Here's Where It Gets Interesting - California: Father of National Parks with Kendra Adachi

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

In this episode, Sharon is joined by Kendra Adachi, affectionately known on the internet as the Lazy Genius, who is also the host of The Lazy Genius Podcast and author of The Lazy Genius Way. Sharon and Kendra discuss the passionate nature of John Muir, an environmental philosopher, mountaineer, botanist, glaciologist, and preservation advocate who is considered to be the Father of the National Parks. During the westward expansion of the late 1800s, John Muir dedicated his life to the preservation of America’s most pristine geography and played a prolific role in the establishment of Yosemite National Park. Americans will forever reap the benefits of John Muir’s passion for nature, and today, there are parks, glaciers, trails, asteroids, and mountains named after his legacy, a testament to the impact one person can have on an entire society. For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. So glad you're joining me for this week's episodes. I am chatting right now with my friend Kendra Adachi. You might know her as the Lazy Genius. Maybe you read her New York Times bestselling book, The Lazy Genius Way. Maybe you follow her on Instagram. She teaches you how to be a genius about things that matter to you and lazy about things that don't. And frankly, we all need that energy in our life. Her voice is just delightful to me. I have told her this so many times that I love the sound of her voice. Her accent to me is just like, please narrate all the audio books. Let's dive into this episode, The Father of National Parks. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.

Yay! My friend Kendra Adachi is here. I'm so excited. Hello, hello, hello. Sharon, it's so fun to be here with you. Yay! I actually really enjoy your accent very much. So if you could like crank it up to level 10, I think your accent is absolutely adorable.

I need to imagine going to my grandma's and having dinner, I guess. That's right. Of course we don't hear our own accents, right? Sometimes I catch myself though, and I'm like, whoa, I just said that like a Minnesotan. Okay. First of all, tell everybody what you do. Yeah. My name is Kendra Adachi. I am the Lazy Genius. I have a podcast called the Lazy Genius Podcast and a book called the Lazy Genius Way. I'm on Instagram at the Lazy Genius because I'm really good at being creative at new things. Hey, that's just good branding. Consistent. Yes. But I help people be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't to them. Because we help people be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the

things that don't to them. Because we can't be a genius about everything. No. That requires way too much focus and attention, which we don't have the bandwidth for that. You have to be lazy about some things. See, that's why I love you when I found you and I was like, oh my word, she is an absolute lazy genius because you're focusing on what matters. You're just like education, facts, and empathy. This is good. We're going to help people. We can let go of the other stuff. But also you make me sound like a genius because you have the knowledge and you're doing all the work and I don't have to do the work to figure it out. I just listen to you. And it's so helpful. Yay. Okay. I have a story I want to chat with you about today. Do you know

who John Muir is? Wait a minute. I'm envisioning mountains. I feel like he's a nature dude. He is a nature dude. I think that might be all I know though. All right. Well, you're going to know more by the time we're talking about this. So John Muir, it's spelled M-U-I-R. He was born in Scotland, born in this very, very strict religious home in which all of your time needed to be spent working and in which you had very little downtime, free time, the idea that you would like explore your own dreams and that kind of stuff. That was not part of his upbringing. That sounds delightful. Possibly his biographers have hypothesized possibly as a response to this very, very, very strict upbringing, he was looking for like a little escape very quickly.

He identified within himself an extreme love of nature and was always trying to find little ways to like sneak off, pick some flowers, look at some rocks, be on his own for a few minutes. So in 1849, his family immigrated to the United States. And one of the biggest reasons they immigrated is because they felt the Church of Scotland was not sufficiently strict. You describe his upbringing. I'm like, that really sounds intense. And then the parents are like, no, not quite. Not strict enough. Turn it up to 11, guys. That's right. So they moved to Wisconsin. Throughout his lifetime, he always had those kind of like interest in nature, but it wasn't something that was really encouraged by his parents. So he didn't truly fall into his passions until he was 22 and went to college. He enrolled at the university of Wisconsin, Madison

and discovered like, I am so interested in the natural world. I'm so interested in chemistry, in botany, in geology, very multi-passionate. And he described one lecture that he attended where the professor took them out and they were looking at how this black locust tree was actually part of the pea family, like a garden pea. His mind was kind of blown. Like how, how is this massive tree like related to this like garden pea plant? This is what he said about that lesson. His lesson charmed me and sent me flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm. It is a shame that John Muir is not a poet because that's beautiful. He became a prolific writer. Nice. And has written many books, many essays, many articles. So yes, he was talented in that regard,

clearly. Yes. In 1864, the civil war was really beginning to heat up and both he and his brother were like, I am not interested in getting drafted. Let's go to Canada. So people have been saying that for a really long time. So both he and his brother go to Canada to avoid being drafted in the civil war. And he hiked around like the Canadian side of Niagara, the bogs of Ontario, you know, like he was just trying to learn everything that he could because he had never really been allowed to learn about any of these things while he was in Canada. Abraham Lincoln, while president, signed a land grant giving the Yosemite Valley in California and the giant sequoias there to the state of California. So this was in 1864. John Muir not even living in the United States at the time. Okay. Okay. So he eventually returns to the United States and gets a job in Indiana at a wagon wheel factory. I don't feel like that would make John Muir very happy. Talk about a job that no longer exists.

I work in a wagon wheel factory. That job is gone from America. Yes, it is. It is indeed. One day he had a terrible accident at the factory where a file that he was using slipped and ripped his cornea. And then his other eye sympathetically failed where it was like, dang, serious injury, shut off the vision, shut it off, shut off all vision. And the doctors told him truly your only hope of regaining your sight is to lie in a darkened room until it returns. I will say though, I would not mind being prescribed to lie in a darkened room. I imagine that probably was not super positive for John. No, that was not what he preferred to be doing with his time, clearly. And eventually after like six to eight weeks, his vision did return. He was completely blinded. And then as

his cornea healed, his vision resumed. And the other eye that had sympathetically failed was like, okay, are we turning back on now? All right, we're turning back on. He later said of that accident, he literally saw the world in a new light after that accident, literally. And he also said, God has to nearly kill us sometimes to teach us lessons. Oh, that's a tough one to absorb, isn't it? So he's like, you know what? This wagon wheel factory is not for me. You know what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to go to Kentucky and then from Kentucky, I am just going to go ahead and walk to Florida. Okay. So I'm not very good at geography,

but I feel like that's far. Yeah. It's a thousand miles. Okay. I'm just going to go ahead and walk the thousand miles. And people were like, well, what route are you going to take to walk to Florida? And he said, I'm going to take the wildest, leafiest and least trodden way I can find. Wow. I'm about to say it's too much nature, but I feel like that is not a sentence that John would have uttered. The more nature, the better. Right. He makes it the Gulf coast of Florida and again, gets a job at like a sawmill. Cause that's what he can get work doing. And he's sitting on top of his boss's house one evening, watching the sunset over the Gulf. He sees a boat and he's

like, you know what? I'm going to go check off that boat. And he did. And that boat was sailing for Cuba. And he was like, I'm going to do that instead. I'm not going to work at this sawmill. Let me go ahead and get on this boat to Cuba because they have plants there that I don't know about. I want to see what there is to see in Cuba. I don't feel like John Muir is a five-year plan guy. No. So after he's in Cuba for a while, he studies flowers and seashells, you know, like things that he hadn't had the opportunity to really study before in Wisconsin. He eventually gets really sick with malaria and decides he needs to return to a more temperate climate and gets back on a boat and goes to New York city. Okay. Like this is so not direct. This is like if a, you know, a preschooler gets hold of a crayon and it's like draw, draw a line across the map. It's all over the place. That's right. you know, a preschooler gets hold of a crayon and draw a line across the map.

It's all over the place. That's right. You know, I always think about like how much work travel was in the 1860s. Oh my gosh, for real. He gets to New York and he's like, okay, this is also not what I'm interested in. There are no plants here. You know where I want to go? I want to see the West Coast of the United States. So he gets on a boat that sails off the boat in San Francisco. This is 1868. San

Francisco is booming. This is California gold rush, San Francisco, one of the largest cities in the country at that time. He gets off the boat. He finds this carpenter working on a corner. He looks around San Francisco and he's like, oh, heck no. And he asked, what is the quickest way out of this city? And the carpenter says, well, where do you want to go. And he asked, what is the quickest way out of this city? And the carpenter says, well, where do you want to go? And he said, anywhere that is wild. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey.

We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand-new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag

to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand-new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. He just decided, you know what I'm going to do is walk to Yosemite. It's difficult to overstate the grandeur of Yosemite. It really is. There's nothing like it. I've never been, and we're East coasters and we're not walking or taking the boat around Panama.

He got there and he instantly fell so in love that his biographers later referred to when he arrived in Yosemite, almost as a conversion experience. It was that profound for John Muir. And he decided he was going to build a cabin and he was going to live there. So he built this really primitive little cabin with his own two hands on the shores of a stream. And he constructed the house so that a portion of the stream flowed through the cabin so he would always hear the sound of running water. Wow. He's alone, right? He's alone.

Yes. Isn't that fascinating? It is. You wouldn't just open the windows. You would construct it so that the stream ran through your house. Ran through your house, like an area rug. So he lives there for a number of years. He becomes a very big fan of the writings of Thoreau and Emerson,

these writers of the American wilderness. Eventually, Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to visit him and offered Muir a job as a professor at Harvard. Cool. And Muir had never even finished college. He was too interested in too many things and never got on one track of study. He just bounced around too much to matriculate a degree. So for him to be offered a professorship at Harvard, that just demonstrates what other people thought of him. His writings were that impactful. He slowly became obsessed with glaciers. His obsession moved into glacier activity activity and he became convinced that the entire Yosemite valley was carved by glaciers and not by earthquakes some of the more prominent geologists

at the time who had a lot more training than he did openly denounced him and they were like John Muir does not know what he's talking about. These mountains were caused by earthquakes. They were not carved by glaciers. And then of course, John Muir discovered glaciers in the region that had been previously undocumented. He begins taking trips to Alaska and to Canada to study glaciers. And he becomes the first known European American who visited some of the glaciers in Alaska. He's taken there by native Alaskans. And one of the glaciers was later named after him. He published some papers on the giant sequoias, which exist nowhere else in the world.

Which is wild. It's unbelievable. Yeah. So he eventually, John Muir marries, he's like 40 at this point. He marries this woman named Louisa. They have two daughters. Louisa was from a wealthy family and he agrees to manage his father-in-law's 2,600 acre apple orchard. Just be outside 2,600 acres. That feels like a lot of acres. A lot of room to roam around. Yes. He still always loved to visit the Yosemite back country, however, and he would take only

a loaf of bread, a handful of tea, a tin cup, and the writings of Emerson. So he really became obsessed with this idea of establishing Yosemite as a national park because he saw what domestic livestock in the Yosemite Valley was doing to the wildlands. He becomes very, very firm in his idea that this needs to be a national park so that we can preserve this, keep these sheep out of here, keep people from damming the river, preserve this pristine location. And so in 1890, Yosemite National Park was formed, due in large part to his consistent and constant lobbying of Congress, constantly writing letters, you know, and he had made some friends in high places at this time. He was a world traveler. He was a well-known author. I didn't even mention how he had been to Australia,

China, Japan, Africa. This man had been all around the world. His name became known. He was hired by the U.S. government to lead expeditions into mapping the 39th parallel in the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah. But he was disappointed that Congress did not set aside the Yosemite Valley. It was only like a chunk of these mountains and then separately this growth of sequoias. He wanted the entire valley protected as well because that was an integral part of this region in his mind. So he never stopped working to have Congress set aside more land to protect more of this space. In 1892, he realizes there might be more power in numbers. Maybe I should get some other people to help me with this. All of us can do more than just me

doing it alone. And so he and the president of Stanford University and some other well-placed people decide to form the Sierra Club, which has millions of members today. It's a very, very well-known and one of the oldest conservation organizations and influential in helping to create via their lobbying what are now known as national forests. Those did not exist before the Sierra Club. Wow. As the U.S. was expanding westward and we need to somehow manage all of this territory that we have won via wars, negotiated via treaties, just possessed because we are stronger, bought from the French. Like as we have expanded westward, we need to somehow manage all of this. And so they created what is

now the Forest Service. And John Muir was kind of at odds with the person who was put in charge of Forest Service. The person in charge felt like his job was to manage the resources sustainably so that they could be used for commercial development. And John Muir was like, absolutely not. There needs to be no commercial development because his quote was that the forests are places for rest, inspiration, and prayers. And there should be no development. This is one of my favorite stories about John Muir, which is that in 1903, Teddy Roosevelt, the president came to visit John Muir. They met in Oakland, took a train and then a stage coach into Yosemite. While they're in the stage coach, Muir convinces Roosevelt to set aside more land for Yosemite National Park.

Roosevelt agrees. You know what? Let's just go camping out here. They just open air camped under the sequoias. Can you imagine a U.S. president today open air camping in the forest? No. So they open air camped. They get snowed on while they're open air camping. They wake up covered in like a light layer of snow. And Teddy Roosevelt, I love this quote of his. He said, lying out at night under those giant sequoias, which Roosevelt had never seen before, was like lying in a temple built by no hand of man. Wow.

A temple grander than any human architect could possibly build. Teddy Roosevelt later set aside 148 million acres of national forest and doubled the number of national parks while he was president. Wow. John Muir was very influential in the creation of Grand Canyon National Park, Mount Rainier National Park, the Petrified Forest National Park, Sequoia National Park, Yosemite. John Muir is really viewed by many as the father of national parks in the United States. Wow. I love stories about people who kind of have a long game, that this was something that was

building, that it was a priority, that nature mattered. And now we all get to benefit from it. Yes. Yes. Because he discovered his passion. We now benefit. It demonstrates how much one person can do. And you have always told us, call your Congress people, call your senators, call your representatives. And it's like, John Muir was like, yeah, I know. I know, Sharon, thank you for your advice. I'm going to keep pounding the president to make this park bigger. That's right. I'm going to force him to come out here and camp under these sequoias with me, because then he'll see. He'll see what I'm talking about. So John Muir has so many places named after him. This is the legacy that John Muir has built,

just as a little teeny chunk of the list of places that are named after him. Mount Muir, which is in the Chugash Mountains in Alaska. There is Mount Muir in Pasadena, California. The Black Butte in California, also called Muir's Peak, Muir Glacier and Muir Inlet in Alaska. There are John Muir trails, hiking trails in California, Tennessee, Connecticut, and Wisconsin. The John Muir Wilderness is in the Sierra Nevadas, Muir Pass, Muir Woods National Monument, which is a redwood forest. It's north of San Francisco. You go over the Golden Gate Bridge. I won't even go into all the places that are named after him in Scotland.

He has an asteroid named after him. Oh, wow. But John Muir Woods in California, it's difficult to describe just how majestic these trees are. And one of the things I think is really interesting is that what has allowed redwood trees and sequoias to live for so many thousands of years is that they have special properties in their sap and their bark. And they form this protective layer where the outside of the tree can catch on fire and it will not destroy the tree. And some redwood trees have burned for months and still not burned down. Man. Isn't that so interesting?

It is. It is. And you can see in John Muir Woods, you can see trees that still growing, still healthy, but who have half of their bark completely black. From hundreds of years ago, a wildfire came through and it did not burn the tree down. Wow. Resilient seems like a small word even for that. Yeah. John Muir eventually passed away on Christmas Eve of 1914. In the 1980s, Yosemite was designated a world heritage site. In the 90s, John Muir was on several U.S. postage stamps. Arnold Schwarzenegger inducted John Muir into the California Hall of Fame. April 21st is John Muir Day in California. wildflowers visiting Yosemite, he said, it seemed to me that the Sierra should not be called the Nevada or the snowy range, but the range of light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountains I have ever seen. What an interesting human being. We are benefiting so much now from his consistent,

sustained efforts. He didn't just write to Congress one time and say, well, they obviously don't care. So nevermind. Like he kept at it, kept at it. And it took a long time. Well, this was really fun. I loved this story. If someone says, do you know who John Muir is? My answer will not be, isn't he the nature guy? I will actually have like information. Thank you for telling me that story. That's lovely. Tell everyone where they can find you. Say it again. Everything is the lazy genius. I'm on Instagram at the lazy genius. The podcast is the lazy genius podcast. And the book is called the lazy genius way. I love Genius. I'm on Instagram at the Lazy Genius. The podcast is the Lazy Genius Podcast and the book is called The Lazy Genius Way. I love it. I'm the Lazy Genius of Government.

Kendra, thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Sharon. Oh, I hope you'll come back. I hope so too. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So Podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.