Muir, John 1838-1914

MUIR, JOHN 1838-1914

Naturalist, founder of the sierra club

Background

John Muir was the most influential and best known advocate of wilderness protection during the 1900s. He was born in Scotland and immigrated to the Wisconsin frontier in 1849. Self-educated, he later attended the University of Wisconsin from 1860 to 1863. Muir became interested in botany, and he took walking trips around the Midwest and Canada. After an industrial accident in 1867, he decided to devote himself to "the study of the inventions of God." In 1868 he first visited California's Yosemite Valley, where he remained for six years. After spending years away from it, Muir returned to the valley in 1889 to find it spoiled by logging and sheep grazing. In 1890 he helped to win passage of the Yosemite National Park Act.

National Influence

By 1900 he had helped found the Sierra Club (1892) and was busy raising public awareness of the need to protect America's wilderness lands. In 1901 he published Our National Parks, and two years later went on a camping trip in California with President Theodore Roosevelt. It was on this trip that Muir was able to influence public policy the most. Roosevelt was moved to add 148 million acres to the national forest lands, and he also doubled the number of national parks and created sixteen national monuments. One of them, a stand of redwood near San Francisco, was later named the Muir Woods National Monument.

Preservation Versus Conservation

Theodore Roosevelt was a personal friend of Muir's, and declared in 1908 that in the nation's park's "all things wild should be protected and the scenery kept wholly unmarred." But as president he was torn between Muir's belief in preservation—the notion that wilderness should be protected simply for its beauty and wonder—and conservation, advocated by chief forester Gifford Pinchot, who thought more in terms of the wise use of natural resources than about "Nature." Conservationists advocated such measures as the 1902 Newlands Act (named for Francis G. Newlands, representative from Nevada), which required that the money from the sale of public lands be used to build dams and irrigation for the approximately five hundred million open acres in the West that were mostly arid land. While preservationists and conservationists often cooperated in the effort to establish parks and national forests, their differences in principle came to a head in the great battle of John Muir's life, the struggle to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park.

Hetch Hetchy

In 1900 the city of San Francisco announced its desire to create a reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, one hundred fifty miles away in the Sierra Nevada mountains, by constructing a hydroelectric dam on the Tuolomne River. Because the valley was located in a national park, the secretary of the interior blocked the plan. Following the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906, the city tried again and was granted permission by the Interior Department, with the backing of Pinchot. Muir swung into action. Since the plan would require congressional approval, he hoped to block the measure in Congress by gathering public support. He denounced advocates of the project as "Temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism," who "seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar." Muir put his heart and soul into the effort for more than a decade, but advocates of urban growth finally prevailed in 1913, when Congress approved the dam. A year later, worn out and disheartened, Muir died of pneumonia, but not before making wilderness protection a national issue.

Sources:

Stephen R. Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981);

Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1959);

Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967);

Elmo R. Richardson, "The Struggle for the Valley: California's Hetch Hetchy Controversy, 1905-1913," California Historical Society Quarterly, 38 (1959): 249-258.