Earth Day 2006

The unknown Muir

The racist and radical nature of the Sierra Club’s founder

By Amaris White
From the April 2006 Print Edition

When most of us think about John Muir, we probably picture a man who loved nature. He was essentially a good guy who fought to establish the National Park system, especially to protect Yosemite. Unfortunately, this view of the man is somewhat incomplete. Before we bestow our total and unqualified admiration upon this man, as most people do, perhaps we should look at him in his entirety. If we do, we see that there is much more to our hero than we ever suspected.

Muir came from a deeply religious background. His father — a Protestant who rejected everything that is not stated in the Bible — moved his family from Scotland to the United States to properly practice religion and start a farm. Here, Muir memorized the entire New Testament, and three-fourths of the Old Testament. Although he claimed in his later years that this was a form of extremism he had always rejected, the influences of his upbringing became apparent as he discovered his passion for nature.

Once given the chance, Muir left home and originally started at the University of Madison. However, after Lincoln signed an order to draft 50,000 men, he quickly became a draft dodger and left to “enroll in the university of wilderness.” Muir fled to Canada and avoided all contact with his family and friends in fear that he would be discovered. During this time he explored and studied nature, and soon decided that the wilderness was the only church and school he needed.

From this grew a series of new beliefs. Muir soon began to believe that animals are “our earth-born companions and fellow mortals.” He could no longer see the distinction between a man and a worm. He proclaimed that all animals, insects, rocks, and the “plant people” were, “All God’s people.” Nature was the tangible presence of God.

Thus Muir’s religious background began to reveal itself prominently — much like his father who had rejected the inequalities of the Scottish Church under English rule, he rejected the differences that people created between man and all other life. To Muir, all things were, “Sparks of the Divine Soul variously clothed upon with flesh, leaves, or that harder tissue called rock, water, etc.”

Essentially forming a new religion, Muir saw everything in nature as equal to man, and associated to God, thus providing justification and passion to preserve and protect all of nature. Muir became an environmental activist, and soon gained a following, whose members he encouraged to go into nature and cleanse their souls in order to experience the true love of God.

Ironically, Muir’s love for nature and animals stopped precisely there. He certainly did not have the same love for his fellow man. He expressed a great dislike of the Indians, and of black people. For Muir, the Indians were a dirty people that disrupted the pristine beauty of nature, and he, therefore, supported their removal. Nature helped to “cover and cure the grossness of their lives,” but nonetheless, Muir felt they were unclean and did not belong. Upon seeing an Indian woman he remarked, “Strange that man alone is dirty. Had she been clad in fur or cloth woven of grass or shreddy bark, she might then have seemed a rightful part of the wilderness; like a good wolf at least, or bear.” He did, however, remark that his repulsion of fellow men was unfortunate, and that, “to prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our own species must surely be unnatural,” although he did not change his views on the Indian’s presence in the wilderness that he sought to protect.

Muir’s dislike of black people was just as strong as his passionate love and advocacy for a microbe. Although he thought some blacks were “well trained,” he believed that for the most part they were, “easygoing and merry, making a great deal of noise and doing little work. One energetic white man, working with a will, would easily pick as much cotton as half a dozen Sambos and Sallies.”

And yet, despite this seemingly inconsistent support for all forms of life, Muir became a prominent activist. He began to quiet his more extreme views — although he continued to passionately believe in them — and started his best-known movement toward the preservation of Hetch Hetchy. Despite the large water problem San Francisco was facing, Muir vowed to do anything to stop the “temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism.” The “Satan worshippers” were destroying God’s temple, which he found to be just as breathtaking, if not more so, than Yosemite. Through Muir’s activism, the Sierra Club was founded, although many of his members dispersed when he began his movement to protect Hetch Hetchy.

From this surprising beginning, the modern environmentalist movement began with its split between conservationists and preservationists. Today’s preservationists have continued with Muir’s mantra for the equal rights of anything, be it plant, rock, or man. Perhaps we should have thought a little more about the real John Muir before we put him on the back of our state quarter.

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