the john muir exhibit - press_releases - legacy
by Stephen Fox
(
from the book's dust jacket
)
John Muir and His Legacy:
The American Conservation Movement
by Stephen Fox
1981
Boston: Little, Brown and Company
Perhaps the most legendary woodsman in American
history, John Muir (1838 - 1914) was a Scottish-born
naturalist, an eccentric nature lover who would set out
for the wilderness for days on end with only tea,
oatmeal, and bread in his pack, and sing entranced from
the tops of waterfalls. A spellbinding conversationalist
whose acquaintances included Emerson and Theodore
Roosevelt, he won the hearts of the eastern
establishment intellectuals with his writings from the
Sierra. More than anyone else, John Muir was responsible
for our national park system, and the American
conservation movement is very much his legacy.
John Muir and His Legacy
is at once a biography of
this remarkable man--the first work to make
unrestricted use of all of Muir's manuscripts and
personal papers--and a history of the century-old fight
to save the natural environment. Stephen Fox traces the
conservation movement's diverse, colorful, and
tumultuous history, from the successful campaign to
establish Yosemite National Park in 1890 to the
movement's present day concerns of nuclear waste and
acid rain.
Previous histories of conservation have focused on
politicians and professional conservationists in
government bureaus. Fox chronicles the development of
the major conservation groups, spotlighting the zealous
amateurs who have been at the heart and soul of
American conservation. The cast of characters includes
two Presidents, a Supreme Court justice, and a Pulitzer
Prize winning historian. It also includes William
Dutcher, an insurance agent who organized the National
Audubon Society: J. Horace McFarland, a master printer
who saved Niagara Falls; Will Dilg, an advertising man
who started the Izaak Walton League; Rosalie Edge, "the
only woman in conservation"; and Aldo Leopold, whose
classic
A Sand County Almanac
was the final act in a
distinguished career.
Conservation has run a cyclical course, Fox contends,
from its origins in the 1890's when it was the province
of amateurs, to its takeover by professionals with quasi-scientific notions,
and back, in the 1960's to its original
impetus. Since then man's view of himself as "the last
endangered species" has sparked an explosion of public
interest in environmentalism.
John Muir and His Legacy
is at once a fascinating
biography of America's foremost wilderness defender
and a penetrating historical examination of the
impassioned individuals and vigilant organizations that
have borne aloft the movement he began.
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