John Muir, Anti-Racism, and Finding a Way Forward
Thirty years ago in 1990, my Stanford dissertation described the implicit racism embodied in John Muir’s writing in endless painful academic detail. Complete with footnotes. It was not a welcome message, then or now.
So in July 2020 when national news outlets finally began publishing first-hand accounts of fierce confrontations between the Sierra Club and its own employees of color — complete with strident calls for the Sierra Club to sever ties with the racist legacy of its legendary founder John Muir — my first reaction was “Oh heck yeah. It’s about time.”
But my second thought, just as it had been thirty years before, was to wonder if the sometimes-painful story of Muir’s life and legacy couldn’t still somehow offer a partial way forward through the catastrophic forest fires that destroyed Paradise. Leaving us all trapped together regardless of age, race, religion, poverty or wealth in the smoke and heat of the 21st Century’s looming Anthropocene era. Could the complex story of Muir’s long life contain some useful clues? A pathway forward beyond our painfully racist past? And present? Or perhaps hint at practical policies to confront the rapidly-accelerating “slow…
