Showing results for "John Muir" in Biographies & Memoirs

John Muir is regarded as the "father of America's national parks" and is a towering figure in the history of that country's involvement with ecology. This wonderful memoir pays tribute to a giant of ecology and is essential listening for lovers of natural history.

Part of John Muir's appeal to modern audiences is that he not only explored the American West and wrote about its beauties but also fought for their preservation. His successes dot the landscape and are evident in all the natural features that bear his name: forests, lakes, trails, and glaciers. Here collected are some of Muir's finest wilderness essays, ranging in subject matter from Alaska to Yellowstone, from Oregon to the High Sierra.

Best known for his association with the Yosemite Valley and Sierra Nevada Mountains, John Muir also explored the southern states, Alaska, and the Mojave Desert. His studies generated volumes of poetic, evocative writings. As America expanded westward, Muir witnessed the plunder of the land and became a driving force in efforts to protect the natural world. He influenced four U.S. Presidents to sponsor legislation that protected forests and established or expanded America's national parks.

The pioneering advocate of wilderness preservation, John Muir (1838-1914) was influential in the creation of many national parks.

http://www.adfreebooks.com - 500+ audiobooks, all ad free"The only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with a fire box about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep,- scant space for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero weather all the family of ten shivered, and beneath which in the morning we found our socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen solid." Thus, with perceptive eye for detail, the American naturalist, John Muir, describes life on a pioneer Wisconsin farm in the 1850's. Muir was only eleven years old when his father uprooted the family from a ...

Three friends, women in their fifties, set out to hike "the most beautiful long-distance trail in the world," the John Muir Trail. From the outset, their adventure is complicated by self-inflicted accidents and ferocious weather, then enriched when they "adopt" a young hiker abandoned by her partner along the trail.

At stake in 1896 was the new idea that some landscapes should be collectively, permanently owned by a democratic government. Although many people today think of public lands as an American birthright, their very existence was then in doubt and dependent on a merger of the talents of these two men. Natural Rivals examines a time of environmental threat and political dysfunction not unlike our own and reveals the complex dynamic that gave birth to America’s rich public lands legacy.

Before he became one of America’s most influential environmental voices, John Muir was a curious Scottish immigrant boy growing up on the Wisconsin frontier. This honest and vivid memoir traces his journey from a strict religious upbringing to the early stirrings of a lifelong love for nature.

Essayist. Preservationist. Mountain man. Inventor. John Muir may be California’s best-known icon. A literary naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, Muir left his legacy on the landscape and on paper. But the celebrity of John Muir does not tell the whole story. In Essential Muir, for the first time, Muir's selected writings include those that show his ecological vision without ignoring his racism, providing a more complete portrait of the man.

Join nature enthusiast John Muir as he embarks on a transformative journey through California’s breathtaking Sierra Nevada range during the summer of 1869. From the picturesque landscapes of French Bar to the serene shores of Mono Lake and the majestic Yosemite Valley, Muir was captivated by the wonders of the natural world. He marveled at the intricate lives of the smallest “insect people” and found inspiration in the resilience of ancient Juniper trees clinging to life in the most unlikely places. This recording not only celebrates the 140th anniversary of that remarkable ...

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing". In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world.

It was 1993, Suzanne Roberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California's John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts's account of that hike.

In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman recreated Muir's journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir's time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South's natural riches.

In this essay, Muir tells his experience of climbing to the top of a tree and riding it for hours through a wild Sierra storm. As he writes, “the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.”

A “sublime” and “radically original” exploration of the Sierra Nevadas, the best mountains on Earth for hiking and camping, from New York Times bestselling novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (—Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder). Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains...