My buddies @mehannibal and @the_wrangler on opposite sides of the John Muir debate latimes.com/local/californ… My two cents:
Instead of canceling the guy, I wish we would take this opportunity to understand the man in full -- not just as a prophet or a wilderness mystic, but as an affluent farmer who went to war with nature on his ranch, but deemed it sacred when hiking in the mountains.
He was perfectly happy to extract resources from the natural world to support himself, but condemned Native Americans for doing the same in the places he wanted to hike, and helped kick them off their land.
And yes, like many people living at that time, he was a lot more racist than the average person today. He was, in other words, a flawed human. Not the pure saint of environmentalism I was taught to adore.
AND - the transcendent feeling of retreating into beautiful places that he popularized is real, and lovely! We owe him a debt for getting the country to value that. Let's not throw that out with the bathwater
If we start seeing the man in full I think we could value natural beauty without ONLY valuing it. We could stop unrealistically demanding that we must leave nature totally untouched. Instead of focusing so much on aesthetics, environmentalism would focus more on economics.
Instead of just seeing Muir in Yosemite, I want people to understand how he made his money, and fed himself. I want to widen the focus so we see him killing pests on the farm, too.
Do that and environmentalism stops being a movement of shouting "Stop, don't touch that!" And instead acknowledges that we all have to eat. It starts to be about trade-offs and living lightly instead of unrealistic abstinence. So keep Muir - especially the parts he tried to hide
