|
johnmuir.org's defense of John Muir is not a racist is pallid by modern understandings of the definition of wilderness. https://johnmuir.org/native-americans/ > Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than birds and squirrels.” As author Kenneth Brower says, “It is time for those of us who know wilderness, and who understand the idea of it, to wrest that idea back from its hijackers, a coterie of academics and historians too clever by half and stuck too long at their desks. We need, first, to reestablish what wilderness isn’t, because it isn’t what they say it is. No wilderness advocate–not Muir or anyone else–ever said wilderness means no people. Seasonal visitation by humans does not disqualify a place as wilderness, nor does subsistence use of it.” This is the faintest of praise. Even in 2014 when Brower wrote this, this thinking was on the way out (Tending the Wild, 1st edition, October 2013). There were already substantial questions being asked about this sentiment. To think of them as benevolent visitors is still eurocentric thinking. They weren't visitors, to be tolerated. They were stewards, whose ancestors were materially responsible for everything you saw in those woods. I sound like I'm demonizing Brower, but that's not my thrust. My point is that it's 2023 and their defense, which started as a refutation of a July 2020 article, is still using statements from 2014, which I find damning. |