LOS ANGELES – The Sierra Club apologized Wednesday for racist comments its founder, naturalist John Muir, made more than a century ago when the influential environmental group grapples with a damaging story that perpetuates white supremacy.
Executive Director Michael Brune said it was “time to tear down some of our own monuments” as statues of Confederate officers and settlers collapse across the United States in a reckoning with the nation’s racist history after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
Muir, who founded the club in 1892 and helped spawn the environmental movement, is called “father of our national parks.” He figures prominently in what Brune called a “telling the truth” about the group’s early history.
“He made derogatory comments about blacks and indigenous peoples that were based on deeply damaging racist stereotypes, although his views evolved later in his life,” Brune wrote on the group’s website. “As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate indigenous peoples and people of color. “
Muir, who was born in Scotland, came to the United States when he was young and traveled and wrote extensively, romanticizing nature in breathless passages. He emphasized the need to preserve the land, but he also expressed disdain for American Indians and blacks.
He also joined other early club members and leaders, such as Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan, who advocated white supremacy and promoted the race through eugenics, which called for the forced sterilization of blacks and other minority groups, he said. Brune.
Until recent years, Muir’s legacy has been largely intact and focused on his conservation efforts, such as saving the Yosemite Valley before becoming a national park and preserving the world’s largest trees in what has become Sequoia National Park.
But Richard White, a Stanford history professor, said Muir’s defense of the desert has an inherent racial bias.
Muir’s image of human formless virgin nature only existed if the natives were not part of it. Although they had been there for thousands of years, Muir wrote that “they seemed to have no correct place in the landscape.” American Indians needed to be removed to reinvent these places as intact.
“There is a dark side here that will not be erased just by saying Muir was racist,” White said. “I would leave Muir’s name in things but would explain that, as difficult as it is to accept it, it is not just Muir who was racist. The way we created wilderness areas that we now value correctly was racist. ”
Muir is so revered that his name appears throughout California, from schools to national monuments, one of the highest peaks in the state, a giant swath of picturesque Sierra Nevada nature that is traversed by a trail in his name, and a historic site national. Muir’s discernible profile, with a long beard, wide-brimmed hat, and cane looking at the Yosemite Half Dome, was stamped in the California neighborhood of 2005 when the United States Mint was producing a commemorative coin for each state. .
In Alaska, where he traveled extensively, a glacier and an entrance to the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve are named after Muir, as it is likely a mountain east of Anchorage.
You can’t walk into a national park gift shop without coming face-to-face with T-shirts, mugs, and tchotchkes with one of their often overused phrases like “Mountains are calling and I must go.”
The review of Muir’s offensive remarks comes as environmental groups and the outdoor industry seek to be more inclusive during a renewed racial consciousness after Floyd’s death. The murder of the black man in May sparked weeks of protests and sparked calls to rename the places named by Confederate officers and to remove statues of historical figures who held slaves or colonized or exploited Native Americans.
Brune said the Sierra Club once excluded people of color as it serves middle and upper class whites. She said that the focus on preserving recreational lands that were once inhabited by indigenous peoples who had been deliberately evicted by white settlers ignored the plight of minorities struggling against environmental pregnices in their own communities.
“For all the damage the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to blacks, indigenous people, and others of color, I am very sorry,” wrote Brune.
He promised to hire more diverse staff and invest in racial and environmental justice work.
