Muir to the Story

I like to think of myself as too bright and wise to engage in hero worship, but I must admit that certain people occupy high pedestals in my view. John Muir is one of them. I am not alone in this his name graces many schools, natural features, buildings, and even a minor planet, according to a recent article by Justin Nobel, The Miseducation of John Muir.

Muir is best known as the founder of the Sierra Club (of which I was an active member when we lived in Texas) and for his role in establishing the National Park Service. I learned of him in the first geography course I took as an undergraduate -- Conservation Thought -- in which his views were contrasted with those of Gifford Pinchot, the first director of the National Forest Service. In modern parlance, the two would be considered "frenemies" -- one dedicated to the preservation (non-use) and the other to conservation (sustainable use) of wild areas. Despite understanding the importance of balance between the two, I must admit always liking the purist Muir a bit better than the pragmatic Pinchot.

For those who admire Muir as I have -- or who love the National Parks that are his legacy -- I recommend Nobel's article, which exposes some "ugly truths" (Nobel's phrase) about Muir, along with some more benign but little-known aspects of his early biography.

First, the benign. I did not know that he had been  both a worker and a mid-level manager in the Industrial Revolution; the wilderness he loved was a strong contrast with the machinery that was equally dear to him. He also had walked the post-war American South long before he walked the Cascades of California, covering 1,000 miles on foot.

And now the ugly: His writings about that walk extol the natural beauty while describing the people -- especially indigenous people -- in very ugly terms. He did not recognize -- at least as a 29-year-old explorer -- that the views of nature he advocated were already held by people he viewed as primitive.

Looking back, Native Americans today are critical not only of those ugly attitudes but also of the adulation Muir received for doing things -- like the long walk itself -- that were already part of their cultures. In this way, Muir is a focal point for the deeply problematic way in which even European-American approaches to land stewardship have usually marginalized those who were its stewards long before colonization.

Lagniappe

After reading Nobel's article, I checked this blog for references to Muir and was surprised to find that my 2009 Botanical Travels post had actually mentioned controversy related to indigenous people in Yosemite.

2025 Update 

Sometime after writing this post in 2016, I decided to devote some significant time to it. Muir and his view of wilderness, after all, comprise the underpinning of much of what I teach -- particularly in a course entitled Land Protection. The distinction between preservation and conservation is complicated enough -- all the more so if we acknowledge that most or all of the "wild" land had ben in use all along.

So I started to prepare for a sabbatical in which I would examine all of this in more depth. I even started a very rough bibliography for this work. Sabbaticals come far enough apart (every 8th year at my university) that my priorities eventually shifted and my next/final sabbatical will be in Cabo Verde doing essentially unrelated projects. 

This update relates to the fact that someone already did the research I in mind, and in fact did it quite a while ago and quite well. I am currently reading the audio version of ethnoecologist M. Kat Anderson's 2005 book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. As the long title with the requisite colon suggests, this book gives every indication of having originated as a doctoral dissertation. The author references ample field work and also provides numerous, very specific examples to bolter the claims she makes. 

As the first part of the title implies: places that Muir and other European Americans thought of as wild were actually part of very complex patterns of land use that had developed over a period of more than 100 centuries before Europeans arrived in what is now California.