Muir's spiritualized version of the natural world as a place of luminous order was something he could and did rally people like him to defend. It had a constructive side, but it is no longer possible to ignore its destructive side. If getting over the idea that much of this continent was wild in the old sense of untouched or uninfluenced by human beings feels like a loss for those raised on that vision, it brings with it a far greater gain: the realization that there is no inevitable nature-culture dichotomy and that the example of people living on the land—or of many peoples living on many kinds of land, from the Arctic to the Everglades—without devastating it has always been here.
An important part of this recognition for those of us who are the descendants of immigrants is understanding that the violence against Native Americans was not only literal but cultural. They were dismissed and disparaged and written out of the record as they were slaughtered and pushed out of their places and brutalized out of their cultures, and this led us to misunderstand them, ourselves, and the natural world of North America. I think that asking whether these long-gone figures such as Muir could have known better is asking whether the past itself could have been better. It could have been better, but now it can't; it's done and gone. But the future can be better, and we in the present are making that future now. And part of making a better future involves reexamining the past and trying to repair what was broken and hear who was silenced then.
LATE LAST SUMMER, Muir's views came up for reconsideration when the great racial reckoning that has been going on for the past few decades intensified into the largest protests in US history in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. "[Muir] made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life," wrote Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune in a July 2020 online column in response to the protests. "As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir's words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club."