Kilgraston’s Head of Geography discusses Earth Day
Dr Phillips, Kilgraston's Head of Geography looks at the birth of Earth day and what famous Scot John Muir has to do with it.
Earth Day was founded by US Senator Gaylord Nelson, with the first Earth Day being held on 22nd April 1970. There are a number of reasons why this date was chosen, but one reason is that it fell the day after the anniversary of John Muir’s birthday. John Muir was born in Dunbar, in East Lothian, on 21st April 1838. As a young boy, he spent a lot of time wandering the local coastline and countryside until, at the age of 11, Muir and his family migrated to the USA, starting a farm near Portage, Wisconsin.
In March 1867, at the age of 28, Muir was working in a wagon wheel factory in Indianapolis, Indiana when an accident happened that nearly caused him to lose his sight. He was confined to a darkened room for six weeks, worrying all the time about whether he would end up blind. Eventually, his sight did return, and Muir resolved to follow his dreams of exploration. “This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields,” he wrote. “God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.”
The next year, in 1868, moved to San Francisco, California, then almost immediately set out for a week-long visit to Yosemite, a place that he had only read about. He climbed a number of mountains, scrambled down steep cliff faces to get a closer look at waterfalls, and built himself a small cabin along Yosemite Creek, designing it so that a section of the stream flowed through a corner of the room, so he could enjoy the sound of running water.
Over the next twenty years, Muir threw himself into campaigning to preserve the natural landscape of Yosemite until, in June 1889, he camped there with Robert Underwood Johnson, the influential associate editor of The Century magazine. Johnson agreed to publish any article that Muir wrote on Yosemite. He also used his influence to introduce a bill to Congress that, on 1st October 1890, established Yosemite National Park.
Muir’s campaigning attracted so much attention that, in 1903, Muir camped out in Yosemite with President Theodore Roosevelt himself; three years later, on 8th June 1906, President Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act into law, which grants the President of the United States executive powers to dedicate ‘national monuments’, which Congress can then upgrade to National Parks. Roosevelt himself created a further 18, and all but four US Presidents have since added to this number. It is for this reason that John Muir is sometimes known in the US as ‘the Father of the National Parks’.
In time, perhaps he will also come to be known as the Father of Earth Day. As Muir wrote: “When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”
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