The Scot who saved nature

Published on Wednesday 15 November 2006 10:38

NATURE has always been around us, but it could be said that it was a Scot who discovered the environment and pushed it to the front of our awareness.

John Muir, often regarded as the "Father of Conservationism", left Dunbar, a village in East Lothian, with his family when he was 11. His parents bought a farm in Wisconsin – a hard task made more difficult by Muir's stern taskmaster of a father. As if the back-breaking chores were not enough, his father insisted the teenager learn huge chunks of the Old Testament by heart.

Despite all these demands, Muir was left with enough determination to exercise his ingenuity. To find time to read as avidly as he wished, he constructed the ultimate in alarm clocks – a bed that tilted vertical at an appropriately early hour and set the young man upright and ready for the day ahead.

He was an avid reader and his studying gained him a place at the University of Wisconsin. He was obsessed by chemistry, geology and botany but none-the-less left university without a degree. He began work as an engineer in a wagon factory and seemed destined for a life in industry.

There a tragic accident – a severe eye injury – ruled out mechanical work, but paradoxically opened up an entire new life.Muir became a walker, but not just a rambler. In 1867 he began a 1,000-mile trek, intending to walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico and then onto Central and South America. A dose of malaria forced a change of plans and Muir headed instead to California. He took a series of jobs around Yosemite Valley, working there throughout 1869. He travelled extensively and began writing his theories on the development of the environment. His growing interest in glaciers sent him to Alaska in the 1880s to further develop his ideas on how the landscape was formed.

His interest in how our natural heritage was formed led him to believe that it was something that had to be protected from the greed and thoughtlessness of man, and that he was to lead "the battle between landscape righteousness and the devil." His colourful, non-stop campaigning won over public opinion and a succession of US presidents. He persuaded Theodore Roosevelt to come camping with him and converted the most powerful man in America to take up his cause and especially the concept of national parks.

Muir's last big battle for the environment was campaigning against a plan to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide water for San Francisco. When, in 1913, Roosevelt's successor Woodrow Wilson agreed to the building of the dam, Muir was sorely disappointed.

The conservationist died the next year on 24 December, some say of a broken heart after the failure to stop the destruction of a beautiful valley.

The US commemorated Muir with a stamp on the 50th anniversary of his death.

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