Читать книгу The John Muir Trail. Through the Californian Sierra Nevada онлайн

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John Muir was undoubtedly America’s most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist, but he was also a popular writer whose somewhat romantic style and unbounded love of nature often won over the hearts even of those with little interest in nature and the environment. His eight wilderness books, a lifetime’s work, are classics of the genre: The Story of my Boyhood and Youth, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, My First Summer in the Sierra, The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, The Yosemite, Travels in Alaska and Steep Trails. They were republished in Britain by Diadem in one volume in 1992 (see Appendix 7 – Bibliography). In all he wrote over 300 articles and 10 major books.

Sadly Muir lost his last fight, a long, drawn-out campaign to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite from being flooded. This failure dispirited him and soon after, on Christmas Eve 1914, he died of pneumonia.

His lasting memorials are the world’s national park networks established by those inspired by his vision. His views are perhaps even more relevant today because of the many threats that the modern world poses for the wild places of this fragile planet. In essence Muir’s naturalist philosophy was a simple one, believing that man truly belonged to nature. ‘I only went out for a walk,’ he wrote, ‘and finally decided to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.’