To show the results of the timber-planting act, it need only be stated that of the 38,000,000 acres entered under it, less than 1,000,000 acres have been patented. Basically, Muir's essay is a moment by moment account of one of his outings in the California . Posted on February 26, 2013 by Nathaniel Cowper. The forest service does not rest satisfied with the present proportion of woodland, but looks to planting the best forest trees it can find in any country, if likely to be useful and to thrive in Japan. The 39th president of the United States of America Jimmy Carter fears the domination of domestic use of the Artctic Refuge. Most notably, this was John Muir's first published essay (1871). 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. They went to the woods to escape aspects of. His lifelong passion for hiking began when he hiked 1,000 miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico in. In Switzerland, after many laws like our own had been found wanting, the Swiss forest school was established in 1865, and soon after the Federal Forest Law was enacted, which is binding over nearly two thirds of the country. There is no real sky and no scenery. Listen to the trailer for. The largest sawmills ever built are busy along its seaward border, with all the modern improvements, but so immense is the yield per acre it will be long ere the supply is exhausted. The conservation/preservation battle first played on the The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. The disappearance of the forests in the first place, it is claimed, may be traced in most cases directly to mountain pasturage. 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 In the settlement and civilization of the country, bread more than timber or beauty was wanted; and in the blindness of hunger, the early settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide, regarded Gods trees as only a larger kind of pernicious weeds, extremely hard to get rid of. "The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted." He described trees with a diameter of twenty feet as "lordly. In "The American Forests", John Muir's purpose is to reveal the disloyalty that Americans have towards their agriculture. John Muir, in The American Forests, speaks fondly of the American forests, calling them the "glory of the world." He discusses the genera of each coast, and describes the vast diversity between species, size, and some wildlife. 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. John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland on April 21, 1838, as the oldest son in religious shopkeepers family. It has, therefore, as shown by Mr. Pinchot, refused to deliver its forests to more or less speedy destruction by permitting them to pass into private ownership. The sempervirens is certainly the taller of the two. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe. 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. Back at the turn of the 20th Century Gifford Pinchot and John Muir had radically contrasting views of how to manage . Happy robbers! The people will not always be deceived by selfish opposition, whether from lumber and mining corporations or from sheepmen and prospectors, however cunningly brought forward underneath fables and gold. In most mills only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends. Well, it didn't happen by accident or guesswork. An exception would seem to be found in the case of our forests, which have been mismanaged rather long, and now come desperately near being like smashed eggs and spilt milk. 'Yes, John Muir; and you know I promised to return and visit you in about twenty-five years, and though I am a little latesix or seven yearsI've done the best I could . 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. His family did not have enough money to send him to school, so after completing his daily farm chores, Muir spent his spare time teaching himself algebra and geometry. John Muir. Here and there in the Southern States there are still considerable areas of timbered government land, but these are comparatively unimportant. Let them be as free to pick gold and gems from the hills, to cut and hew, dig and plant, for homes and bread, as the birds are to pick berries from the wild bushes, and moss and leaves for nests. In any case, it will be hard to teach the pioneers that it is wrong to steal government timber. 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. There was some virtuous effort made with a view to limit the operations of the act by requiring that the purchaser should make affidavit that he was entering the land exclusively for his own use, and by not allowing any association to enter more than one hundred and sixty acres. But in the Rocky Mountains and California and Arizona, where the forests are inflammable, and where the fertility of the lowlands depends upon irrigation, public opinion is growing stronger every year in favor of permanent protection by the federal government of all the forests that cover the sources of the streams. Flying Spur Press, Yosemite, California. To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately, 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. 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 . One of the reasons why John Muir and other naturalists would have believed that the grandeur of Western America was shaped entirely by natural forces is that they had no idea how many Native. 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. Humans, Muir decided, are no greater or lesser than other forms of life. University Libraries He closes his long essay with his now-famous statements: "Any fool can destroy trees. As timber the redwood is too good to live. you may Download the file to your hard drive. John Muirthe surprise star of Ken Burns's recent PBS documentary, The National Parks is most remembered for founding the Sierra Club in 1911 and for the preservation of Yosemite, but another of his great legacies is his prose, which introduced a new vocabulary to the genre of nature writing. This magazine has been fully digitized as a part of The Atlantic's archive. As he grew older, Muir became increasingly excited about what plants and nature could teach him. 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 Sierra Club is the oldest, largest and most influential conservation organization in the United States. In 1913, Congress passed a law that approved the construction of the dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley. Listen to the trailer for. Then he chops into one after another of the pines, until he finds one that he feels sure will split freely, cuts this down, saws off a section four feet long, splits it, and from this first cut, perhaps seven feet in diameter, he gets shakes enough for a cabin and its furniture, walls, roof, door, bedstead, table, and stool. After several legal battles, Congress established Yosemite National Park in 1890 in order to protect thousands of acres of forest land from further destruction. Muir walked through these groves of giant sequoias and thought them to be among the most fascinating of ecosystems certainly worth whatever protection humans could afford them. Then he advertises, in whatever way he can, that he has excellent sugar-pine shakes for sale, easy of access and cheap. 2) Yosemite Glaciers. Timber is as necessary as bread, and no scheme of management failing to recognize and properly provide for this want can possibly be maintained. Still, the species is not in danger of extinction. So far our government has done nothing effective with its forests, though the best in the world, but is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificent estate in perfect order, and then has left his rich fields and meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted at will, depending on their inexhaustible abundance. Visit the John Muir National Historic Site, located in Martinez, California. Word Count: 490. 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. Had he gone West he would have found out that the sky was not safe; for all through the summer months, over most of the mountain regions, the smoke of mill and forest fires is so thick and black that no sunbeam can pierce it. He came to the San Francisco area in 1868 and there he discovered the Sierra Mountains. Thence westward were oak and elm, hickory and tupelo, gum and liriodendron, sassafras and ash, linden and laurel, spreading on ever wider in glorious exuberance over the great fertile basin of the Mississippi, over damp level bottoms, low dimpling hollows, and round dotting hills, embosoming sunny prairies and cheery park openings, half sunshine, half shade ; while a dark wilderness of pines covered the region around the Great Lakes. The Indians with stone axes could do them no more harm than could gnawing beavers and browsing moose. The United States government has always been proud of the welcome it has extended to good men of every nation, seeking freedom and homes and bread. 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. Then he strikes off into the virgin woods, where the sugar-pine, king of all the hundred species of pines in the world in size and beauty, towers on the open sunny slopes of the Sierra in the fullness of its glory. President Roosevelt's concern for the environment was influenced by American naturalists, such as John Muir, and by his own political appointees, including Gifford Pinchot, Chief of Forestry. 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. A few bolts from the same section that the shakes were made from are split into square sticks and built up to form a chimney, the inside and interspaces being plastered and filled in with mud. During a mans life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees tens of centuries old that have been destroyed. Muir constantly brings up the burning of the forests. About seventy million acres it still owns, enough for all the country, if wisely used. . A large portion of the best timber is thus shattered and destroyed, and, with the huge knotty tops, is left in ruins for tremendous fires that kill every tree within their range, great and small. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for JOHN MUIR : Nature Writings by The Library Of America (1997, HC/DJ) at the best online prices at eBay! Both environmentalists were great activists that informed the . Nevertheless, under this act wealthy corporations have fraudulently obtained title to from ten thousand to twenty thousand acres or more. The whole sky, with clouds, sun, moon, and stars, is simply blotted out. Every one of the frail shake shanties is a centre of destruction, and the extent of the ravages wrought in this quiet way is in the aggregate enormous. 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. Twenty-First Century Books, New York, New York. Our annual Brave Thinkers list, an interview with Mike Bloomberg, the strangest potential threat to the president, the Army's culture of mediocrity, Benjamin Schwarz on the end of jazz, and more, The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? 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. In 1903, Roosevelt spent four days in Yosemite with Muir, camping with him and learning about the value of the untamed land. The axe is not yet at the root of every tree, but the sheep is, or was before the national parks were established and guarded by the military, the only effective and reliable arm of the government free from the blight of politics. And in the fullness of time it was planted in groves, and belts, and broad, exuberant, mantling forests, with the largest, most varied, most fruitful, and most beautiful trees in the world. 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. From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely . Honest citizens see that only the rights of the government are being trampled, not those of the settlers. Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Muir Woods National Monument, Download the official NPS app before your next visit. President Theodore Roosevelt & John Muir. He also realized how fragile nature was; how peoples impact on the land, through grazing, lumbering and commercial developments, was slowly destroying all the beauty in the wilderness. Its a mighty good business, and youre your own boss, and the whole things fun.. "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Drought and barrenness would follow. Through his book Travels in Alaska, I learned about the formation of Glacier Bay and Muir's exploration of that twinned body of water I called home for two summers. Madison Grant's nature was the last redoubt of nobility in a levelling and hybridizing democracy. Of all the destroyers that infest the woods the shake-maker seems the happiest. John Muir was one of the countrys most famous naturalist and conservationist and Muir Woods, part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, is named in his honor. Visit the parks associated with John Muir! Surely, then, it should not be wondered at that lovers of their country, bewailing its baldness, are now crying aloud, Save what is left of the forests! Clearing has surely now gone far enough; soon timber will be scarce, and not a grove will be left to rest in or pray in. It seems, therefore, that almost every civilized nation can give us a lesson on the management and care of forests. The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? The prospector deliberately sets fires to clear off the woods just where they are densest, to lay the rocks bare and make the discovery of mines easier. The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. OUR NATIONAL PARKs.-Under this title Mr. John Muir has brought together several papers originally published in the Atlantic Monthly. Muir Inlet and Muir Glacier are both named for him. The directors of a line that guarded against fires, and cleared a clean gap edged with living trees, and fringed and mantled with the grass and flowers and beautiful seedlings that are ever ready and willing to spring up, might justly boast of the beauty of their road; for nature is always ready to heal every scar. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmb/234. 234. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn." John Muir, The Mountains of California tags: energy , mountains , nature 1227 likes Like By such methods have our magnificent redwoods and much of the sugar-pine forests of the Sierra Nevada been absorbed by foreign and resident capitalists. Last summer, of the unrivaled redwood forests of the Pacific Coast Range the United States Forestry Commission could not find a single quarter-section that remained in the hands of the government. Ginger Wadsworth. He would later be called the godfather of the American environmental movement. The effect of the present confused, discriminating, and unjust system has been to place almost the whole population in opposition to the government; and as conclusive of its futility, as shown by Mr. Bowers, we need only state that during the seven years from 1881 to 1887 inclusive the value of the timber reported stolen from the government lands was $36,719,935, and the amount recovered was $478,073, while the cost of the services of special agents alone was $455,000, to which must be added the expense of the trials. Chapter 2: How is Sustainability a Political Issue? But the felled timber is not worked up into firewood for the engines and into lumber for the companys use; it is left lying in vulgar confusion, and is fired from time to time by sparks from locomotives or by the workmen camping along the line. 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 . The remnant protected will yield plenty of timber, a perennial harvest for every right use, without further diminution of its area, and will continue to cover the springs of the rivers that rise in the mountains and give irrigating waters to the dry valleys at their feet, prevent wasting floods and be a blessing to everybody forever. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, have been read by millions. (Boston, 1901), chapter 10, "The American Forests." Originally published as John Muir, "The American Forests," Atlantic Monthly 80 (August 1897): 145-57. Selecting a favorable spot for a cabin near a meadow with a stream, he unpacks his animal and stakes it out on the meadow. At university, Muir focused his studies on chemistry, geology and botany. Theres always a market for bear grease, and sometimes you can sell the hams. For it must be told again and again, and be burningly borne in mind, that just now, while protective measures are being deliberated languidly, destruction and use are speeding on faster and farther every day. The fires, whether accidental or set, are allowed to run into the woods as far as they may, thus assuring comprehensive destruction. John Muir's 1897 Case for Saving America's Forests - The Atlantic August 1897 Issue Explore Technology The American Forests "God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease,. John Muir (1838-1914) was born in Scotland and emigrated to Wisconsin as a young boy. That a change from robbery and ruin to a permanent rational policy is urgently needed nobody with the slightest knowledge of American forests will deny. 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