Other members of the club’s early history also peddled white supremacist ideas, Brune wrote, such as David Starr Jordan, who advocated for forced sterilization laws and who co-founded the Human Betterment Foundation, a eugenics organization. “We’re undergoing a long, transformative journey, and this blog post is just the first step,” Brune wrote. In a statement to the Independent Journal, Brune wrote that the Sierra Club is “actively reevaluating figures in our history whose ideology caused immeasurable harm to oppressed groups, including John Muir.” “But we now know that he was a flawed person and that really needs to inform his place in history and how we talk about him.” “(Muir’s) contributions to environmental protection and our public lands are still positive and historic,” Huffman said. Clearly this is a person with a more complicated legacy.”Īs to whether there should be a conversation of renaming the national monument, Huffman said he will let others decide whether that is the next step in the conversation. “I’ve always had John Muir on a high pedestal for his environmentalism,” Huffman said Wednesday, “but sometimes when you admire someone for something like that you project all these other virtues that don’t always belong. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, said he was unaware of Muir’s offensive viewpoints and commended the Sierra Club for being transparent about its founder. “The NPS is committed to continuing to tell these stories throughout our nation, in all of their complexity.” “A hallmark of American progress is our ability to discuss and learn from our history,” Strickfaden continued. “Today, the monument shares the totality of the history of Muir Woods, including Kent’s own legacy as that of a conservationist who espoused anti-immigrant ideas. “At Muir Woods National Monument, park staff tell the story of William Kent, who, in naming the monument, sought to honor the legacy of the founder of the Sierra Club,” Strickfaden wrote in a statement. Muir has been quoted as describing the monument as “the best tree-lovers monument that could possibly be found in all the forests of the world.”Ĭharlie Strickfaden, communications chief with the National Park Service, wrote that the park service “preserves these and other sites and offers interpretive context for them and the history they commemorate.” Local historian Dewey Livingston said it is well known that Muir visited Muir Woods as a guest of Kent. Kent - a controversial figure in his own right for his outspoken support of anti-Asian policies - convinced Roosevelt to name the land after Muir instead. William Kent, who had donated the land to the federal government. President Theodore Roosevelt created the national monument through the Antiquities Act and had originally planned to name it after Rep. Muir Woods National Monument was named after Muir in 1908. Forest Service’s Gifford Pinchot at Muir Woods Inn, circa 1909. From left, John Muir, William Kent and the U.S. “In these early years, the Sierra Club was basically a mountaineering club for middle- and upper-class white people who worked to preserve the wilderness they hiked through - wilderness that had begun to need protection only a few decades earlier, when white settlers violently displaced the Indigenous peoples who had lived on and taken care of the land for thousands of years,” Brune wrote. In Muir’s case, Brune said, conversations around his legacy often overlook the ways in which his brand of environmentalism excluded people of color and the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral land he used for recreation. The changes have included the toppling of statues depicting Confederate leaders as well as the renaming of brands, university buildings and sports teams. The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, is but the latest institution to reassess its history, part of a national movement to examine past and present racism the United States touched off by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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