John Muir
Conservationists will today celebrate the birth-date of the mountaineer and founder of the national park movement.
The Big Picnic will launch a season of events to commemorate the birth of John Muir, the Scottish-born defender of wilderness areas who was instrumental in the establishment of America’s national parks. Muir, who was born on 21 April 1838, emigrated to the USA at the age of 11.
The John Muir Odyssey starts today at the Dunbar home of the John Muir Birthplace Trust. Other events in the programme include the Great Scots Walking Festival, following in the footsteps of not just Muir, but Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stephenson.
Muir settled in California where he worked a series of odd jobs while pursuing his real passion: studying the natural wonders of the Yosemite Valley.
He went on to find fame as a botanist, geologist, mountaineer, ecologist and writer. During his explorations of the High Sierra and Alaska, Muir’s awareness of the threats to wild places grew and he successfully campaigned for the establishment of national parks to safeguard vast tracts of wild lands such as Yosemite Valley in California.
He founded the Sierra Club and is widely regarded as a pioneer of the modern conservation movement.
Stuart Brooks, chief executive of the John Muir Trust, said: “John Muir’s lifelong work to share his love of the natural world has never been more relevant to us today.
“His appreciation of the beauty and significance of wild places remains fundamental to the protection of our fragile and ever more beleaguered world.”
Muir believed wildernesses were as essential to man’s wellbeing as food and water. He said: “Everyone 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.”
He was also a firm believer in what has become the fundamental of modern ecological thinking, that human activities have consequences beyond the immediate and obvious. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he said, “We find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken to everything in the universe.”
The JMT was formed in 1983 to campaign against threats to wild land and for wild places to be valued by society. The trust says it supports the Government’s ambitious to reduce carbon emission through energy efficiency measures and a mix of renewable technologies that includes wind power but that this can be done without allowing the development of poorly sited onshore wind developments in Scotland’s most environmentally sensitive areas.
The JMT owns much of Ben Nevis, Schiehallion, the Red Cuillin in Skye, Quinag and Sandwood Bay.
Details of some of the events can be found on the John Muir Birthplace Trust website.
