John Muir: “The Treasures of the Yosemite”

John Muir had always had an affinity to nature and had believed that humankind too had a connection to nature. An immigrant from Scotland, Muir had a boyhood dream of traveling and experiencing what nature had to offer. When Muir arrived in California, he immediately set out for the Yosemite Valley, where he fell in love with Yosemite’s sublime wilderness. Muir argued that the beauty and vastness of the Yosemite Valley was something to be appreciated and preserved, a challenge to the American industrialization that had grown toward the end of the nineteenth century. In this article, published in Century Magazine in 1890, Muir, a strong preservationist, appeals to the reader’s emotions in a plea to protect the Yosemite Valley by calling on it to be adopted as a national park. Calling attention to the negative impacts of commercial farming and logging, Muir advocates for government intervention to make Yosemite a national park and calls attention to the importance of environmental preservation, the idea that beauty over use is the proper path for environmentalism.