Memory  /  Q&A

John Muir and Race

Environmental historian Donald E. Worster pushes back against recent characterizations of Muir as a racist.

John Muir is an almost prophetlike figure in California. The 19th-century Scottish-American found rapture in the Sierra Nevada, publishing works that helped inspire the preservation of wild areas, including the designation of Yosemite as a national park in 1890.

No fewer than 70 schools, lodges, roads, and other places in California bear Muir’s name.

So it came as a jolt to many last week when the Sierra Club, of which Muir was the first president, issued a statement denouncing the environmentalist for drawing on racist stereotypes in his writings. The post, titled “Pulling down our monuments,” linked to an Atlas Obscura article that recounted how Muir had described Native Americans as “lazy” and “savages.” While walking through the South, Muir recalled encountering a “black lump of something” that turned out to be a small boy. “Birds make nests and nearly all beasts make some kind of bed for their young, but these negroes allow their younglings to lie nestless and naked in the dirt,” he wrote.

In an essay responding to the Sierra Club’s post, the Muir biographer Donald E. Worster acknowledged there was much to regret about Muir’s views, but argued that the environmentalist should be judged in a broader context.

“Muir has been dead for more than a century,” Worster wrote, “but if he could speak from the grave, I can easily imagine him agreeing that systemic racism is bad and should be repudiated, for he never published a word in support of black slavery, racial segregation, the Confederacy, forced sterilization of minorities, or genocidal policies toward Native Americans.”

California Sun contributor Finn Cohen reached out to ask a few questions of Worster, who is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Kansas and the author of “A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir.”

Excerpts of their conversation, below, have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q. What are your feelings about the Sierra Club’s statement regarding John Muir?

A. If they just turn the page, sometimes they find some rather surprising context. Particularly that one episode from John Muir’s journal from 1868 when he was for the first time in the Yosemite area and encountered Indians coming over the mountains from Mono Lake. That gets quoted again and again. But the rest of that day's journal entry, just something he wrote by the campfire, is quite different in tone from what most people gather from a couple of words and characterizations.