Kim Stanley Robinson is a noted eco-science fiction author of over 20 books, and has been a Sierra Club member for many decades. His writings have appeared in the Sierra Club magazine several times, including the 2018 essay, “There is No Planet B.”  He is an author of eco-fiction novels Green Earth, New York 2140, Aurora, and most recently, The Ministry for the Future.

His 2022 non-fiction book The High Sierra:  a Love Story, involved deep research into John Muir, and it includes chapters on the Sierra Club as an early feminist organization, on John Muir as “not-a-racist and environmental hero still“ and by contrast, how actually deplorable geographic names used  in the Sierra Nevada mountains ought to be removed— such as Spencer, Agassiz, Haeckel, LeConte Senior (a Sierra Club founder), David Starr Jordan, etc.  Notably the book addresses how wilderness remains crucial for our future survival. 

In his book, he comments that “The main accusation made against [John Muir]  is that he preferred wilderness areas to be empty of people, and that he therefore advocated for the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands, in order to make the newly created national parks more pure. The notion has gotten around and is now often taken to be the historical truth. I find it frightening to see how quickly a characterization like this becomes received wisdom. Because it’s not true. To be more confident of this assertion, I read all Muir’s published work, and a great deal of his unpublished writing in his archive at the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, California (much of this is now online). At no point in any of this writing did he advocate for the removal of Native Americans from their land.”  After discussing several passages from Muir in detail, Robinson concluded: “So, contrary to the uninformed accusations being made against Muir in our time, he was not a racist, despite his sharp tongue, and the negative impressions he wrote down concerning some people he met in his journeys. His judgments were of individuals, and did not describe or compare ethnic groups as such. And over the course of his lifetime, his ongoing interest in Native Americans, sparked in his childhood in Wisconsin, strengthened into a sympathetic admiration.”

In a recent interview about this book, he commented further: “I would very much want to dispel the myth that John Muir ever advocated that Native Americans be removed from wilderness areas in order to make them more pure, by making them more empty. He never advocated any such thing, and in his writing he showed he was aware of Native Americans’ use of fire to sculpt landscapes, and to care for land in curatorial ways. So that’s one false myth that does damage to the environmental cause generally, and the idea of wilderness in particular.” In response to the question, “What can today’s activists learn from Muir’s writing?,” he responded:  “It’s important to read [all of] John Muir’s writing, first of all. When you read him in full, you see him always acting as a kind of enthusiastic usher, not writing much about himself, but rather describing landscapes and biomes at length, and suggesting in particular that urban Americans could live more fulfilling lives by visiting wild areas from time to time, and paying more attention to animals both domestic and wild… He lived for three months with the Tlingit people of Alaska, and learned to admire them immensely: they should be missionaries to the Christians, he wrote. So a full reading of Muir’s work will lead to even more admiration for his close observations, his honesty, his defense of Native Americans, and his extremely progressive defense of animal rights. Lessons can be taken from all this, including the fact that reputations can be easily damaged by ignorant internet memes, but over the long haul the historical record can rectify such vagaries.”

He concluded in his book:  “For me, the most telling passage in all that Muir wrote about Native Americans is this, written about the Tlingit: ‘I have never yet seen a child ill-used even to the extent of an angry word. Scolding, so common a curse of the degraded of Christian countries, is not known here at all. But on the contrary the young are fondled and indulged without being spoiled.’ Given his own childhood, you can see how that would have caught his attention.”

He wrote in 2020, “The current Sierra Club board of directors should be removed for egregious and unnecessary damage to the reputation of John Muir and of the Sierra Club as a rational group of people.”

On April 3, 2022, Robinson was quoted in the HuffPost: ““I was amazed that the Sierra Club Board of Directors had been so foolish as to try to censor their own people who sought to make a statement in defense of their founder. It challenged my sense of what this group’s intelligence and motivations actually were.” He went on to say, “Really, I think the whole board of directors ought to resign after what they did in response to the essay by Mair, Hanson and Nelson,” He added. “They ought to say, ‘Oops, collective moment of insanity. We ruined the reputation of the club, and we are going to resign now and let a new group take over.’”  

Robinson’s commitment to the legacy and message of John Muir is further shown in his commitment to supporting the effort to restore Hetch Hetchy. In his book The High Sierra: A Love Story, he lamented the loss of Hetch Hetchy Valley writing “The flooding of Hetch Hetchy was a knife thrust into the heart of the wilderness movement.” Muir’s “scores of essays from this time all used variants of his slogan message: “Drown Hetch Hetchy? You might as well use your cathedrals for water tanks!”

Robinson recognized that it was John Muir who originally “understood that drowning Hetch Hetchy, which was within the new boundaries of Yosemite National Park, was a deliberate attack on the idea of wilderness protection, made by people involved in all kinds of extraction industries. It was well understood even at that time that lower foothill valleys could be used to store the same amount of water as Hetch Hetchy: going after it was a strike in a war, a stab at the heart.”

He then wrote, “But the war is never over. And as I looked down on the scene that misty evening, I saw the water drain away. It will happen someday. There is no rush about this, and given the emergency century we are entering, it isn’t even close to the highest priority. But put it this way: if civilization gets itself in a balance with the planet, a day will come when we will drain that misbegotten death lake and let the valley go back to the way it was. It will be one of the greatest experiments in landscape restoration ever conducted.”

In October, 2023,  Kim Stanley Robinson gave the keynote address at the Restore Hetch Hetchy Annual Dinner.  As the group reported, in his speech, he linked the restoration of Hetch Hetchy to his lifetime love of the Sierra. Drawing from his own experiences in Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite and beyond, his address journeyed into the future where the valley is inevitably restored. He shared that restoring Hetch Hetchy is the right thing to do for wildlife, for the study of habitat restoration, and for the future of our national parks and the Sierra Nevada as a whole.

Robinson’s speech gave his personal perspective on the positive impact that restoration would have for all who love Yosemite for many, many years to come. Extensive time spent adventuring in the Sierra helped him to tap into that future—he imagined backpackers marveling in awe at Hetch Hetchy from its valley floor as they trek into (or out of) the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne. Someday, he mused, there will come a time that future generations will forget that Hetch Hetchy was ever drowned by a reservoir.