NEWS: Sierra Club apologizes for John Muir's racist views
Seraph White
On Wednesday, July 22, 2020 the Sierra Club apologized for the legacy of John Muir's racism and its impacts on the environmental and conservation movements. I deeply appreciate the awareness and work that it takes to reckon with a history of complicity with structural racism, white supremacy, and colonialism. I have linked the article on NPR, and two articles from the Washington Post.
WASHINGTON POST: The Sierra Club apologized Wednesday for racist remarks its founder, naturalist John Muir, made more then a century ago as the influential environmental group grapples with a harmful history that perpetuated white supremacy. [...]
Muir, who founded the club in 1892, helped spawn the environmental movement and is called “father of our national parks,” figures prominently in what [ED Michael] Brune called a “truth-telling” about the group’s early history.[...]But Richard White, a Stanford history professor, said Muir’s advocacy for wilderness has an inherent racial bias.
Muir’s image of pristine wilderness unshaped by humans only existed if native people weren’t part of it. Even though they had been there for thousands of years, Muir wrote that they “seemed to have no right place in the landscape.” American Indians needed to be removed in order to reinvent those places as untouched.
“There is a dark underside here that will not be erased by just saying Muir was a racist,” White said. “I would leave Muir’s name on things but explain that, as hard as it may be to accept, it is not just Muir who was racist. The way we created the wilderness areas we now rightly prize was racist.” [...]“For all the harms the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, I am deeply sorry,” Brune wrote.
I have struggled with this legacy, particularly as a parent teaching my children to both love the outdoors and be aware of the structural racism in the lands that we love. Together we have learned the many ways that parks, visitor centers, and other public lands give atrocities the passive tense and erase and/or romanticize indigenous history.
I acknowledge all the ways that I have benefited from this legacy, and, in particular, benefited from living on the occupied territory of the Yelamu Ramaytush Ohlone. Of course, recognition and apology are only the first steps of this process, and I rededicate myself to our OEN commitment to reducing barriers and participating in and leading the necessary culture change in the outdoors.
Be well,
Seraph
Washington Post (paywall)
Sierra Club apologizes for founder John Muir’s racist views
Liberal, progressive — and racist? The Sierra Club faces its white-supremacist history.
NPR