the american forests john muir summarythe american forests john muir summary

Conservation generally refers to the act of consciously and efficiently using land and/or its natural resources. In the settlement and civilization of the country, bread more than timber or beauty was wanted; and in the blindness of hunger, the early settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide, regarded Gods trees as only a larger kind of pernicious weeds, extremely hard to get rid of. Type the abstract of the document here. John Muir (1838 - 1914) was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. Notwithstanding all the waste and use which have been going on unchecked like a storm for more than two centuries, it is not yet too late, though it is high time, for the government to begin a rational administration of its forests. Honest citizens see that only the rights of the government are being trampled, not those of the settlers. . There is none to say them nay. 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. 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 - John Muir, 1869. Of all the destroyers that infest the woods the shake-maker seems the happiest. In France no government forests have been sold since 1870. At least none is in sight from the lowlands, and they all might as well be on the moon, as far as scenery is concerned. Being rather partial to trees, I could not resist reading "A wind-storm in the forests" by Scottish-born American naturalist/enviromentalist John Muir (1838-1914) when it lobbed in by email today as this week's Library of America story of the week.Anyone who has been to the stunning Yosemite - or visited the peaceful Muir Woods north of San Francisco - will have heard of John Muir. Listen to the trailer for Holy Week. Still, the species is not in danger of extinction. Its focus is the general geology and characteristics of the Sierra Nevada. 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. As he grew older, Muir became increasingly excited about what plants and nature could teach him. In India systematic forest management was begun about forty years ago, under difficulties presented by the character of the country, the prevalence of running fires, opposition from lumbermen, settlers, etc. These two sequoias are all that are known to exist in the world, though in former geological times the genus was common and had many species. 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. Theres big money in it, and your grub costs nothing. They buy no land, pay no taxes, dwell in a paradise with no forbidding angel either from Washington or from heaven. John Muir: A Reading Bibliography by Kimes. Accessibility Statement, John Muir: A Reading Bibliography by Kimes, Holt-Atherton Special Collections homepage. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn." John Muir, The Mountains of California tags: energy , mountains , nature 1227 likes Like 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. The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? John Muir (1838-1914) was born in Scotland and emigrated to Wisconsin as a young boy. John Muir; At Home in the Wild. Taking from the government is with them the same as taking from nature, and their consciences flinch no more in cutting timber from the wild forests than in drawing water from a lake or river. travel our way. 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 American Forests by John Muir (1901) . 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. Selecting a favorable spot for a cabin near a meadow with a stream, he unpacks his animal and stakes it out on the meadow. They are invited to heaven, and may well be allowed in America. The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. John Muir in Yosemite. 2) Yosemite Glaciers. Listen to the trailer for. He was 29. 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. But most preferred the shake business, until something more profitable and as sure could be found, with equal comfort and independence. This grand tree, Sequoia sempervirens, is surpassed in size only by its near relative, Sequoia gigantea, or big tree, of the Sierra Nevada, if indeed it is surpassed. 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. 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. FAQ | Now it is plain that the forests are not inexhaustible, and that quick measures must be taken if ruin is to be avoided. This excerpt from "The American Forests," was part of John Muir's 1897 campaign to save the American wilderness. Thence westward were oak and elm, hickory and tupelo, gum and liriodendron, sassafras and ash, linden and laurel, spreading on ever wider in glorious exuberance over the great fertile basin of the Mississippi, over damp level bottoms, low dimpling hollows, and round dotting hills, embosoming sunny prairies and cheery park openings, half sunshine, half shade ; while a dark wilderness of pines covered the region around the Great Lakes. 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. > Drought and barrenness would follow. Listen to the trailer for. He explains that "any fool can destroy trees" as "they cannot run away" (Muir, 2006, p. 364). Every place is made better by them. 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: thus robbing the country of its glory and impoverishing it without right benefit to anybody, a bad, black business from beginning to end. But there is not a single specimen of the redwood in any national park. The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner. 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 American Forests John Muir ALDO LEOPOLD'S LAND ETHIC IN FORESTRY; 5. But the state woodlands are not allowed to lie idle. On the contrary, all the brains, religion, and superstition of the neighborhood are brought into play to prevent a new growth. 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. Muir became politically active to protect Yosemite from being threatened by commercial developments. The Yellowstone National Park 3. No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The big tree is also to come extent being made into lumber. Both environmentalists were great activists that informed the . Here the forests reached their highest development. A proprietor who has cleared his forest without permission is subject to heavy fine, and in addition may be made to replant the cleared area. Merely what belongs to all alike is reserved, and every acre that is left should be held together under the federal government as a basis for a general policy of administration for the public good. Nevertheless, under this act wealthy corporations have fraudulently obtained title to from ten thousand to twenty thousand acres or more. In 1913, Congress passed a law that approved the construction of the dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley. 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. The week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination was revolutionaryso why was it nearly forgotten? Muir served as the club's president until his death in 1914, and today, the Sierra Club boasts more than 3 . The 39th president of the United States of America Jimmy Carter fears the domination of domestic use of the Artctic Refuge. While in Alaska, I saw the loveliest forests and scenery I've ever seen. The fact is, it was all started over 100 years ago by two men I like to refer to as the founding fathers of America's public lands. Madison Grant's nature was the last redoubt of nobility in a levelling and hybridizing democracy. 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. Everywhere, everywhere over all the blessed continent, there were beauty, and melody, and kindly, wholesome, foodful abundance. The legitimate demands on the forests that have passed into private ownership, as well as those in the hands of the government, are increasing every year with the rapid settlement and upbuilding of the country, but the methods of lumbering are as yet grossly wasteful. 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. Not a mountain is left in the landscape. Muir's nature was a pristine refuge from the city. After the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia had been mostly cleared and scorched into melancholy ruins, the overflowing multitude of bread and money seekers poured over the Alleghanies into the fertile middle West, spreading ruthless devastation ever wider and farther over the rich valley of the Mississippi and the vast shadowy pine region about the Great Lakes.

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