John Muir: “The American Forests”

When John Muir began advocating for preservation, he had one objective in mind: to protect the environment from human influence. That task became harder as the United States entered the Second Industrial Revolution and the population began to grow and expand westward. America’s natural resources were necessary to accommodate the booming population, and as result, the pristine landscape, like the forests, began to disappear at an alarming rate. Muir, hoping to appeal to his audience’s emotions, used the ideals of earlier transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, preaching that humans shared a unique relationship with nature, and thus nature needed to be preserved. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the conservation movement in the United States took off and pitted the idea of preservation against practical use of resources, like forests. In the larger part of this text, Muir criticizes Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forest Service, for his advocacy of conservation. Muir argued that the government was not doing enough to protect the forests and championed international preservation movements as an example for the United States to follow. This excerpt from Muir’s 1901 article “The American Forests” highlights why preservation is necessary and how it is the duty of the U.S. government to protect the forests, playing off the emotional imagery of what the forests offer.