John Muir (1838–1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist and explorer. Regarded as the father of the modern environmental movement, he was largely responsible for the establishment of Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park.
Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland. His family immigrated to the USA in 1849 and established a homestead near Portage, Wisconsin. He studied at Wisconsin University, concentrated his interest in natural history, and made extended expeditions all over the USA, frequently on foot. The journal of his 1867 trip from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico was edited as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916.)
In 1868, Muir made California his home and started surveying the western USA, particularly the Yosemite area. He farmed very successfully in California and campaigned for a national park there. In 1889, Muir argued in Century Magazine that Yosemite Valley should become a national park. He founded The Sierra Club in 1892; it is now one of the most important conservation organizations in the United States.
More than a decade of Muir’s energetic oratory and article writing, President Theodore Roosevelt supported the cause and passed legislation for the Yosemite National Park in 1890. Muir wrote The Mountains of California (1893) and Our National Parks (1901) along with many articles in popular magazines to advance the conservation movement.
Muir’s other books include My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) and The Yosemite (1912.) The John Muir Trust was established in 1984 in Scotland to help conserve wild land and wild places in Great Britain.
William Frederic Badè, Muir’s literary executor, wrote the biography The Life and Letters of John Muir (1924.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Muir
I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show travelers where other minds have been, or at best smoke signals to call attention… One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cart load of books.
—John Muir
Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question “Why was it made?” goes on and on, with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself.
—John Muir
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 lilies that enameled the ground; towering serene through the long centuries, preaching God’s forestry fresh from heaven
—John Muir
There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.
—John Muir
When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and hear what it had to tell… I asked the boulders I met, whence they came and whither they were going.
—John Muir
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom on the mountains. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The wind will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
—John Muir
Topics: Nature, Fresh, Autumn
Wilderness is a necessity … They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow.
—John Muir
A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.
—John Muir
Good luck and Good work for the happy mountain raindrops, each one of them a high waterfall in itself, descending from the cliffs and hollows of the clouds to the cliffs and hollows of the rocks, out of the sky-thunder into the thunder of the falling rivers
—John Muir
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
—John Muir
If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit-wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. I should not go moping around the tombs, nor around the artificial desolation of men. I should study Nature’s laws in all their crossings and unions: I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communions with other powers and expressions of matter. And I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole splendid page from the beginning.
—John Muir
I … am always glad to touch the living rock again and dip my hand in the high mountain air.
—John Muir
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
—John Muir
Topics: Nature, Change, Philosophy
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
—John Muir
Topics: Death
Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.
—John Muir
Topics: Nature
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
—John Muir
Topics: Solitude, Beauty
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best He ever planted.
—John Muir
The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.
—John Muir
Topics: Nature
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe… The whole wilderness is unity and interrelationship is alive and familiar.
—John Muir
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
—John Muir
Topics: Security
Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.
—John Muir
Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place.
—John Muir
Topics: Memory
The beauty and completeness of a wild apple tree living its own life in the woods is heartily acknowledged by all those who have been so happy as to form its acquaintance. The fine wild piquancy of its fruit is unrivaled, but in the great question of quantity as human food wild apples are found wanting. Man, therefore, takes the tree from the woods, manures and prunes and grafts, plans and guesses, adds a little of this and that, selects and rejects, until apples of every conceivable size and softness are produced, like nut galls in response to the irritating punctures of insects. Orchard apples are to me the most eloquent words that culture had ever spoken, but they reflect no imperfection upon Nature’s spicy crab.
—John Muir
Topics: Nature
When a man plants a tree, he plants himself.
—John Muir
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains.
—John Muir
Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
—John Muir
I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.
—John Muir
Topics: Friendship
One can make a day of any size, and regulate the rising and the setting of his own sun and the brightness of its shining.
—John Muir
The power of imagination makes us infinite.
—John Muir
No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movement of water, or gardening—still all is Beauty!
—John Muir
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