As a naturalist, writer and activist, John Muir helped to shape the modern Western conceptions of nature conservation and wilderness.
Influenced by a Romantic love of dramatic landscapes, Muir had his most profound direct impact in California, where he campaigned to protect the Yosemite Valley and the Sequoia National Park.
Muir was born in Dunbar in 1838 and he credited the landscapes of East Lothian with inspiring his love of the natural world. In 1849, his strictly religious family emigrated to the United States and started a farm in Wisconsin.
Muir was introduced to botany at university and continued to collect and catalogue plants while living in Canada during the American Civil War and later when employed in various jobs back in the US.
In September 1867, Muir undertook a walk of about 1,000 miles from Kentucky to Florida and travelled to New York and Cuba before settling in San Francisco, where he became “overwhelmed” by the landscapes of California. It was there that Muir found his direction. He co-founded the Sierra Club, one of the world’s first large-scale organisations dedicated to nature preservation.
Increasingly he expressed his passions through writing and his books combined philosophy with scientific knowledge and spiritual fervour. Muir’s early writing has been criticised for discriminatory attitudes towards indigenous people and African Americans but while other members of the Sierra Club were drawn towards eugenics, this was not the case for not Muir himself.
However, the creation of national parks, while protecting large areas of natural landscape against unsustainable exploitation and development, has since been criticised for privileging an idealised vision of untouched wilderness over indigenous peoples and their existing relationships with place.
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