Kenosha News reports that the Wisconsin chapter of the Sierra Club is no longer named for the environmental group’s founder, John Muir. They just dropped his name from theirs.
Another hero bites the dust for hanging with white supremacists when they didn’t exist.
Apparently, “the father of our national parks,” John Muir, who established the conservation movement, was labeled a racist despite the fact that he grew to respect the people he once criticized.
The fact that it was a different time doesn’t matter to the cancel culture who are erasing our history.
Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and the organization is wiping his name from their records.
Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director, tells members that “it’s time to take down some of our own monuments.” Brune says members must now “reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”
It turns out that as a young immigrant from Scotland, John Muir held some biased beliefs. He made “derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life,” Brune wrote in a statement on the Sierra Club’s website. “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.”
Forgetting all the good he did and how he grew in his lifetime, and judging him by today’s standards, the Stalinists have an excuse for erasing history.
A few years ago, the club itself published a study that noted Muir was considered a progressive for his era and never advocated any discriminatory policies, John Fund wrote last August.
Fund added, Muir later lived among various Native American tribes. “He grew to respect and honor their beliefs, actions, and lifestyles,” wrote scholar Richard Fleck, in the journal American Indian Quarterly. “He, too, would evolve and change from his somewhat ambivalent stance toward various Indian cultures to a positive admiration.”
Muir is also condemned for his friendship with zoologist Henry Fairfield Osborn who was a racist.
Ironically, he too was a progressive of the era.
One biased fool with a computer is erasing the man who shaped how we look at the environment.
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