In their natural condition, or under wise management, keeping out destructive sheep, preventing fires, selecting the trees that should be cut for lumber, and preserving the young ones and the shrubs and sod of herbaceous vegetation, these forests would be a never failing fountain of wealth and beauty. But light is surely coming, and the friends of destruction will preach and bewail in vain. Twenty-First Century Books, New York, New York. During his lengthy wanderings, Muir contemplated man's relationship to nature. The 39th president of the United States of America Jimmy Carter fears the domination of domestic use of the Artctic Refuge. 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 enormous logs, too heavy to handle, are blasted into manageable dimensions with gunpowder. Listen to the trailer for. > Muir enumerates the forest regulations of the principal countries of the world, and then reviews the abuses this country has allowed, detailing the fraudulent methods used by the timber thieves to gain title to thousands of forested acres. John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland on April 21, 1838, as the oldest son in religious shopkeepers family. It is the only genuine Erebus route. 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. In 1903, Roosevelt spent four days in Yosemite with Muir, camping with him and learning about the value of the untamed land. The most significant battle that Muir and the Sierra Club ever fought was over the damming of Yosemites Hetch Hetchy Valley. Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Muir Woods National Monument, Download the official NPS app before your next visit. Muir became politically active to protect Yosemite from being threatened by commercial developments. In one case which came under the observation of Mr. Bowers, it was the practice of a lumber company to hire the entire crew of every vessel which might happen to touch at any port in the redwood belt, to enter one hundred and sixty acres each and immediately deed the land to the company, in consideration of the company's paying all expenses and giving the jolly sailors fifty dollars apiece for their trouble. Have you ever wondered why your favorite National Park is surrounded by a National Forest? By the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run into the woods. During the course of his political term, Roosevelt set aside 148 million acres of forest reserves, created 50 regions for the protection of wildlife, founded 16 national monuments and established 5 new national parks. John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold todaythat much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. John Muir, (born April 21, 1838, Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotlanddied December 24, 1914, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), Scottish-born American naturalist, writer, and advocate of U.S. forest conservation, who was largely responsible for the establishment of Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park, which are located in California. 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. Visit the parks associated with John Muir! Posted on February 26, 2013 by Nathaniel Cowper. Surveyed thus from the east to the west, from the north to the south, they are rich beyond thought, immortal, immeasurable, enough and to spare for every feeding, sheltering beast and bird, insect and son of Adam; and nobody need have cared had there been no pines in Norway, no cedars and deodars on Lebanon and the Himalayas, no vine-clad selvas in the basin of the Amazon. No place is too good for good men, and still there is room. Shot em on the Joaquin, tied em in dozens by the neck, and shipped em to San Francisco. It has been shown over and over again that if these mountains were to be stripped of their trees and underbrush, and kept bare and sodless by hordes of sheep and the innumerable fires the shepherds set, besides those of the millmen, prospectors, shake-makers, and all sorts of adventurers, both lowlands and mountains would speedily become little better than deserts, compared with their present beneficent fertility. Read more from, Butterfield & Co.: In Two Parts. American forester, the first Chief of the US Forest Service and his family was the financial backer for the country's first forestry school (at Yale University), so there can be no doubt where the profession of forestry locates itself in the Muir-Pinchot debate. With the exception of the timber culture act, under which, in consideration of planting a few acres of seedlings, settlers on the treeless plains got 160 acres each, the above is the only legislation aiming to protect and promote the planting of forests. The Pantheon Press, Nashville, Tennessee, 1959. See also: no. The Arctic Refuge is a crucial refuge as it is one of the few left in the Arctic and around the world. American forests! 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. Taking from the government is with them the same as taking from nature, and their consciences flinch no more in cutting timber from the wild forests than in drawing water from a lake or river. Muir believes the forests must have been a delight to God, for "they were the best he ever planted" (145). . Back at the turn of the 20th Century Gifford Pinchot and John Muir had radically contrasting views of how to manage . In the nature of things they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness. Since then, critics both international and domestic, but mostly from within the environmental movement, have criticized the idea of wilderness. He was a strong voice in preserving the area known today as the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. This book deals with both of these key issues. > 331-[365]; no. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future: From One Earth to One World (Brundtland Report) Part One, The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? He is best known for his work as a conservationist, particularly his role in the establishment of Yosemite National Park in California. Thus, with abundance of fuel, shelter and comfort by his own fireside are secured. 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 the East and along the northern Pacific coast, where the rainfall is abundant, comparatively few care keenly what becomes of the trees as long as fuel and lumber are not noticeably dear. by man, must have been a great delight to. The sky is black and the ground is black, and on either side there is a continuous border of black stumps and logs and blasted trees appealing to heaven for help as if still half alive, and their mute eloquence is most interestingly touching. Railroad tracks were just . The outcries we hear against forest reservations come mostly from thieves who are wealthy and steal timber by wholesale. This magazine has been fully digitized as a part of The Atlantic's archive. 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. A champion of America's great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation's history and culture. 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. A Wind-Storm in the Forests. About this book. 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: thus robbing the country of its glory and impoverishing it without right benefit to anybody, a bad, black business from beginning to end. Chuck Roe -A Sesquicentennial Account of John Muir's 1,000 Mile Walk - A review of the landscape 150 years after Muir's walk, with a focus on the progress of land conservation and identification of the many publicly-accessible, protected natural areas now located immediately along Muir's route. Roe's intent was to observe and describe the publicly accessible parks, nature preserves, forests . Year by year the remnant is growing smaller before the axe and fire, while the laws in existence provide neither for the protection of the timber from destruction nor for its use where it is most needed. John Muir (1838-1914) was born in Scotland and emigrated to Wisconsin as a young boy. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. The annual appropriation for so-called protection service is hardly sufficient to keep twenty-five timber agents in the field, and as far as any efficient protection of timber is concerned these agents themselves might as well be timber. Hence they went wavering northward over icy Alaska, brave spruce and fir, poplar and birch, by the coasts and the rivers, to within sight of the Arctic Ocean. Last summer, in the Rocky Mountains, I saw six fires started by sparks from a locomotive within a distance of three miles, and nobody was in sight to prevent them from spreading. Upon this old law, as Mr. Bowers points out, having the construction of a wooden navy in view, the United States government has to-day chiefly to rely in protecting its timber throughout the arid regions of the West, where none of the naval timber which the law had in mind is to be found. While in Alaska, I saw the loveliest forests and scenery I've ever seen. He explains that "any fool can destroy trees" as "they cannot run away" (Muir, 2006, p. 364). The American Forests John Muir ALDO LEOPOLD'S LAND ETHIC IN FORESTRY; 5. John Muir Lesson for Kids: Facts & Biography 2022-10-26. The passage of the Wilderness Act was an historically important event in American environmental politics, which tied the fate of much of America's public lands to disputes over the meaning of wilderness. Of all the magnificent coniferous forests around the Great Lakes, once the property of the United States, scarcely any belong to it now. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most powerful voices in the history of American conservation. A proprietor who has cleared his forest without permission is subject to heavy fine, and in addition may be made to replant the cleared area. He shared his love of the outdoors through writing and inspired people to protect our country's wild places like Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Sequoia & King's Canyon . Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time-and long before that-God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools,-only Uncle Sam can do that.''. He closes his long essay with his now-famous statements: "Any fool can destroy trees. The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? Being rather partial to trees, I could not resist reading "A wind-storm in the forests" by Scottish-born American naturalist/enviromentalist John Muir (1838-1914) when it lobbed in by email today as this week's Library of America story of the week.Anyone who has been to the stunning Yosemite - or visited the peaceful Muir Woods north of San Francisco - will have heard of John Muir. 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. It has been planted and is flourishing over a great part of Europe, and magnificent sections of the aboriginal forests have been reserved as national and state parks, the Mariposa Sequoia Grove, near Yosemite, managed by the State of California, and the General Grant and Sequoia national parks on the Kings, the Kaweah, and Tule rivers, efficiently guarded by a small troop of United States cavalry under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior. The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West 2. To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately, 237, pp. Anyhow, these vigorous, almost immortal trees are killed at last, and black stumps are now their only monuments over most of the chopped and burned areas. Here the forests reached their highest development. Passionate and . But not one denuded acre in a hundred is allowed to raise a new forest growth. The great forests of Northern United States captivated him and fueled . 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. The Indians with stone axes could do them no more harm than could gnawing beavers and browsing moose. 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