John Muir

John Muir (1838–1914) was a Scottish-born American naturalist and writer, the most influential advocate of wilderness in his country. Raised on a Wisconsin farm, he walked a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867 and then settled in California, where the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite became his life's work. He argued that glaciers had carved Yosemite Valley, founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and campaigned for national parks, camping with Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. His books, among them The Mountains of California, My First Summer in the Sierra and Our National Parks, mix close observation with religious feeling for nature.