Many thanks to NetGalley and the University of Nebraska Press for the digital ARC of this book. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I've read several biographies about John Muir and have seen Ken Burns National Park documentary series more times than I can count. Most of the depictions of Muir have been of a wise sage who realized before most people the need to protect the lands of the American west from being overrun. But who was the protection for? The well-to-do Eastern Protestants who came out to vacation in "untamed land"? As with most biographies written more than a decade ago, very little attention is given to the indigenous people who lived on the very land that the United States government protected by creating national parks. This book seeks to rectify that fact.

There's a well-known Muir quote that goes something like this "Nothing truly wild is unclean." However, when you read the whole quote, it's racist AF. The sentence preceding that famous quote is "The worst thing about the American Indian is their uncleanliness." And that's just one of the fun quotes the author unearthed. That said, however much one wants to condemn Muir for his beliefs, in the context of the times, it was not an unusual thought for a white, educated, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

It's important to note that this book isn't just a deep dive into John Muir and his dismissal of any non-white person he came across. Rather, it's a look at the times in which Muir lived, the other important decision-makers when it came to the national park system and transcontinental railroad. The book points out repeatedly that when Muir or others encountered Chinese workers of Indigenous people, they are merely mentioned in passing. It is rare that an actual name is used in Muir's writings unless it's a white person.

I do think that at times the point of the book is stretched a little bit, as after Muir's death the book continues on to mark other notable screwing-over of Indigenous People up until the present-day. However, I do think on the whole, this book is a great start in a more nuanced look at Muir and others like him, and how they shouldn't be held so high up on the pedestal.

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This book is amazing!! It’s the untold story of John Muir. He’s the father of our national parks. As an avid hiker I enjoyed this book.

<i>Cast Out of Eden</i> is a biography of John Muir. If you are unfamiliar with Muir, he invented the outdoors in 1890. Put a pin in that joke, but the point is that he is well-enough established a historical figure that I do not feel the need to elaborate much here.

I predict that the reviews of this book will look like a snapshot of the culture war, with words like 'problematic' and 'woke mob' getting tossed about. I am a little more in the middle as regards this book. I know, I know, everyone claims that, but in essence I think that the author's thesis is both correct and relevant, but that the own goals in the text hurt the immediacy of the message.

The twist here is that Muir is beloved on both sides of the political spectrum. On the left he is seen as a landmark environmentalist. On the right, Muir is a small-e evangelical and the copywriter of American Muscular Christianity (while he would not identify himself with either).

But he sure wrote a lot of racist things. It is one thing to read <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/john-muir"> Nothing truly wild is unclean</a>," (with 104 likes on this website as of the writing of this) and realize that the sentence preceding it is "The worst thing about [the American Indian] is their uncleanliness." This is not complaining about the past. It is part of his philosophy of the wilderness and the importance of the outdoors, as he viewed a white man's burden that attached to the proper stewardship of wild places, and that Anglo-Saxon Protestants were the only people with sufficient reservation to be conservationists. Which they were God-sent to do, for the benefit of all the people's of the world.

The sort of racism he displays tends to be altogether predictable in its sentiment, though as noted above his fixation on cleanliness as relates to the American Indian feels idiosyncratic and mysophobic. It is tempting to take this and play amateur Freudian and try and come up with an explanation based on Muir's biography, but if I did, I would be engaging in one of the persisting weaknesses of the book, and when it gets too hit piece. There are a lot of negative inferences. All are supportable, but few are warranted. For instance, at one point the author refers to Muir's nickname among some of the Alaskan natives as a joke, rather than an honor This is not baseless, but neither is it clear. (And I do find it interesting that the cites on it include the culture critic's column [as a culture critic, I warn you never to trust culture critics] but not the <a href="https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/2016/12/30/an-expert-opinion-on-whether-john-muir-was-really-an-honorary-tlingit-chief/">response</a> by the linguist of the tribe, whose take was equivocal.) The author sells on the worst possible choices.

At points, this winds up obfuscating the more interesting stores of Muir. In the above story, Muir is much more accepting and laudatory of the Alaskan Natives than he is of other indigenous groups. Similarly, Muir's views on the ownership of cultural property seem to vary, sometimes upset by stealing or destroying of items like grave goods, and sometimes destroying them himself with willful abandon. He has friendships, particularly with eugenicists (a lot of eugenicists. So many, many eugenicists) but his own writing does not seem to reflect that, and might even contradict it. Why were some big shot tourists okay and not others whom he befriended? How does someone who was engineering tyro end up the United State's premier environmentalist?

Muir is human, and not bound to consistency in his behaviors, so it may be that such questions are unanswerable. Even if they are, this biography, with its particular inflection, may not be the right place to answer them. But in that it feels like they are often answered in a way as to structure a sort of smear to Muir's character, which feels like bad faith.

Functionally, I think that this is okay. Muir has much more hagiography by volume. But I worry that it creates an unnecessary distraction from the important thesis of the book.

We return to the pin. It is a joke to say that Muir invented the outdoors, as if the outdoors was something he started in his garage and now is listed on the NASDAQ. It is not a joke to say that Muir invented the idea of the outdoors, that Muir impressed a concept upon the space of America that we now accept as the outdoors, and that concept is so foundational to how we think about space in the nation that it is impossible to see.

Muir's view was dualist: there is a sacred wild that reflects the mind of God and a profane civil that reflects the degeneracy of man. But the author is here to show how Muir's wild was nothing of the sort. Humans had been living in the Americas for millennia. The landscape was not natural, but built to their particular lifestyle. Pretending it was natural was an element of settler colonialism that allowed, well, settler colonialism at all, because it treats the whole of the land as fundamentally wild and unclaimed as opposed to all claimed in a network of national identity that is unrecognized and disrespected.

And here, the author is on point to establish that Muir was a knowing participant in this sort of steps to genocide. This is unlike his acceptance of a more ambient racism, and the author points out advocates like C.E. Kelsey who, while still racist in the abstract, recognized the way that enforcing wild spaces meant denying the property rights of American Indians, and wanted a blended approach. I am a little unsure that it is truly better, it's a little too Hobbs vs. Rousseau. But the idea that Muir took things in the wrong way once you get past the pretty words is indelible because of his own words on the topic and his treatment of American Indians as a sort of inconvenient fact.

I think that acknowledging this is very important for policy debates today, with ramifications about how we think about cities and land and personal determination. And like Muir's bicameral appeal, it presents an equally unifying negative one, disabusing the world of both the I got mine Libertarian and the haughty central planner. And it is unique to see how we can point to one thing and say this is the origin story, here is where the myth is not just generally asserted but codified. The idea that we can isolate and speak truth about such things is important for all manner of addressing what can be changed in political life. I just hope that the need to take all the easy buckets does not cause readers to miss that.

My thanks to the author, Robert Aquinas McNally, and to the publisher, University of Nebraska Press, for making the ARC available to me.