John Muir

And it's just, you know, I guess in the readings, you can see how much it affects everybody.

And, you know, from John Muir to present day, everybody differently, but yeah.

yeah it's just i knew it was a special place and i always wanted to go there my father didn't want to he didn't like crowds and he you know had been there when he was a little kid

yeah

He started a small cabin and a ranching business.

He helped found Yosemite National Park along with John Muir.

He started eating food that was only available in Yosemite Valley, you know, rabbits, squirrel, deer, fish.

some wild berries.

We got to find our way through these storms because they make us more resilient and resourceful for the storms that will lie ahead.

who was it, John Muir, the environmentalist said, when you pull on a thread, you find that it's connected to everything else in the universe.

And it's not so simple as just getting food into our kids.

Food isn't simply fuel.

But when you were describing the Ken Burns movie on the National Parks, you talk about the story that he's trying to tell.

And it seems like, at least in my interpretation of it, it's a story of good faith from John Muir.

Combined with the one that they're trying to tell, combined with charitable philanthropists that can lead to success and is captured by the state, then captured by the state, which undermines the entire project.

It seems like a story of grassroots.

Yes.

I read like all of John Muir's books in rapid succession.

And one of them, he just like, it was a phase, man.

I don't know.

And I was able to hike part of that before I wrote this book.

And I came across a guy that I thought was John Muir come back to life at this lonely part of the trail out in the middle of nowhere in the woods.

And this guy with a long white beard and binoculars looking at birds and I thought to myself, if John Muir were alive today, this is what he would be doing.

He'd be out in the woods with, uh, this little bird book and his high power binoculars looking at whatever he could find.

And he was the only person I came across on the trail that day, that whole day hiking it.

Unbelievable.

But I began to think as I was staring at my bookshelves perhaps one day and noticing how many well-known voices and writers and historians and scientists and farmers and, you know, came from and spoke on behalf of the Driftless area, including, you know, very well-known names like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold and Black Hawk, you know, well-known historic figures, but also the quieter voices that we don't know so much about or haven't heard as much about.

And, uh, thinking, gosh, you could pull these together into a pretty interesting collection.

And

I hope to see that someday.

No, it is a ruined, degraded landscape he's writing about.

He is not John Muir in the Sierras.

He is not John Wesley Powell going down the Colorado River.