Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
beauty of large areas of wilderness in the United States. John Muir struggled all his
life to protect and preserve wildernesses from destructive development. His activism,
and particularly his writing, were extremely influential in persuading many people,
including President Theodore Roosevelt, that environmental conservation was
a necessary element of any truly civilized nation. His work inspired the formation
of many conservation agencies, including America's famous Sierra Club established
in 1892, of which he became its first president. Muir, apart from being an active
and effective campaigner, had a deeply romantic attachment to the natural world
and many of his writings are infused with a spiritual sense of Earth's wonders. In
Chapter 16 of
The Yosemite
, published in 1912, Muir explored the wonders of the
Hetch Hetchy Valley:
The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world,
and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized. Everybody
needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may
heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-
hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though
perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended
rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and
botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks - the Yellowstone,
Yosemite, Sequoia, etc. - Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy
of the world. Nevertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning,
however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling
gain seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly
trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes
disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, shampiously crying,
'Conservation, conservation, panutilization,' that man and beast may be fed
and the dear Nation made great. Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants
utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer,
changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier
still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled.
Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park [in 1864], strife has
been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the
universal battle between right and wrong, however much its boundaries may be
shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.
Ken Burns's remarkable 2008 documentary series for PBS,
The National Parks:
America's Best Idea
, tells the story of their creation, struggles and controversies in
a proud, clear but critical manner. The nature protection afforded by the national
parks involved displacing the relatively few human inhabitants of these areas and
protecting them for posterity from economic development, although this did not
necessarily exclude tourism. In many cases human displacement meant depriving
indigenous peoples of their cultural, natural and ancestral heritage (Spence, 2000).
All indigenous peoples were ordered out of Yellowstone in 1877 and the Sierra Club
operated a 'Whites Only' policy until 1920. It was therefore not only Native American
Indians who were to be excluded from these places of natural wilderness, awe,
wonder and the sublime. Those predominantly wealthy tourists who visited the
wilderness went there not as producers but as consumers, as privileged spectators
