Muir, even more than Thoreau, played a key role in popularizing love of wilderness

• Born in Scotland in 1838, family moved to Wisconsin when he was 11
  
• He grew up in a harsh home--his father had a very strict view of Christianity and the importance of hard work--Muir thought wilderness far more appealing than civilization
• he escaped to the University of Wisconsin, where he discovered the ideas of natural theology and transcendentalism
  
• he was talented as an inventor and considered that as a career until he nearly lost his sight in an accident
• he walked a thousand miles to the gulf of Mexico, then took a ship to San Francisco and headed for the mountains
• he discovered the Yosemite valley and stayed

his ideas came from transcendentalism--nature is a mirror reflecting the Creator

• "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. "
• "Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God's blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. "
  
• In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware. -- John of the Mountains
• Against the building of a dam in a valley near Yosemite: "These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."
  
• "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." -- My First Summer in the Sierra
  
• he took it much farther than Thoreau or Emerson, glorying in being alone in the wilderness

what he said that was new was seeing wild nature as having the right to exist for its own sake, not just for the benefit of human beings:

• "No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged."  from "Wild Wool", 1875.
  
• "Nevertheless, again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, 'What are rattlesnakes good for?' As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways. Long ago, an Indian to whom a French traveler put this old question replied that their tails were good for toothache, and their heads for fever. Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life."   -- Our National Parks, ch. 2.
• "Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.... This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever." -- A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)
  

Muir takes preservation ideas further--we should preserve wilderness for its own sake

The conservation movement split between wise use and preservation

• "wise use": set aside natural resources for future use and manage them wisely (Pinchot & the Forest Service)
  
• preservationists want natural areas unaltered by humans, for their own sake
  
• Muir tried to have it both ways for a while but ended up a leading preservationist

In 1890 Muir published two articles in a leading magazine calling for the preservation of the Sierra mountains around the Yosemite Valley as a national park like Yellowstone, only Muir explicitly said the goal was to preserve wilderness.  A bill was quickly passed and signed.

• he writes widely read articles to change public opinion
• this was the first important example of creating a park for the sake of wilderness, not tourists or practical benefits
  

In 1892 Muir founded the Sierra Club

The wise use side:
Meanwhile at the same time the federal government also passed a law setting aside forest reserves, leading to the National Forests, which have a very different philosophy than the National Parks

• Forestry was developing as a profession--one of the key leaders was Gifford Pinchot
• Pinchot argued for sustained yield--if it takes your trees 100 years to grow cut down and replant 1/10 of the forest every 10 years
• see trees as a crop--the trees are going to die anyway so why not use them
• you also need forests to protect water resources
  
• use the forests for the long-term greatest good of the nation (benefit the public, as is appropriate in a democracy)--there can a tension between private profit and the public interest
  
• wise use--cut down trees only as fast as they grow again
  
• this wasn't Muir's idea of preservation
  
• National Park and National Forest systems developed very differently
• the Forest Service is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Park Service is part of the Department of the Interior
  
• so long as forestry techniques involved cutting only selected trees, sustained yield seemed like a good idea to many people
• multiple use--we can use forests for timber production and recreation both
  
• but when new technology made clearcutting (rather than selective cutting) the more efficient approach and cutting increased in the 1950s and 1960s  the public was horrified
• The Greatest Good ch. 4 to Hetch Hetchy
  

Muir's view?

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