Muir in the Modern World

It's John Muir's birthday.

The father of the America's national parks may have shuffled off this mortal coil on Christmas Eve, 1914, but his legacy lives on in wilderness saved, watersheds protected and species preserved. The Sierra Club, of which he was a founding member and president, carries on that work to this day.

Now, however, many of the things Muir fought so hard to protect are threatened by a crisis he could not have foreseen. Global climate change threatens the very fabric of the natural world. As the world warms, glaciers are disappearing at a rate that is anything but glacial. Climate patterns are changing faster than plant and animal species can adapt. And the oceans are becoming more acidic, threatening the foundation of the marine food chain.

So, while the Sierra Club continues to defend wild places, its mission has had to expand to meet this new challenge. As Bruce Hamilton, the Club's conservation director put it in a speech in March,

It is not enough to just work for wilderness and parks and presume they will be saved for all future generations by designation. We must all work together for smart energy solutions to reverse global warming before the world we cherish is lost.

We're certain Muir would have agreed. At the foundation of his philosophy, after all, was the bedrock realization that everything is connected. As he wrote a few years before his death: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."