When the Government Tried to Flood the Grand Canyon

Destroying the habitat of thousands of species is not fungible. It can never be restored.

I am starting to understand why rural America hates the cities.

We need some way to continuously siphon sediment and expel it with the exhaust from the hydro and overflow pipes.

https://johnmuir.org/native-americans/

> Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than birds and squirrels.” As author Kenneth Brower says, “It is time for those of us who know wilderness, and who understand the idea of it, to wrest that idea back from its hijackers, a coterie of academics and historians too clever by half and stuck too long at their desks. We need, first, to reestablish what wilderness isn’t, because it isn’t what they say it is. No wilderness advocate–not Muir or anyone else–ever said wilderness means no people. Seasonal visitation by humans does not disqualify a place as wilderness, nor does subsistence use of it.”

This is the faintest of praise. Even in 2014 when Brower wrote this, this thinking was on the way out (Tending the Wild, 1st edition, October 2013). There were already substantial questions being asked about this sentiment. To think of them as benevolent visitors is still eurocentric thinking. They weren't visitors, to be tolerated. They were stewards, whose ancestors were materially responsible for everything you saw in those woods.

I sound like I'm demonizing Brower, but that's not my thrust. My point is that it's 2023 and their defense, which started as a refutation of a July 2020 article, is still using statements from 2014, which I find damning.

About 12-14 years ago I was trying to figure out where to donate money for environmental concerns. Sierra Club was one of the first names to come to mind. They have pretty good PR and brand recognition (Green Peace had already painted themselves as ineffectual tantrum-throwers and phone botherers by then).

Even in the early 10's there was already a lot of bad press about John Muir with respect to First Nations and pastoralism. He was a very good man, but he was not a great man, and we don't make a habit of creating role models out of the least problematic person amongst a bunch of drastically problematic people.

But that stuff bothered me enough that I donated money to The Nature Conservancy instead and even put them in my will. They're not saints either, and by 2013 I was donating time, energy and a small quantity of blood to environmental causes instead of paying money for other people to do it. I am still a Legacy Club Member, but they get donations every few years and I donate a few hundred hours of my time to local projects instead. For a few years there, that was almost 10% of my free time.

If John were to walk up to me I wouldn't say 'fuck you' to his face, I'd shake his hand. I would say fuck you to everyone who wanted his autograph. The man was above average. The icon needs to die.

So I don't think the president of Sierra Club denouncing Muir in 2020 is some sort of overnight epiphany. It was feedback from years or decades of lost opportunities for fund raising, because of Muir's tarnished legacy.