Gregory Rodriguez and I must have been watching different videos
about the explosive impact of the Tōhoku earthquake and its
killer tsunami. There is no other way to explain his LA Times
column on Monday, in which he reached a startling conclusion:
that it is time for us to shuck John Muir, "the godfather of
contemporary environmentalism;" dump our humble acceptance of
nature's awesome power; and unleash a more aggressive campaign
to rein it in. "Our response to this tragedy," he asserted,
"shouldn't be to hail the nobility of the earthquake a la John
Muir but to redouble our efforts, however imperfect, to tame the
Earth." I have no problem with the idea that Muir's ascendancy
within American environmental culture is problematic. As I tried
to demonstrate in my biography of Gifford Pinchot, first chief
of the U. S. Forest Service and a powerful conservationist often
paired in opposition to Muir, the first president of the Sierra
Club, there are decided real-world limits to the preservationist
ethos that Muir