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Podcast: Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Episode: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, "The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness
Description: John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States’ vision of itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. Critics say that vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had inhabited and managed those same lands, in many cases for millennia. Muir argued for the preservation of wild sanctuaries that would offer spiritual enlightenment to the conquerors, not to the conquered Indigenous peoples who had once lived there. “Somehow,” he wrote, “they seemed t...