He also realized how fragile nature was; how peoples impact on the land, through grazing, lumbering and commercial developments, was slowly destroying all the beauty in the wilderness. President Theodore Roosevelt & John Muir. Many of the miners find that timber is already becoming scarce and dear on the denuded hills around their mills, and they too are asking for protection of forests, at least against fire. The ground will be glad to feed them, and the pines will come down from the mountains for their homes as willingly as the cedars came from Lebanon for Solomons temple. To the southward stretched dark, level-topped cypresses in knobby, tangled swamps, grassy savannas in the midst of them like lakes of light, groves of gay sparkling spice-trees, magnolias and palms, glossy-leaved and blooming and shining continually. Mere destroyers, however, tree-killers, spreading death and confusion in the fairest groves and gardens ever planted, let the government hasten to cast them out and make an end of them. Let them be as free to pick gold and gems from the hills, to cut and hew, dig and plant, for homes and bread, as the birds are to pick berries from the wild bushes, and moss and leaves for nests. John Muir, Naturalist: A Concise Biography of the Great Naturalist. He wrote many magazine articles and books, inspiring other people to love nature and drawing attention to the need to protect the environment. Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old. Now it is plain that the forests are not inexhaustible, and that quick measures must be taken if ruin is to be avoided. Every tree heard the bodeful sound, and pillars of smoke gave the sign in the sky, Many of natures five hundred kinds of wild trees had to make way for orchards and cornfields. But as this groundbreaking book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley . An exception would seem to be found in the case of our forests, which have been mismanaged rather long, and now come desperately near being like smashed eggs and spilt milk. David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. Everywhere, everywhere over all the blessed continent, there were beauty, and melody, and kindly, wholesome, foodful abundance. Home Any fool can destroy trees. Over nearly all of the more accessible slopes of the Sierra and Cascade mountains in southern Oregon, at a height of from three to six thousand feet above the sea, and for a distance of about six hundred miles, this waste and confusion extends. Muir served as the club's president until his death in 1914, and today, the Sierra Club boasts more than 3 . Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain. Then he goes to work sawing and splitting for the market, tying the shakes in bundles of fifty or a hundred. Not only do the shepherds, at the driest time of the year, set fire to everything that will burn, but the sheep consume every green leaf, not sparing even the young conifers when they are in a starving condition from crowding, and they rake and dibble the loose soil of the mountain sides for the spring floods to wash away, and thus at last leave the ground barren. About | Muir is credited with both the creation of the National Park System and the establishment of the Sierra Club. The 39th president of the United States of America Jimmy Carter fears the domination of domestic use of the Artctic Refuge. Shot em on the Joaquin, tied em in dozens by the neck, and shipped em to San Francisco. Nevertheless the Andes and the South American forests continued to fascinate his imagination, as his letters show, for many years after he came to California. Any fool can destroy trees. While reading the John Muir excerpt from the reader, I was struck with how closely he followed the traditions of Emerson and Thoreau while still expanding on his own style. But there is no such road on the western side of the continent. Sapling poles form the frame of the airy building, usually about six feet by eight in size, on which the shakes are nailed, with the edges overlapping. He came to the San Francisco area in 1868 and there he discovered the Sierra Mountains. The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity; but straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. In Luke 12 Jesus says, "I've come to bring fire on earth." Most notably, this was John Muir's first published essay (1871). The sky is black and the ground is black, and on either side there is a continuous border of black stumps and logs and blasted trees appealing to heaven for help as if still half alive, and their mute eloquence is most interestingly touching. His family immigrated to America in 1849 and settled into farm life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. John Muir. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most powerful voices in the history of American conservation. Even lumbermen in these regions, long accustomed to steal, are now willing and anxious to buy lumber for their mills under cover of law: some possibly from a late second growth of honesty, but most, especially the small mill-owners, simply because it no longer pays to steal where all may not only steal, but also destroy, and in particular because it costs about as much to steal timber for one mill as for ten, and therefore the ordinary lumberman can no longer compete with the large corporations. So far our government has done nothing effective with its forests, though the best in the world, but is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificent estate in perfect order, and then has left his rich fields and meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted at will, depending on their inexhaustible abundance. Every tree heard the bodeful sound, and pillars of smoke gave the sign in the sky. Both environmentalists were great activists that informed the . Muir became politically active to protect Yosemite from being threatened by commercial developments. But in the Rocky Mountains and California and Arizona, where the forests are inflammable, and where the fertility of the lowlands depends upon irrigation, public opinion is growing stronger every year in favor of permanent protection by the federal government of all the forests that cover the sources of the streams. "No prisoners were taken," recalled the witness to these events . American forester, the first Chief of the US Forest Service and his family was the financial backer for the country's first forestry school (at Yale University), so there can be no doubt where the profession of forestry locates itself in the Muir-Pinchot debate. 2) Yosemite Glaciers. Conservation generally refers to the act of consciously and efficiently using land and/or its natural resources. The wonderful advance made in the last few years, in creating four national parks in the West, and thirty forest reservations, embracing nearly forty million acres; and in the planting of the borders of streets and highways and spacious parks in all the great cities, to satisfy the natural taste and hunger for landscape beauty and righteousness that God has put, in some measure, into every human being and animal, shows the trend of awakening public opinion. A large portion of the best timber is thus shattered and destroyed, and, with the huge knotty tops, is left in ruins for tremendous fires that kill every tree within their range, great and small. Anyhow, these vigorous, almost immortal trees are killed at last, and black stumps are now their only monuments over most of the chopped and burned areas. The provisions of the code concerning private woodlands are substantially these: No private owner may clear his woodlands without giving notice to the government at least four months in advance, and the forest service may forbid the clearing on the following grounds: to maintain the soil on mountains, to defend the soil against erosion and flooding by rivers or torrents, to insure the existence of springs and watercourses, to protect the dunes and seashore, etc. But there is not a single specimen of the redwood in any national park. The feudal lords valued the woodlands, and enacted vigorous protective laws; and when, in the latest civil war, the Mikado government destroyed the feudal system, it declared the forests that had belonged to the feudal lords to be the property of the state, promulgated a forest law binding on the whole kingdom, and founded a school of forestry in Tokio. The gigantea attains a greater girth, and is heavier, more noble in port, and more sublimely beautiful. He closes his long essay with his now-famous statements: "Any fool can destroy trees. The outcries we hear against forest reservations come mostly from thieves who are wealthy and steal timber by wholesale. Read the whole article in the August 1897 Atlantic. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyedchased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woodstrees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. In most mills only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends. Of the total area of government forests, perhaps 70,000,000 acres, 55,000,000 acres have been brought under the control of the forestry department, a larger area than that of all our national parks and reservations. Muir, John, "The American Forests" (1897). Under these circumstances, the bawling, blethering oratorical stuff drowns the voice of God himself. The special land agents employed by the General Land Office to protect the public domain from timber depredations are supposed to collect testimony to sustain prosecution, and to superintend such prosecution on behalf of the government, which is represented by the district attorneys. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. Savage's men fired indiscriminately into the Ahwahneechee camp, a people who had called this valley their home for centuries. In "The American Forests", John Muir's purpose is to reveal the disloyalty that Americans have towards their agriculture. Had he gone West he would have found out that the sky was not safe; for all through the summer months, over most of the mountain regions, the smoke of mill and forest fires is so thick and black that no sunbeam can pierce it. 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