President Theodore Roosevelt & John Muir. The forests of America, however slighted. Conservation in the United States can be traced back to the 19th century with the formation of the first National Park. Here and there in the Southern States there are still considerable areas of timbered government land, but these are comparatively unimportant. Even lumbermen in these regions, long accustomed to steal, are now willing and anxious to buy lumber for their mills under cover of law: some possibly from a late second growth of honesty, but most, especially the small mill-owners, simply because it no longer pays to steal where all may not only steal, but also destroy, and in particular because it costs about as much to steal timber for one mill as for ten, and therefore the ordinary lumberman can no longer compete with the large corporations. Drought and barrenness would follow. A famous quotation where Muir refers to the Sierra as the "Range of Light" is found within this chapter. Nevertheless, under this act wealthy corporations have fraudulently obtained title to from ten thousand to twenty thousand acres or more. The axe and saw are insanely busy, chips are flying thick as snowflakes, and every summer thousands of acres of priceless forests, with their underbrush, soil, springs, climate, scenery, and religion, are vanishing away in clouds of smoke, while, except in the national parks, not one forest guard is employed. Many of his ideas merely echoed the thoughts of earlier deists and Romantics, especially Thoreau, but he articu- lated them with an intensity and enthusiasm that commanded widespread attention. The Indians with stone axes could do them no more harm than could gnawing beavers and browsing moose. President Teddy Roosevelt was profoundly influenced by Muir and the conservation movement. John Muir: A Reading Bibliography by Kimes. Thoreau, when contemplating the destruction of the forests on the east side of the continent, said that soon the country would be so bald that every man would have to grow whiskers to hide its nakedness, but he thanked God that at least the sky was safe. For years, the conservationists, who wanted to protect the awesome valley in its natural setting, were pitted against the Californians who wanted to dam the valley to create a new and reliable drinking water reservoir. His family immigrated to America in 1849 and settled into farm life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Twenty-First Century Books, New York, New York. Armed with a plant-press and a blank notebook, Muir wandered for weeks at a time, through the mountains that would later be Yosemite National Park. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Our National Parks, by John Muir (1901, c. (1901)) - John Muir Writings . But most preferred the shake business, until something more profitable and as sure could be found, with equal comfort and independence. Word Count: 490. Publisher's Summary During the past twenty-five years, North American forestry has received increasingly vigorous scrutiny. It is the citizens of this country who are robbing from and destroying the beautiful forest. John Muir was born on April 21, 1838 in the small rural town of Dunbar, Scotland. John Muir was one of the country's most famous naturalist and conservationist and Muir Woods, part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, is named in his honor. During his lengthy wanderings, Muir contemplated man's relationship to nature. NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window. From an early age, Muir was fascinated by nature and was eager to learn about his environment. In particular, from our Earth-based vantage point, we are keen to know where the closest life to us is, and how similar it might be to life on our home planet. John Muir, Wilderness Protector. It is a compilation of his own accounts of his travels and journeys, and his explorations and examinations, of the mountain ranges of California, in particular the Sierra Nevada, during the late 1860s to the early 1870s, a time when the wild places in the State where . Accordingly, with no eye to the future, these pious destroyers waged interminable forest wars; chips flew thick and fast; trees in their beauty fell crashing by millions, smashed to confusion, and the smoke of their burning has been rising to heaven more than two hundred years. To the northward, over Maine and the Ottawa, rose hosts of spiry, rosiny evergreens, white pine and spruce, hemlock and cedar, shoulder to shoulder, laden with purple cones, their myriad needles sparkling and shimmering, covering hills and swamps, rocky headlands and domes, ever bravely aspiring and seeking the sky; the ground in their shade now snow-clad and frozen, now mossy and flowery; beaver meadows here and there, full of lilies and grass; lakes gleaming like eyes, and a silvery embroidery of rivers and creeks watering and brightening all the vast glad wilderness. In Luke 12 Jesus says, "I've come to bring fire on earth." In his article "The American Forests", John Muir discusses the beauty of the American forests along with their being easy targets for unwise people destroying them for their egoistical purposes. According to Muir, The trees are felled, and about half of each giant is left on the ground to be converted into smoke and ashes; the better half is sawed into choice lumber and sold to citizens of the United States or to foreigners . The plan was usually as follows: A mill company desirous of getting title to a large body of redwood or sugar-pine land first blurred the eyes and ears of the land agents, and then hired men to enter the land they wanted, and immediately deed it to the company after a nominal compliance with the law; false swearing in the wilderness against the government being held of no account. Muir believes the forests must have been a delight to God, for "they were the best he ever planted" (145). This paper looks at the roles that language had in the writings of John Muir, the father of American national parks and Gifford Pinchot, the father of American forest conservation. The American Forests In decrying the destruction of woodlands by loggers, settlers, and industrialists, Muir, the father of America's conservation movement, advanced the notion that. Our National Parks, by John Muir (1901, c. 1909) - The Writings of John Muir - John Muir Exhibit (John Muir Education Project, Sierra Club California) Our National Parks by John Muir Contents List of Illustrations Preface The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West The Yellowstone National Park The Yosemite National Park John Muir remains worthy of honor and respect as a person who studied, recorded, and shared the natural areas of the United States and the world, and the role of humans within the environment. 331-[365]; no. . -John Muir The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. On the other hand, about one half of the fifty million francs spent on forestry has been given to engineering works, to make the replanting of denuded areas possible. Poem About Beauty Of Forest And Trees Naturalist John Muir and my love of trees inspired this poem. Not a mountain is left in the landscape. In France no government forests have been sold since 1870. Restless to explore more of the country, he left school for what he would call "the University of the Wilderness. Muir served as the club's president until his death in 1914, and today, the Sierra Club boasts more than 3 . In 1913, Congress passed a law that approved the construction of the dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley. The legitimate demands on the forests that have passed into private ownership, as well as those in the hands of the government, are increasing every year with the rapid settlement and upbuilding of the country, but the methods of lumbering are as yet grossly wasteful. But, busied with tariffs, etc., Congress has given no heed to these or other appeals, and our forests, the most valuable and the most destructible of all the natural resources of the country, are being robbed and burned more rapidly than ever. Any fool can destroy trees. The Land Ethic Aldo Leopold Part II: Two Philosophical Issues in Forestry Ethics MULTIPLE VALUES IN FORESTS . This can be in the form of setting aside tracts of land for protection from hunting or urban development, or it can take the form of using less resources such as . The half dozen transcontinental railroad companies advertise the beauties of their lines in gorgeous many-colored folders, each claiming its as the scenic route. The route of superior desolation the smoke, dust, and ashes route would be a more truthful description. Shot em on the Joaquin, tied em in dozens by the neck, and shipped em to San Francisco. Wide-branching oak and elm in endless variety, walnut and maple, chestnut and beech, ilex and locust, touching limb to limb, spread a leafy translucent canopy along the coast of the Atlantic over the wrinkled folds and ridges of the Alleghanies, a green billowy sea in summer, golden and purple in autumn, pearly gray like a steadfast frozen mist of interlacing branches and sprays in leafless, restful winter. Of the total area of government forests, perhaps 70,000,000 acres, 55,000,000 acres have been brought under the control of the forestry department, a larger area than that of all our national parks and reservations. In the clearings of one of the largest mills on the coast we found thirty men at work, last summer, cutting off redwood shoots in the dark of the moon, claiming that all the stumps and roots cleared at this auspicious time would send up no more shoots. The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner. Humans, Muir decided, are no greater or lesser than other forms of life. During heavy rainfalls and while the winter accumulations of snow were melting, the larger streams would swell into destructive torrents; cutting deep, rugged-edged gullies, carrying away the fertile humus and soil as well as sand and rocks, filling up and overflowing their lower channels, and covering the lowland fields with raw detritus. Six of this volume's ten chapters are devoted to Muir's beloved Yosemite, exploring the forests, fountains, streams, and animals of the Sierra Nevada. Nor will the woods be the worse for this use, or their benign influences be diminished any more than the sun is diminished by shining. The 39th president of the United States of America Jimmy Carter fears the domination of domestic use of the Artctic Refuge. The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? Thence still westward swept the forests to right and left around grassy plains and deserts a thousand miles wide: irrepressible hosts of spruce and pine, aspen and willow, nut-pine and juniper, cactus and yucca, caring nothing for drought, extending undaunted from mountain to mountain, over mesa and desert, to join the darkening multitudes of pines that covered the high Rocky ranges and the glorious forests along the coast of the moist and balmy Pacific, where new species of pine, giant cedars and spruces, silver firs and sequoias, kings of their race, growing close together like grass in a meadow, poised their brave domes and spires in the sky three hundred feet above the ferns and the lilies that enameled the ground; towering serene through the long centuries, preaching Gods forestry fresh from heaven. Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old. Ginger Wadsworth. 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the american forests john muir summary