John Muir's legacy questioned as centennial of his death nears

[cali]

John Muir is the patron saint of environmentalism, an epic figure whose writings of mystical enlightenment attained during lone treks in California's wilderness glorified individualism, saved Yosemite and helped establish the national park system.

As the first president of the Sierra Club, Muir shaped enduring perceptions about how the wild world should be prioritized, protected and managed.

But now some critics are arguing that the world has changed so much in the century since his death that Muir has gone the way of wheelwrights.

He is no longer relevant.

"Muir's legacy has to go," said Jon Christensen, a historian with UCLA's Institute of Environment and Sustainability. "It's just not useful anymore."

<snip>

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-rethinking-muir-20141113-story.html#page=1

[Kalidurga]

1. There are some things I would have rather not known.

I didn't know he was a bigot and that he did so much damage to the NA community. That's a big ole blemish on his record. On the other hand saying that preservation of natural areas and national parks is an antiquated idea is a bit of a stretch. I think that urban parks are a great idea and more should be done to make parks in urban areas I don't think it's a one or the other thing, both are important.

[riversedge]

2. Yes, we CAN have both

[SoCalDem]

3. history is a "warts and all" proposition

Once we start parsing and censoring it, we all lose. MANY famous people have held some odd/scary/bigoted/sexist/racist ideas, but it's a facet of them..not the whole, and if you consider the era in which they lived, they may have had fellow-travelers who thought the way they did.

[enough]

4. I'm wondering which of the wilderness areas they think "has to go."

The push is on to privatize currently protected natural areas for real estate development and "resource extraction." This will certainly get stronger in coming years, with Republicans in power in so many places.

It's specious to set up a conflict between preserving wilderness areas and creating urban parks and trail systems, or preserving smaller areas within populated regions. This is a false conflict.

[Scuba]

5. Plan on visiting the "Charles and David Koch Yellowstone Park" in the near future.

[RiverLover]

6. Just read the whole article. Now it makes sense. But I disagree that Muir's

"legacy has to go." It can be integrated.

[HereSince1628]

7. The conservation vs preservation debate is as old as both movements.

Conservation is based on the concept of best use, with sustainable use as a goal for all living resources.

Preservation is based on the concept of no consumptive use.

If you want both sides I suggest reading Gifford Pinchot as well as Muir.

[alarimer]

8. The Sierra Club has been a giant sell-out.

In no way do they live up to Muir's legacy.

[Blue_Tires]

15. +1

[Javaman]

9. "come, one and all to the Meir Woods Desert!" after it's been clear cut by the koch paper industrynt

[Zorra]

10. Neo-liberal corporate propaganda trash.

If we have more urban parks, we can cut down the rest of the Amazon Rainforest and still feel good about ourselves!!1

I've lived in the woods all my life, and one of the things I detest most is dumbass city people who never even grew a turnip and wouldn't know a duck fart from a loon's call making ignorant statements about living in the natural world.

You know what? If the fucking mice get in your house and your pantry, they eat your food, and piss and shit all over everything. So you trap them. Mice are fine in the woods, but when they threaten your food supply, you have every reason and right to stop them from doing so.

[cali]

12. whatever else it is- it's not coming from the neo-liberals. I disagree

with much of this, but this is an argument that has its roots in the left, not the right.

I haven't lived in the woods all my life, but I have lived in it for the past 35 years. Not sure what your rant about mice has to do with it.

[Zorra]

16. About the mice thing...

"For example, in his writings, Muir said the squirrels he killed on his ranch in Martinez, Calif., were disgusting pests out to ruin the orchards. But he described the squirrels living in his beloved High Sierra as hard-working creatures like those later popularized in the Disney classic "Snow White."

Citing this as proof of what a horrible person John Muir was, totally shot the author's credibility right there.

I owned and worked a small organic vegetable farm at one time. Every farmer in the world has to contend with critters eating their crops. Growing food is a lot of hard work. Farmers have a tendency to get really pissed off at animals that eat the crops that they spend hundreds of hours to produce. Gophers, rats, mice, squirrels, cattle, tomato hornworms, cabbage loopers,, nematodes, apple maggots etc. ad infinitum, cease to become cute little Disney characters, and become an enemy that is going to take food out of your baby's mouth. It is heartbreaking when the crop you so lovingly nurtured gets eaten by rockchucks, ground squirrels, gophers, javelinas, etc. I once lost my entire tomato crop because a rancher's cattle got loose and trampled the crop. Fortunately, he had insurance, so my life wasn't totally turned upside down by this.

So when someone who obviously never even grew a carrot uses the example of a farmer getting angry at squirrels, or other critters, for destroying her/his crop as a reason to malign that farmer's respectability and credibility, that person only displays their complete ignorance of the time consuming, hard work, disaster fraught undertaking involved in the real world of what it takes to put those beautiful veggies that they bought in the market on their plate.

The point is, critters, like mice, can get into your food, etc. and cost you a lot of money, and getting angry at them for doing so doesn't mean you are some kind of lowlife hypocrite.

[hunter]

11. The average know-nothing reader of this article...

... might walk away thinking Muir is no longer relevant, that the environmental movement is nothing more than a bunch of old white guys protecting their favorite vacation spots, etc., etc..

This simplistic sort of "two sides" reporting is killing the U.S.A..

Environmental problems are multi-faceted, and it's impossible to pluck a figure like John Muir from history and judge them by today's "progressive" standards.

I quit the Sierra Club a long time ago, and never supported Greenpeace because they both seem to have been corrupted by big money to become mere green-washing agencies, selling, in one form or another, fossil fueled travel to some "special places," special places that need the groups' protection.

The strategy makes sense as a fund raiser. The people who have the disposable income to travel to these special places also have the disposable income to support these groups. But in the larger scheme, it's not "saving the world."

My own environmentalism is quite radical. In my "thought experiment" I'd be emperor of earth and ban all fossil fuel use, and ban (with the exception of medical response units) any engine-powered vehicle that travels faster than the fastest humans can run, . The only speedier travel would require tools like bicycles and sailing ships.

Birth control would be universally available and greatly encouraged. High speed internet would connect everyone, worldwide.

What would that world look like?

People might draw together in close communities, developing their own cultures more in tune with the local environment. And they'd certainly demand year-long vacations every decade or so if they wanted to be world travelers, and plenty of three and four day weekends for local travel. Visiting places like Nepal or Machu Picchu or Arctic Alaska by means of sailboats, slow freighters, slow trains, and just plain walking would take some significant time, but it would also expose people to the natural environments and human cultures along the way. There would be no "fly-over" country.

In my personal life, I am a hypocrite. My wife and I own a single family home on a fairly large lot. We both have our own automobiles.

In my defense, our community has a fairly dense population, ten feet between each home's face, and many extended families sharing homes, grandmas, grandpas, and random cousins. My wife and I, by some great fortune have avoided the automobile commuter lifestyle since the mid-'eighties. When we met we were both Los Angeles commuters, which is where I learned to hate both automobiles and stop-and-go traffic automobile commutes.

Our present civilization is speeding down the highway toward the hell of environmental collapse, and along with that, the collapse of this civilization. It's not a bad thing to slow down a bit, buy some time, but what we really need to do is reverse direction.

I'm not optimistic that will happen.

[joeybee12]

13. The critics quoted here are full of sh*t...

Muir touched something very basic...that wilderness of and by itself is of great value...bunch of tools.

[True Blue Door]

14. What a bunch of solipsistic horseshit.

That article reads like it was written by some desperate intern.

John Muir is an early luminary of environmentalism, and will always be relevant as such.

[enough]

17. Thinking about this during the day, I find it more and more strange.

It's very odd to say "Muir's legacy has to go." What is Muir's legacy if not the preserved wilderness and natural areas in our country. There's no escaping the sense that this person is saying that THAT is what has to go.

In saying this he is right in step with right wingers who believe (and have long believed) that lands should not be preserved, but should be exploited by private owners, including corporations, for purely economic ends.