"John Muir on Yosemite" 1895

Article

Yosemite became a National Park in 1890 but struggle to protect and preserve the wilderness did not end. This San Francisco Call article from November of 1895 is a call for public pressure on the US government to create regulation inside the park. Concerns about the park included the overgrazing of stock, the fire danger of old brush, large crowds of people, and the role of the environment in local, state, and federal politics. Reading through this, I realized that these are most of the same issues Yosemite and many other National Parks deal with today.

The National Parks were created to preserve important American landscape and landmarks for the future generations. The National Park Service has done this successfully but disagreement continues about how important it is and why it needs to exist. Even in the present era it can be hard to draw attention to environmental issues, so an article about preservation of wilderness in a paper from the 1890s was very interesting to see. However, my surprise was cut short when I read the short article directly following about dumping sand and extracted rock into the Bay to build structures on top of it.  John Muir’s examples of degradation of the park cause the reader to think about the balance between the need of the present versus the need of the future and how they can be the same.