John Muir’s Last Stand

One hundred years after this world lost John Muir, Tom Butler and Eileen Crist remember the man who so dramatically shaped how we relate to the natural world that surrounds us. The authors also take the opportunity to look critically at the emerging visions of “new conservationists”, which so often seem at odds with the teachings of Muir.

“One hundred years after his death, John Muir’s legacy could not be more vital. Inspired by the love he felt for the wild world, today’s vision for the future of conservation—and the future of the Earth—is one of planetary rewilding, where a scaled-back human civilization is embedded in a matrix of wildness, and where at least half of the globe is left to nature. It is a vision both idealistic and achievable: Broad swaths of green and blue— beautiful, untrammeled, evolution-supporting lands and waters encircling the Earth, where wild life and people flourish together.”