This is part three in a series of three lectures of the Ruskin Art Club’s ongoing series of presentations on Ruskin in America.
Aiguille Blaitiere, Chamonix c. 1849, pencil, ink, and watercolor, inscribed: 'JR on the spot, 1849'
Ruskin Art Club executive director Gabriel Meyer examines the ways Ruskin's ideas influenced pioneering naturalist John Muir (1838-1914) and American environmentalism at the turn of the 20th century. This talk continues the theme Meyer began with his talk/essay on "Ruskin and the California Dream," available on our YouTube channel and soon to be published in the Ruskin Review in the UK. While Muir himself was not one of the original Concord Transcendentalists, he knew and engaged with them and brought their ideas to bear on his work to chronicle and save the American wilderness. At the center of this lecture is a meditation on the significance of mountain landscapes for both Ruskin and Muir and their starkly contrasting views of what such alpine landscapes say about the interaction of Nature and the human. The lectures ends with a provocative look at the "problem of the picturesque" and at the invitation Ruskin extends to us, even today, to pursue a deep and comprehensive ecological vision, one that postulates that ecological repair and renewal is only possible in the context a radical moral and cultural transformation of human life.
Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. He was especially acclaimed for his coverage of the first Palestinian intifada and of the Bosnian war. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. Tebot Bach published his book-length poetic cycle A Map of Shadows in 2012. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work as a journalist by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley in 2017. He has published poetry and two novels; a large-scale nonfiction work, The Testimony of Stones, a “biography” of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, is awaiting publication. He had been involved with the historic Ruskin Art Club since 1998 and currently serves as its executive director. He is a Companion of the Guild of St. George.