Showing results for "John Muir" in Science

The pioneering advocate of wilderness preservation, John Muir (1838-1914) was influential in the creation of many national parks.

John Muir is regarded as the "father of America's national parks" and is a towering figure in the history of that country's involvement with ecology. This wonderful memoir pays tribute to a giant of ecology and is essential listening for lovers of natural history.

Before he became one of America’s most influential environmental voices, John Muir was a curious Scottish immigrant boy growing up on the Wisconsin frontier. This honest and vivid memoir traces his journey from a strict religious upbringing to the early stirrings of a lifelong love for nature.

Part of John Muir's appeal to modern audiences is that he not only explored the American West and wrote about its beauties but also fought for their preservation. His successes dot the landscape and are evident in all the natural features that bear his name: forests, lakes, trails, and glaciers. Here collected are some of Muir's finest wilderness essays, ranging in subject matter from Alaska to Yellowstone, from Oregon to the High Sierra.

This article, a walking tour of the Cañon including many charcoal illustrations, was published in the Century Illlustrated Monthly Magazine, Volume 43, Nov - April 1881-82. A national park on the lines proposed herein by Mr. Muir, eventually named Sequoia and King's Canyon National Park, was established by Act of Congress, dated October 1, 1890.(Summary by Michele Fry)

"The Cruise of the Corwin is John Muir's account of a voyage he took in 1881 on the steamer Thomas Corwin, which set sail from San Francisco for arctic waters off the coast of Alaska in search of the Jeannette, a ship tragically lost two years before. The Jeannette was never found, but Muir's notes convey the excitement of exploring far and little-known horizons -- climbing frozen mountains, sketching glaciers, examining rare flora, discovering Wrangell Island off the coast of Siberia and claiming it for the United States, observing polar bears, seal, walrus, whale, and reindeer, describing ...

For two years, Scots-born John Muir lived in a small cabin along the Yosemite creek, observing the valley's natural beauty and reading Emerson under the stars. The experience forged a lifelong affinity with the site, which would result in its establishment as a national park in 1890. Originally written as a guidebook to the park, The Yosemite describes every aspect of wildlife and landscape that one might encounter there.

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing". In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world.

Steep Trails by John Muir is a heartfelt and inspiring collection of travel stories from one of America’s greatest nature lovers. In this book, Muir shares his journeys through the mountains, forests, and deserts of the American West—including places like California, Utah, Oregon, and Washington. He writes with wonder and love for the wild, showing us the beauty of tall trees, quiet valleys, rushing rivers, and snow-covered peaks.

John Muir (1838 -1914) was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas in the United States. In the late 1800s, Muir made several trips to the relatively unexplored territory of Alaska. Travels in Alaska, originally published in 1915, describes the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness and its inhabitants as observed during his travels between 1879 and 1890. In poetic prose, he describes the area’s magnificent glaciers and its animals like bears, bald eagles, wolves and whales.

My First Summer in the Sierra is based on a diary Muir kept while tending sheep in Yosemite country and is filled with the author’s awe for the “divine, enduring, unwasteable wealth” of the natural world. It remains a classic of environmental literature and continues to inspire people.

In this engaging audio edition, find out why Wilderness Essays is the top-selling book by John Muir. Wilderness Essays is an essential collection of the finest essays ever written by the “Father of the National Parks.” An ardent outdoorsman, a gifted writer, a dedicated preservationist, and a spiritual beacon, John Muir conveys here the boundless love and wonder of the natural world that drove his critically important work.

In "Our National Parks," Muir takes listeners on a captivating journey through some of America's most stunning wilderness areas, including Yosemite, Sequoia, and the Grand Canyon. His writings not only celebrate the beauty of these landscapes but also advocate passionately for their preservation.

Essayist. Preservationist. Mountain man. Inventor. John Muir may be California’s best-known icon. A literary naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, Muir left his legacy on the landscape and on paper. But the celebrity of John Muir does not tell the whole story. In Essential Muir, for the first time, Muir's selected writings include those that show his ecological vision without ignoring his racism, providing a more complete portrait of the man.

John Muir's adventure guide for the Yosemite Valley.

Nothing is ordinary in the world of John Muir, naturalist and author known as the Father of the US National Parks. In this short work, written in the latter part of his life for Century Magazine, Muir beckons us to come with him, unrushed, to behold the wonder of the Grand Canyon. Some of the beauty every life needs awaits here. Its magnificence envelops, "carrying us back into the midst of the life of a past infinitely remote. And as we go on and on, studying this old, old life in the light of the life beating warmly about us, we enrich and lengthen our own." - Summary by Rebecca Eden Walker

This book is a collection of sketches first published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine and gathered into book form in 1901. The focus here is on 4 parks in the west. Six of the 10 articles focus on Yosemite National Park; also described are Yellowstone, Sequoia, and General Grant (renamed Kings Canyon in 1940) National Parks. - Summary by TriciaG

"In mid-July of 1879, John Muir sailed for the first time through the sheer-walled fjords of Alaska's Inside Passage. 'Never before this,' he wrote, 'had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description.' During the previous 15 years, Muir had vanished into the north woods of Canada, walked a thousand miles from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico, and nested himself in the granite heart of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Wild nature burned with volcanic intensity in the core of John Muir's soul."

A great dog story, a well told tale--the naturalist and adventurer John Muir recounts how he and his companion, a dog named Stickeen, each, alone, confronted and conquered their fears of an icy Alaskan glacier in 1880. (Summary by Sue Anderson)

Leaving from Brooklyn, New York, in August 1911, John Muir, at the age of seventy-three and traveling alone, embarked on an eight-month, 40,000-mile voyage to South America and Africa. The 1911-12 journals and correspondence reproduced in this volume allow us to travel with him up the great Amazon, into the jungles of southern Brazil, to snowline in the Andes, through southern and central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study.