What Muir Got Right and What He Got Wrong

John Muir arrived in California in eighteen sixty-eight, walked to Yosemite, and spent the next thirty years writing the most influential nature prose in American history. He founded the Sierra Club in eighteen ninety-two. He lobbied successfully for Yosemite's national park designation in eighteen ninety and for the protection of dozens of other landscapes. Presidents read him. Congresses acted on what he wrote. His descriptions of the Sierra Nevada as the Range of Light gave the mountains a language they did not previously have in English.

He also described Indigenous peoples in terms that reflected the white supremacy of his time. The Sierra Club, the organization he founded, reviewed his writings formally in twenty twenty and issued a public statement acknowledging that Muir wrote descriptions of Black Americans and Native peoples that were dehumanizing. The statement used the word 'racism.' The Sierra Club did not name a specific work or quote in that statement; the sources this recording draws on reference his views without reproducing specific passages, so neither will this recording.

Both things are true simultaneously. The Range of Light essays are among the great works of American nature writing. The man who wrote them was also a product of nineteenth-century white supremacy who benefited from, and occasionally described with detached curiosity, the erasure of the people who had shaped the landscapes he celebrated as wilderness.

The word 'wilderness,' as Muir used it, meant a place without people. But the meadows he described as pristine and untouched were cultural landscapes, maintained for centuries by Ahwahneechee burning, harvesting, and water management. The 'natural' valley he celebrated was the product of human agency. He did not examine that.

His work created the political will for conservation law that protects landscapes you can still visit. His blind spots helped shape a conservation movement that, for decades, treated the removal of Indigenous people as a precondition for preservation rather than its deepest failure.

That is the full inheritance. Both parts of it are still active.