water: Walks With Rousseau and Muir in Nature
20 Jun
by Michael JS Cox, Simon Fraser University
(An edited version of this essay appears in Confluence, vol. 15 no.2, spring 2010)
Download this essay as a pdf file: Drinking This Champagne Water
These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure…(John Muir, Nature Writings 228)
Sixty years separate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s death (1778) from John Muir’s birth (1838). Muir is not considered a philosopher, and Rousseau is not considered an environmentalist, but each man had an abiding passion for the solace occasioned by long walks in nature, and saw in Nature[1] an expression of God. Each loved the mountains, whether hiking or appreciating them from a distance, and each shared a love of flowers, and of moving water, and each saw himself reflected in the cold, still waters of alpine lakes. This paper addresses the parallels between these men, and the divergences and convergences, which until now have not been sufficiently explored.
In those papers I have read on Muir, references to Rousseau are scant. Several works compare Henry David Thoreau with Rousseau, most of them examining their social philosophies,[2] but as Joseph Lane (2006) notes, “the lines of intellectual transmission from Rousseau to Thoreau and his successors…are, at best, indirect.”
Indirect, but not indistinct. If I were to list several founders of contemporary environmental philosophy—which I am aware would be contentious—there is good reason to include Jean-Jacques Rousseau.[3]







