John Muir, Yosemite, Enacting Change

Last night, Dave and I caught most of the first episode of Ken Burns' new National Parks documentary.

I am going to digress already. First, the obligatory I know that PBS and Ken Burns have a liberal slant, but I still enjoy these documentaries. Second, the above linked article starts out with this statement (from a previous opinion piece, which I did not read) :

"[The documentary's] premise—that Big Government saved wilderness and national treasures that private enterprise would have destroyed—is a lot more politically pointed (in the year of the Tea Party) than you'd expect from a Burns documentary about trees. "

Please. There's a difference between big government taking over the free enterprise system while burdening future generations with phenomenal debt, and the government protecting natural resources. My time is too limited this morning to delve into this.

Right now, I want to discuss John Muir. First off, I need to say that I grew up with a totally trivial bias against him. I went to Horace Mann Middle School. John Muir Middle School was our cross-town rival, and therefore, evil. (Did you know there are only two John Muir Middle Schools in the country?)

Some things I learned about John Muir from the documentary last night:

- His father beat him and made him memorize the Bible. By the time he was 11, he had memorized 3/4 of the Old Testament and all of the New Testament.
- He attended the University of Wisconsin. He was able to use his knowledge to help businesses become more profitable.
(I may have missed this on the documentary, but something I read on Wikipedia is that he spent the years during the Civil War in Canada)
- He was temporarily blinded in a work accident. When he recovered, he walked to Florida. He planned to walk to South America and ride down the Amazon, but he was taken ill. He went to Yosemite instead.
- He turned his spiritual attention to nature. The documentary called it a Christianity with creation as its core. The wikipedia article states that he rejected the idea of a Creator. I think it would have been more apt to simply state he worshipped nature, instead of using the term 'Christianity' as a generic for spirituality.
- He married. His wife's family owned a vineyard and he helped to increase its productivity.
-He became ill. His wife realized he needed to get back in the natural environment, so she sent him to Mt. Ranier.
- He then went back to Yosemite, and was disgusted with how commercialized it had become.

Here's the part that stood out the most for me:

- He wanted Congress to protect the Yosemite region. The establishment wanted to discredit him, so he appealed directly to the people. He wrote articles in Century magazine glorifying the Yosemite region. This led people to petition their congressman to create a national park. Congress established it as a state-controlled park shortly thereafter.

So, one of our country's first conservationists, the founder of the Sierra Club, realized that the normal channels for enacting change weren't open to him. He used the means available to him to let the people hear him.

I wonder what he would have done if the internet had been available to him? Perhaps he would have bypassed even the magazine, and gone directly to blogging. I'm sure Tom Brokaw and Thomas Friedman would have been duly distressed.