Selected Writings of John Muir - Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams

Informationen zum Autor JOHN MUIR was born in 1838 in Scotland, and immigrated with his family in 1849 to the United States. In 1892, he and his colleague Robert Underwood Johnson founded the Sierra Club, of which Muir was president until his death; he was also influential in establishing four national parks. Controversial during and after his lifetime, his writings on wilderness preservation became the impetus for the modern environmentalist movement. Muir died in 1914 in California. TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS is the best-selling author of fifteen books, including the environmental classic Refuge and most recently, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks. She has received numerous awards and honors for her commitment to peace and ecological consciousness. She lives in Utah and Wyoming. Klappentext A new collection of the seminal writings of America's first naturalist and the founder of the modern conservation movement. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY ORIGINAL. This volume of John Muir's selected writings chronicles the key turning points in his life and study of the American wilderness. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is Muir's account of his childhood on a Wisconsin farm! where his interest in nature was first piqued; in The Mountains of California ! The Yosemite ! and Travels in Alaska ! we follow him on long journeys into stunning mountain ranges and valleys! where he records native flora and fauna and finds proof of his theories of the effect of glaciers on landscape formation. These four full-length works--along with a selection of important essays--helped galvanize American naturalists! and led to the founding of the Sierra Club and several national parks. In these pages! written with meticulous thoroughness and an impassioned lyricism! we witness Muir's awakening to the incredible beauty of our planet! and the honing of an eye turned as acutely toward the scientific as the spiritual. Earth—Planet—Universe   John Muir is a man I would have loved to have met on the trail. I would have enjoyed walking with him through Tuolumne Meadows in his beloved Yosemite listening to him discuss each wildflower by name; tell stories of each peak he climbed and the weather on that day; what he saw and how he felt. I wonder if he would have ranted and raved or kindly addressed and advocated for these wildlands in his lifelong pursuit to protect them. He might have said as he did in his essay, ‘‘The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” published in his book, Our National Parks : ‘‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” And I would have agreed with him. I like to imagine that he could walk with me now in the red rock desert of the Colorado Plateau where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona share a common boundary point in what is known as the Four Corners. We would stand on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in shared awe, where he once stood and proclaimed that it was ‘‘as if you had found it after death, on some other star; so incomparably lovely and grand and supreme is it above all the other can˜ons in our firemoulded, earthquake-shaken, rain-washed, wave-washed, river and glacier sculptured world.” We might have discussed a wild life versus a domesticated one, and he would have exclaimed, ‘‘I have been too long wild” without any thought of changing his passionate stance toward the virtues of a life lived outside. And then, I would have asked him to visit Big Flats outside of Moab, Utah, now a series of oil and gas drilling sites that look like monstrous, mechanical ravens with their heads rising up and down as they peck o...

Product details

• Authors: John Muir, Terry Tempest Williams
• Assisted by: Terry Tempest Williams (Introduction)
• Publisher: Everyman s Library PRH USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2017
• EAN: 9781101907627
• ISBN: 978-1-101-90762-7
• Series: Everyman's Library classics; Everyman's Library Classics Series
• Subject: Guides > Nature