Tuesday, September 26, 2006

John Muir



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John Muir was a fascinating man. He was born in Scotland in 1838, emigrated to America in 1849, and ended up being one of the greatest conservationists in the history of the nation.
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He is widely viewed as the father of the conservationist movement. He also created the Sierra Club.
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In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt accompanied Muir to Yosemite. This is what Roosevelt later had to say about John Muir, “No man was more influential than John Muir in preserving the Sierra's integrity. If I were to choose a single Californian to occupy the Hall of Fame, it would be this tenacious Scot who became a Californian during the final forty-six years of his life.
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It was John Muir whose knowledge wedded to zeal led men and governments to establish the National Park Service. Yosemite and Sequoia in California, the Petrified forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the glacier wilderness of Alaska are what they are today largely because of this one man, in whom learning and love were co-equal.
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More than any other, he was the answer to that call which appears on the Courts Building in Sacramento: Give me men to match my mountains.”

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On my last trip to the UK I made sure to visit his birthplace East of Edinburgh in Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland and took these pictures of the house that he grew up in.
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This is a link to the wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir

This is a great book:
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