More Lessons from the Life of John Muir
"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools"—John Muir
The last leg of John Muir’s "thousand-mile walk to the Gulf" took him from Gainesville (which he described as an “oasis” with many beautiful homes) to Cedar Key, Florida in five days. On early Saturday morning, September 25, 2010, my father and I made the 60 mile drive in an hour. Our trip made me wonder how much this portion of the Florida coastal lowlands had changed in the 143 years since John Muir first encountered the Gulf Hammocks and all of the coastal keys near Cedar Key. What I discovered is a powerful lesson for family leaders who want to make sure their families will flourish for generations.
In his first trip to Cedar Key John Muir found the Gulf Hammocks to be a "watery and vine-tied" land where "the streams are still young." Muir had to cross vast quantities of Red Cedar along the coastal lowlands of Levy County. In fact the Cedar Keys took their name from the stands of junipers known as Red Cedar.
On our trip to Cedar Key last weekend the first Red Cedars we noticed were two large trees outside the Cedar Key State Museum. This museum chronicles the visit of John Muir to Cedar Key in 1868 and the impact of German entrepreneur and pencil magnate, J. Eberhard Faber.
At age 19 Faber, who came from a family which had made its fortune manufacturing pencils, immigrated to the U.S. and opened a stationary store. Three years later he founded the Eberhard Faber company and commenced looking for an abundant source of splinter-free wood. In 1852 that search led him to Cedar Key, where he discovered the vast red cedar stands in Florida’s Gulf Hammock area between the Suwannee and Withlacoochee Rivers. He bought land and timber rights, organized crews to float cedar logs to the port at Cedar Key, and then shipped those logs to the family pencil factory in Germany.
In 1858, Faber built a slat mill directly south of Cedar Key. He began shipping slats instead of logs which greatly improved efficiency and profitability. The pencil industry in Cedar Key expanded rapidly and a few years later the Eagle Pencil Company built a Cedar Key facility. These thriving enterprises were a strong inducement to the completion of a trans-Florida railway which in 1861 connected the port of Cedar Key to the East Coast port of Fernandina Beach. Now the splinter-free slats that would become thousands of pencils could be shipped to the Atlantic and save the time and expense of a trip around the Florida Keys and up the gulf coast.
In 1862 Faber became the first person to establish a large scale pencil factory in the U.S., near the current site of the United Nations. By the time John Muir arrived in Cedar Key in 1868 the town was booming.
As we learned in The Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf of Mexico John Muir was forced to spend months in Cedar Key recuperating from malaria. He borrowed a skiff and explored the keys which dot the coast and undoubtedly saw the effects of the massive harvesting of Red Cedars. It was here that Muir’s vision about man’s role as a steward of nature emerged.
Muir, who was a professional forester, believed that "forestry is tree farming." He felt you should harvest timber but always with a view to preserving the long-term viability of the forests. Faber and the other pencil barons were intent on maximizing their profits. The red cedar forests of the Gulf Hammocks were being harvested without any thought about regeneration of the forest.
The story of John Muir’s emergence during the next thirty years to become perhaps the nation’s leading conservation advocate traces its roots to his battle with malaria. Each day during his convalescence he would retreat into the forests or borrow a skiff to visit one of the nearby keys. These reflective periods were helping to strengthen his conviction of man’s responsibility to seek to live in harmony with the environment.
After he had regained enough strength to continue his journey, John Muir left Cedar Key in 1868 and continued his journey eventually reaching Cuba. Realizing he was still greatly weakened from the malaria, John Muir abandoned his plans to tour South America and instead ended up in California. He settled in a cabin inside of what we know today as Yosemite National Park. He became a student of the geology of Yosemite and over the years he would give tours of the area to prominent politicians, business and thought leaders of his day. Upon meeting John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson announced he had finally found the prophet of conservation he had been looking for. He offered Muir a professorship at Harvard. Muir preferred to remain in Yosemite and to use his influence for its protection.
In 1890 John Muir was instrumental in the introduction of federal legislation to preserve Yosemite. In 1892 he co-founded the Sierra Club and served as its first President. He would be such a driving force behind the National Parks movement that he is called the “Father of the National Parks.” He encouraged city dwellers to seek spiritual nourishment in nature and referred to the National Parks as “places for rest, inspiration and prayers.”
In 1898 Muir returned to Florida on a forest inspection tour. What he saw around Cedar Key had to reaffirm his view of the importance of man’s stewardship of the forests. Two years before John Muir returned to Cedar Key, a great hurricane had destroyed much of the town and toppled most of what remained of the red cedar forests. The depletion of the nearby red cedar forests coupled with the destruction of the mills and factories in Cedar Key spelled doom for the pencil industry in that area. Without the local red cedar supply, the pencil factories in New York and abroad quickly switched to reliance on Western Cedar for its pencil stock. It took the town of Cedar Key more than seven decades to recover from the economic devastation of the town and the pencil industry.
What had transpired in the thirty years since John Muir first left Cedar Key is a remarkable lesson about stewardship of natural resources and planning for unexpected calamities.
Surely Eberhard Faber should have anticipated the problem of depletion of the red cedar forests. If he had studied the history of Cedar Key, he might have learned that just ten years prior to his arrival in the town a hurricane had produced a 27 foot storm surge. Would you build your mill and factory facility on the virtually flat outermost key if you were aware of what potential destruction a hurricane could pose? It appears Mr. Faber and the other pencil industry owners either ignored those risks or deliberately chose to exploit the local resources as rapidly as possible. Mr. Faber died in 1882 and never knew that in another 15 years the profit center he had created in Cedar Key would be destroyed by another “big storm” with no economic justification for rebuilding it due to the depletion of the resource base.
Have you prepared for the obvious risks which could threaten both your financial capital as well as the other dimensions of your family’s wealth? Have you looked back at least three generations to consider what you might learn from the past about what unexpected threats to your family’s well-being there might be? Have you sought to warn future generations of your family and what risks are within your horizon of awareness? Have you engaged in a conversation with advisors whose experiences might have let them look beyond your horizon of awareness and discover threats you haven’t even considered? Have you read books, such as Family Wealth – Keeping It in the Family, which open up a view of both the mistakes and best practices of family leaders from generations ago and share some of the knowledge and wisdom which are foundational to building a flourishing family?
“Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life”--Unknown
