Ironically, it was while recovering from a twist of fate that had blinded him for several months that John Muir, the “father of the American park system,” devoted his life to conservation.
Today, more than two hundred million visitors enjoy the 84 million acres of national parks of the year of the Muir Epiphany. From glacier formation in Alaska Glacier Bay to manatees in the Florida Everglades, there’s plenty to explore!Here are some unexpected facts about the man whose vision — or lack of it — left this legacy:
Like many of us, he had assumed that this iconic figure of American conservation was born in the United States, but Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, a sunny village an hour south of Edinburgh.
His circle of relatives lived above his father’s food store (oatmeal). Oatmeal was a vital staple for many Scots, either for animal feed and for the ubiquitous Scottish porridge, so the circle of relatives was prosperous.
John attributed his love of nature to the Scottish countryside. In The Story of My Childhood and My Youth, he wrote:
“As a child in Scotland, I enjoyed all that wild nature, and all my life I’ve become increasingly attached to wild places and wild creatures. “
“As a child in Scotland, I enjoyed all that wild nature, and all my life I’ve become increasingly attached to wild places and wild creatures. “
Pro tip: The three-story space where John grew up in Dunbar is now a museum that lists John’s many achievements. My favorite exhibition is the first two editions of Muir’s books, published in 1894 and 1913.
John’s father, Daniel, an evangelical Christian and strict discipline, John later wrote:
“My father made me aware of so many Bible verses every day that at the age of 11 I was about three-quarters of the Old Testament and the whole New Testament through the center and the sore flesh. “
As Elder Muir’s devoted ideals have become more extreme, he left Scotland to enroll in the strict Disciples of Christ founded in the United States. Packing 11-year-old John, his older sister and younger brother, Daniel sailed for the New World, eventually steadving himself on wasteland in Wisconsin to identify a space and a farm before bringing his wife and four other children.
Daniel did not allow John to go to school, as it was obligatory to break the delicate land from sunrise to dusk, but John borrowed books and learned botany, biology and geology himself. He’d get up at one in the morning to examine in the basement till dawn. .
John also learned by walking through the fields, cataloguing plants and documenting trees. He enjoyed this land so much that as an adult he tried 3 times to buy his farm from years of training. Today, Fountain Lake Farm is a historic national open to visitors.
Without technical training, John invented things, basically watches, barometers and a device to automatically feed the horses, but also a device to get him out of bed every morning!He took his “emerging device” to the Madison State Fair, where he caught the attention of the University of Wisconsin, which awarded him a scholarship, even though he was self-taught and did not have a high school diploma.
Once enrolled in Madison, he invented a “study workplace” to open the books and turn the pages. Sunlight would burn a cable that connected to a lens, making sure art was activated at dawn. Wisconsin Historical Society on the UofW/Madison campus.
During a period like ter, he invented a clock that can appease the classroom fireplace early in the morning so that the classroom warms up when students arrive.
He did a medical course for 4 years before leaving, who preferred his studies in botany.
“I only leave one university for another, the University of Wisconsin by the University of the Desert. “
To make a living, Muir used his mechanical wisdom running in factories and sometimes invented tactics for production. It ended up in Indianapolis, which was then a post-Civil War mall, but still close to forests and swamps to live in. I have just continued my studies at the Desert University.
At the age of 28, Muir began running in a car factory, impressed by his new employee’s abilities, the owners presented him with an association, but as he fastened a swivel belt, Muir lost control and the steel alene slipped and cut the cornea. of his right eye, blinding him. Although his left eye was not wounded, he fell into a “compassionate” blindness, and Muir was “closed to all the good looks of God,” as he screamed after the accident.
He was confined to bed in a dark room for two weeks and fell into a deep depression. He wrote at home: “I’ve been trolling a lot among the flowers lately. “
When the bandages were removed six weeks later, Muir’s vision recovered, but this terrifying turn of fate had given him a new vision:
“I said goodbye to all my mechanical inventions, we decided to dedicate the rest of my life to examining God’s inventions.
After walking from Louisville, Kentucky, to Florida through the “wildest itinerary imaginable” (a vacation narrated in his e-book A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf) and a detour to Havana, Cuba, Muir headed to California. about Yosemite and that’s when he put his appeal into his new views.
When Muir first visited Yosemite, he had a playground for the rugged san Franciscons. After descending into the valley through 26 complicated laces, they stayed in one of the few rustic inns, or “camped in the woods, ate oatmeal cakes and drank tea. “” he “walked to mountain panoramas like Glacier Point, read poetry around campfires, and walked through moonlit lakes,” writes Tony Perrottet in Smithsonian Magazine.
Muir first arrived in 1868 and remained there for about 10 days, returned the following year and landed a task in the structure and control of a sawmill for one of the innkeepers, guided tourists, adding Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went in particular to Meet the Young Naturalist.
Muir moved for the next six years in Yosemite to fill one paperback after another with his observations of plants and geological formations. He earned a reputation in San Francisco as a self-taught naturalist and began writing articles for major magazines of the time. – Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s and New York Tribune, eventually concluding that he needed to spend more time protecting Yosemite than he would like to rejoice in.
The president personally wrote to Muir in 1901, asking him to make a stopover in Via Yosemite. “I don’t need anyone with me,” Roosevelt wrote, “and I probably need to leave politics for four days and just be in the open with you.
In the spring of 1903, Muir traveled for two months with Roosevelt from the White House to Yellowstone with dozens of urgent stops along the way. He detailed his two-week camping tour in Yellowstone in a 1906 Atlantic Monthly article.
Later that year, Muir visited the president on a four-day trip through Yosemite. Roosevelt left his security service and left with Muir for a “deep sleep” adventure, as Muir’s Scots would say. One morning they awoke dusty in the snow, to which Roosevelt replied: “It’s even more bubbly.
However, Muir did not “abandon” politics. He sought Roosevelt to claim Yosemite National Park, as Yellowstone had recently passed through President Ulysses S. Grant. At the time of the trip, Muir later wrote: “I was pretty good at wood thieves and the work of loggers and other forest sabotages.
During his presidency, Roosevelt would maintain more than 230 million acres of public land, adding Yosemite and 4 national parks and 18 national monuments.
In 1892, to protect his beloved Yosemite and “make the mountains happy,” Muir co-founded the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and longest-lasting environmental organization, and its president until his death in 1914.
Today, the Sierra Club, with the rest of America, examines its institutional racism, apologizing for the racist attitudes of its founder.
“[Muir] made derogatory comments about blacks and other Aboriginal people based on deeply destructive racist stereotypes, even though their prospects were later in life,” Michael Brune, the club’s executive director, wrote on the group’s website. As it appears in sierra club history, Muir’s words and movements are strong. They continue to harm and alienate other indigenous people and others of color.
“For all the damage the Sierra Club has done, and continues to do, to blacks, Aboriginal people and other people of color, I’m deeply sorry. “
Roosevelt named Muir Woods, the redwood forest north of San Francisco, as a national memorial in honor of his friend, and then John Muir College, who is part of the University of California/San Diego, which promotes environmental studies.
But it’s the John Muir Trail, one of America’s most productive trails, that actually illustrates Muir’s legacy. The 210-mile trail begins, of course, in Yosemite National Park, crosses Ansel Adams Wilderness, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and ends at the highest peak in mainland America, Mount. Whitney.
To arouse people’s interest in nature, Muir has written 12 books and more than three hundred articles on nature and their travels, which have taken him to each and every continent (except Antarctica). In 1903 he embarked on a global tour through Europe, Siberia. , Far East, India, Egypt and Australia.
But, for Muir, “the clearest trail of the universe [was] through a wild forest. “
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