John Muir, Anti-Racism, and Finding a Way Forward

Dr. Scott Lankford
15 min readJul 31, 2020

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…

Dr. Scott Lankford

Stanford GEN Global Educators Network Director of Communication. Foothill College English Prof. “Tahoe beneath the Surface” won Nature Book of the Year 2010!