John Muir Global Network

A portal to celebrating and encouraging environmental protection through the inspiring life of John Muir, the founder of the worldwide conservation movement.

As a wilderness explorer, John Muir is renowned for his exciting adventures in California’s Sierra Nevada, among Alaska’s glaciers, and world wide travels in search of nature’s beauty. As a writer, he taught the people of his time and ours the importance of experiencing and protecting our natural heritage. In fact, Muir went even further, to decry the exclusively human-centered (anthropocentric) view of the world, holding an abiding faith in our “horizontal brothers,” while noting that humans join in brotherhood with all living things as “the vertical mammal.” He remains a major inspiration today. We hope this website will increase your appreciation for this remarkable man.

NEW!… Review and Critique by Harold Wood of 2022 John Muir Symposium: New Perspectives on Peoples and Parks – focused on the current discussion on Muir and race. (March, 2024 review of April 2022 event).

NEW!… The Life and Letters of John Muir, (2023) One Hundredth Anniversary reprint with additional introductions by Stephen Hatch and Michael Wurtz, and an Epilogue by Harold Wood. Learn more with 4 video interviews about the book.

Book Review: The Earth Wisdom of John Muir by Harold Wood (2023) – An updated and enhanced book review, based on an earlier presentation reviewing the book Earth Wisdom: John Muir, Accidental Taoist, Charts Humanity’s Only Future on a Changing Planet by Raymond Barnett (2016). How John Muir’s “accidental Taoist” world view replaces the West’s anthropocentric worldview, offering a path to becoming whole with the natural world and dealing with the existential challenge of climate change.

IMPORTANT NEW ANALYSIS OF JOHN MUIR:

Criticizing Muir and misunderstanding the foundation of American nature conservation
by Bruce A. Byers, in The Ecological Citizen Vol 5 No 1 2021, 22 Oct 2021.

The recent controversy within the Sierra Club about whether their founder, John Muir, held racist views provides a useful opportunity to examine a much more important issue: the anthropocentric worldview that is the root cause of the global environmental crisis. The claims against Muir are easily refuted by a thorough and fair reading of his work; they are based on out-of-context quotes and revisionist interpretations of his early writings. But those claims give rise to a harmful misinterpretation of the history and philosophy of American nature conservation.

1838-1914

John Muir

Founder of the World Wide Conservation Movement

John Muir was America’s most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist, and founder of the Sierra Club.

He has been called “The Father of our National Parks,” “Wilderness Prophet,” and “Citizen of the Universe.” He once described himself more humorously, and perhaps most accurately, as, a “poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc. !!!!”

He was at turns an explorer, mountaineer, conservationist, botanist, amateur geologist, family man, farmer, citizen lobbyist, and, most remembered today, an inspirational writer about nature and wildness.

The late Graham White, a Scottish environmentalist, put Muir’s legacy into splendid perspective, writing:

“It is worth considering that even if John Muir had achieved all that he did, as ‘Father of the American National Parks’, he might just be an interesting historical figure, who did some great things and who passed away a long time ago; we could put his marble bust on the mantelpiece in the library, read his books and that would be the end of it.. Just an interesting Victorian who has been dead for eighty years.

“But that is not the case, as is evidenced by the fact that millions of people still are inspired by the words and writings of John Muir. Surely, it is because we are deeply moved by the intellectual force, the emotional power, and the evident truth of his words.

“The legacy which John Muir bequeathed to us is the vision of a sustainable world. And his message is not just of academic or literary interest. It has to do with the very survival of our forests, our water resources, the fish in our oceans, the wild places of our country; it is concerned with the quality of life that your children and grandchildren will enjoy or suffer, over the next 100 or 200 years in America.”

He first developed a passion for wild places growing up in his birthplace of Dunbar, Scotland, near a wild seacoast. At age 10, he emigrated to Wisconsin in the United States with his family, to discover an even bigger wilderness. After a brief sojourn at the University of Wiconsin and some time in Canada, he walked a thousand miles from Indiana to Florida, and later from San Francisco to Yosemite, where he found his life-long spiritual home. Many other adventures were to come, from exploring wild Alaska, to the Himalayan Mountains in India to hunting down Baobab trees in Africa and traveling up the Amazon to fulfill a long-postponed life dream. Muir embraced all nature from mosquitoes to mountain ranges, recognizing that everything is connected to everything else.

His passion for wild places led to a quest to protect them, teaching us all that all wild creatures and the natural world deserve to exist for their own sake.