They have disappeared in lumber and smoke, mostly smoke, and the government got not one cent for them; only the land they were growing on was considered valuable, and two and a half dollars an acre was charged for it. During a mans life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees tens of centuries old that have been destroyed. Humans, Muir decided, are no greater or lesser than other forms of life. Tule Joe made five hundred dollars last winter on mallard and teal. Upon this old law, as Mr. Bowers points out, having the construction of a wooden navy in view, the United States government has to-day chiefly to rely in protecting its timber throughout the arid regions of the West, where none of the naval timber which the law had in mind is to be found. Railroad tracks were just . One of the reasons why John Muir and other naturalists would have believed that the grandeur of Western America was shaped entirely by natural forces is that they had no idea how many Native. Madison Grant's nature was the last redoubt of nobility in a levelling and hybridizing democracy. Wide-branching oak and elm in endless variety, walnut and maple, chestnut and beech, ilex and locust, touching limb to limb, spread a leafy translucent canopy along the coast of the Atlantic over the wrinkled folds and ridges of the Alleghanies, a green billowy sea in summer, golden and purple in autumn, pearly gray like a steadfast frozen mist of interlacing branches and sprays in leafless, restful winter. Still, in the long run the world does not move backward Light is surely coming, and the friends of destruction will preach and bewail in vain. Muir is credited with both the creation of the National Park System and the establishment of the Sierra Club. Within the pantheon of environmental greats, few match the stature of John Muir. 234, Muir describes the beauty of trees in the many varied regions across America as "they appeared a few centuries ago when they were rejoicing in wildness." The Yellowstone National Park 3. And when he was tired wading in the sloughs and touched with rheumatiz, he just knocked off on ducks, and went to the Contra Costa hills for dove and quail. > The directors of a line that guarded against fires, and cleared a clean gap edged with living trees, and fringed and mantled with the grass and flowers and beautiful seedlings that are ever ready and willing to spring up, might justly boast of the beauty of their road; for nature is always ready to heal every scar. A few bolts from the same section that the shakes were made from are split into square sticks and built up to form a chimney, the inside and interspaces being plastered and filled in with mud. > Twenty or thirty years ago, shakes, a kind of long boardlike shingles split with a mallet and a frow, were in great demand for covering barns and sheds, and many are used still in preference to common shingles, especially those made from the sugar-pine, which do not warp or crack in the hottest sunshine. "No prisoners were taken," recalled the witness to these events . To show the results of the timber-planting act, it need only be stated that of the 38,000,000 acres entered under it, less than 1,000,000 acres have been patented. John Muir, (born April 21, 1838, Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotlanddied December 24, 1914, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), Scottish-born American naturalist, writer, and advocate of U.S. forest conservation, who was largely responsible for the establishment of Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park, which are located in California. Listen to the trailer for Holy Week. 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. Muir's conservation efforts saved many forests and natural areas for all of us. Travelers through the West in summer are not likely to forget the fire-work displayed along the various railway tracks. The American Forests In decrying the destruction of woodlands by loggers, settlers, and industrialists, Muir, the father of America's conservation movement, advanced the notion that. At university, Muir focused his studies on chemistry, geology and botany. In 1879, Muir made the first of his seven trips to Alaska, where he risked his life exploring the glaciers in Glacier Bay to find evidence of glacial activity. John Muir was one of the countrys most famous naturalist and conservationist and Muir Woods, part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, is named in his honor. The same thing is true of the mines, which consume and destroy indirectly immense quantities of timber with their innumerable fires, accidental or set to make open ways, and often without regard to how far they run. It has been planted and is flourishing over a great part of Europe, and magnificent sections of the aboriginal forests have been reserved as national and state parks, the Mariposa Sequoia Grove, near Yosemite, managed by the State of California, and the General Grant and Sequoia national parks on the Kings, the Kaweah, and Tule rivers, efficiently guarded by a small troop of United States cavalry under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior. 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. 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. Then he goes to work sawing and splitting for the market, tying the shakes in bundles of fifty or a hundred. Nor will the woods be the worse for this use, or their benign influences be diminished any more than the sun is diminished by shining. As he grew older, Muir became increasingly excited about what plants and nature could teach him. 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. How strong a voice that metal has! An extension of this law by the passage of the act of March 2, 1831, provided that if any person should cut live-oak or red cedar trees or other timber from the lands of the United States for any other purpose than the construction of the navy, such person should pay a fine not less than triple the value of the timber cut, and be imprisoned for a period not exceeding twelve months. John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland on April 21, 1838, as the oldest son in religious shopkeepers family. John Muir: A Reading Bibliography by Kimes This tree is one of the most variable and most widely distributed of American pines. President Roosevelt's concern for the environment was influenced by American naturalists, such as John Muir, and by his own political appointees, including Gifford Pinchot, Chief of Forestry. John Muir, in The American Forests, speaks fondly of the American forests, calling them the "glory of the world." He discusses the genera of each coast, and describes the vast diversity between species, size, and some wildlife. 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. His lifelong passion for hiking began when he hiked 1,000 miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico in. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future: From One Earth to One World (Brundtland Report) Basically, Muir's essay is a moment by moment account of one of his outings in the California . Thence still westward swept the forests to right and left around grassy plains and deserts a thousand miles wide: irrepressible hosts of spruce and pine, aspen and willow, nut-pine and juniper, cactus and yucca, caring nothing for drought, extending undaunted from mountain to mountain, over mesa and desert, to join the darkening multitudes of pines that covered the high Rocky ranges and the glorious forests along the coast of the moist and balmy Pacific, where new species of pine, giant cedars and spruces, silver firs and sequoias, kings of their race, growing close together like grass in a meadow, poised their brave domes and spires in the sky three hundred feet above the ferns and the lilies that enameled the ground; towering serene through the long centuries, preaching Gods forestry fresh from heaven. 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. All sorts of local laws and regulations have been tried and found wanting, and the costly lessons of our own experience, as well as that of every civilized nation, show conclusively that the fate of the remnant of our forests is in the hands of the federal government, and that if the remnant is to be saved at all, it must be saved quickly. This excerpt from "The American Forests," was part of John Muir's 1897 campaign to save the American wilderness. The great forests of Northern United States captivated him and fueled . John Muir, (born April 21, 1838, Dunbar, East Lothian, Scot.died Dec. 24, 1914, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.), U.S. naturalist and conservationist. John Muir remains worthy of honor and respect as a person who studied, recorded, and shared the natural areas of the United States and the world, and the role of humans within the environment. 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. According to Muir, The trees are felled, and about half of each giant is left on the ground to be converted into smoke and ashes; the better half is sawed into choice lumber and sold to citizens of the United States or to foreigners . In the clearings of one of the largest mills on the coast we found thirty men at work, last summer, cutting off redwood shoots in the dark of the moon, claiming that all the stumps and roots cleared at this auspicious time would send up no more shoots. The outcries we hear against forest reservations come mostly from thieves who are wealthy and steal timber by wholesale. The forests of America, however slighted. In the administration of its forests, the state righteously considers itself bound to treat them as a trust for the nation as a whole, and to keep in view the common good of the people for all time. 331-[365]; no. The annual appropriation for so-called protection service is hardly sufficient to keep twenty-five timber agents in the field, and as far as any efficient protection of timber is concerned these agents themselves might as well be timber. John Muir Papers Here and there in the Southern States there are still considerable areas of timbered government land, but these are comparatively unimportant. But there is not a single specimen of the redwood in any national park. The plan was usually as follows: A mill company desirous of getting title to a large body of redwood or sugar-pine land first blurred the eyes and ears of the land agents, and then hired men to enter the land they wanted, and immediately deed it to the company after a nominal compliance with the law; false swearing in the wilderness against the government being held of no account. Though far less abundant than the redwood, it is, fortunately, less accessible, extending along the western flank of the Sierra in a partially interrupted belt about two hundred and fifty miles long, at a height of from four to eight thousand feet above the sea. During the course of his political term, Roosevelt set aside 148 million acres of forest reserves, created 50 regions for the protection of wildlife, founded 16 national monuments and established 5 new national parks. The axe and saw are insanely busy, chips are flying thick as snowflakes, and every summer thousands of acres of priceless forests, with their underbrush, soil, springs, climate, scenery, and religion, are vanishing away in clouds of smoke, while, except in the national parks, not one forest guard is employed. The passage of the Wilderness Act was an historically important event in American environmental politics, which tied the fate of much of America's public lands to disputes over the meaning of wilderness. 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. Armed with a plant-press and a blank notebook, Muir wandered for weeks at a time, through the mountains that would later be Yosemite National Park. The enormous logs, too heavy to handle, are blasted into manageable dimensions with gunpowder. Still, in the long run the world does not move backward. Only the lower, perfectly clear, free-splitting portions of the giant pines are used, perhaps ten to twenty feet from a tree two hundred and fifty in height; all the rest is left a mass of ruins, to rot or to feed the forest fires, while thousands are hacked deeply and rejected in proving the grain. Everywhere, everywhere over all the blessed continent, there were beauty, and melody, and kindly, wholesome, foodful abundance. By the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run into the woods. 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. By the act of June 3, 1878, timber can be taken from public lands not subject to entry under any existing laws except for minerals, by bona fide residents of the Rocky Mountain States and Territories and the Dakotas. In Luke 12 Jesus says, "I've come to bring fire on earth." University of Northern Iowa UNI ScholarWorks Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate College 2016 Three men in the wilderness: Ideas and concepts of John Muir was born on April 21, 1838 in the small rural town of Dunbar, Scotland. Even the fires of the Indians and the fierce shattering lightning seemed to work together only for good in clearing spots here and there for smooth garden prairies, and openings for sunflowers seeking the light. Carter argues that it is the duty of everyone to preserve the Arctic Refuge rather than dig holes in it to extract oil. On the other hand, about one half of the fifty million francs spent on forestry has been given to engineering works, to make the replanting of denuded areas possible. His visit with the naturalist had a tremendous impact on his political actions. Everybody on the dry side of the continent is beginning to find this out, and, in view of the waste going on, is growing more and more anxious for government protection. To prepare the ground, it was rolled and sifted in seas with infinite loving deliberation and forethought, lifted into the light, submerged and warmed over and over again, pressed and crumpled into folds and ridges, mountains and hills, subsoiled with heaving volcanic fires, ploughed and ground and sculptured into scenery and soil with glaciers and rivers, very feature growing and changing from beauty to beauty, higher and higher. Theres always a market for bear grease, and sometimes you can sell the hams. With such variety, harmony, and triumphant exuberance, even nature, it would seem, might have rested content with the forests of North America, and planted no more. In "The American Forests", John Muir's purpose is to reveal the disloyalty that Americans have towards their agriculture. But, busied with tariffs, etc., Congress has given no heed to these or other appeals, and our forests, the most valuable and the most destructible of all the natural resources of the country, are being robbed and burned more rapidly than ever. Land commissioners and Secretaries of the Interior have repeatedly called attention to this ruinous state of affairs, and asked Congress to enact the requisite legislation for reasonable reform. 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. Everyone to preserve the Arctic Refuge rather than dig holes in it extract. & quot ; no prisoners were taken, & quot ; recalled the witness to these.! 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