Stuff You Should Know - John Muir: Outdoor Enthusiast

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

John Muir loved being outside. So much so that he dedicated his life to helping preserve it, but not without some controversy. Listen in to this decidedly nature-centric episode today! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there and there's Jerry Rowland there and this is Stuff You Should Know and outdoors the addition if there

ever was. Is that your American master's voice? Kind of. It's got a little Bob Ross to it. Oh but happy birthday Bob Dylan, by the way. Happy 80th birthday to one of the great legends speaking of great bobs. Oh okay. I was like, how is that? I propose of anything. You said Bob. Maybe thank you, Dylan. I gotcha. There's a lot of online congratulations going around. That's good. So throw me in there. I know you don't care about Bob Dylan, but I do. That's fine. And apparently you don't care about John Muir because boy you were snotty about this. I have no problem with John Muir. Well that's not exactly true. You're not the only one and not other people doing stuff. It's whatever. Let's just get into this shall we? So we're

talking John Muir today and that name might sound familiar if you're not a member of the Sierra Club. If you're a member of the Sierra Club you probably just dropped to your knees and did the secret sign when I said John Muir. Sure. Just had to do it again because I said John Muir and there it goes again. Every time we say John Muir the Sierra Club members have to do something weird. Or if you've ever hiked any portion of the John Muir trail that was named after him. Is that in Yosemite? It's in California. Okay. Yeah it's part of it's in Yosemite I think. I should have looked that up. Well he is, I asked that because he's basically synonymous with Yosemite. He was a huge driving force in getting Yosemite into national park status and then fully becoming

the Yosemite that we understand it today. Have you ever been? No I haven't and I really wanted to because I saw some pickers online and it looks really nice. I've been to quite a few amazing national parks in the United States. Not all of them. So I've been to Yellowstone but I've been to a lot of them and Yosemite is really it's really up there. It is one of the more special places. Looks like it. It's pretty incredible. So John Muir he played a huge role in Yosemite becoming a national park but also like it's really kind of selling short the impact that he had on the creation of our national park system but also like the idea of what a national park is, what wilderness is, what needs to be protected, how we protect it. He was certainly

not working in a vacuum in that sense. He was kind of tapped into this larger way of thinking for better or worse but he was a huge driving force and one of the reasons he was a huge driving force for getting America into preserving wild spaces in the face of the second industrial revolution that was just minting money and building railroads and just turning America into a powerhouse because he walked the walk for sure. He was not just some eastern greenhorn who had never set foot in the wilderness but liked the idea of it. He went and lived it for sure. He did some really wild stuff while he was living in Yosemite at the time. Yeah in fact later when he was in his late 30s he was hooked up with Ralph Waldo Emerson who was older and

they really bonded. They went on a camping trip together and I think Emerson was like what you need to do is come back to Boston. Emerson or Thoreau? Emerson. Okay. And he said you need to come back to Boston and be among the intelligentsia advocating for this stuff and at the time John Muir was like no way man. No way dude. I gotta be in the woods. I'm a rocker dude through and through. Yeah and it would not be until later in his kind of mid to late 40s that his life was kind of in two parts. It was the wild exploring and categorizing and botanical categorization of everything he could find and then the mid 40s on when he was very much a political advocate and kind of did that because he felt he had to. He would have rather he had a t-shirt on the whole

time that said I'd rather be camping. Right but I also saw that he went back after a little bit of a hiatus. I think like a nine month hiatus toward the end when he finally left Yosemite for good and he felt like he was an intruder there. Like he felt like his time there was done and he knew that he had to be out of there in the world to advocate for it for the preservation of this area but also that he like he just he felt like that chapter was closed. Interesting. Yeah I mean that's they always say no when it's time to leave and I guess he did. They always say that. So let's talk about John Muir starting even younger than that. Yeah let's start with minute one. He was born April 21 1838 he of Scottish heritage. He was born in Dunbar and came to the U.S. when he was

11. He and his family settled in Wisconsin eventually in Hickory Hill on an 80 acre farm near Portage. His father was a very stern Calvinist. Super religious. Yeah like it kind of if you ever seen the movie The Witch sort of along those lines where punishment was very heavy and strict. If you beat your child yeah because they haven't memorized the Bible verse to your satisfaction you may be over the over the line. I think I'm not going to go so far as to say there was physical abuse. Oh there was. Oh there was with his father. Yes for that reason. Okay I mean I saw like corporal punishment but like you know these days spanking a kid is abuse like I don't know where it fell on the meter back then. Well I can't say where it fell on the meter.

I can't say either but yes he would be. But today he would be in prison. Probably yeah. But one of the reasons John Muir became John Muir's because of his father because his the wilderness in Wisconsin was his refuge and his literal escape to kind of get away from him. So who knows what would have been you know what would have happened had his father not been like that. Yeah and I don't want to fully mischaracterize his father just partially. He was he was very stern but John Muir was convinced that his father loved him still and cared about him and sure was even maybe a little bit proud of him in the ways that he deviated from what his father wanted for him and one of the main ways that he deviated from him was in book

learning basically like all his father was concerned with was his his boys working the land farming knowing farming and knowing the Bible. They didn't need to know anything else but that wasn't enough for John Muir. He was basically a born tinker a born engineer but he did not have free time. His father was like you're either working in the field or you're studying the Bible or you're getting hit with a switch by me. Right. It's one of those three things is what you're doing for all of your waking hours. Yeah and so John Muir hit upon the idea of expanding his waking hours and so as a youth he started waking up at one in the morning so that he could have five hours to himself between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. when he was expected

to start working on the farm to just read or tinker or invent and he actually used that to really great effect. Yeah so he made a lot of the little inventions there was one called an early rising machine which was basically a alarm clock attached to his bed that would quite literally tip his bed up and tip him out of it. Yeah. I don't get the feeling that he needed it because he's getting up at 1 a.m. anyway. His father used it. Did he really? Yeah but he eventually would go to the state fair in Madison in 1860 with a lot of his inventions and was sort of a boy wonder inventor. He was 22 at the time. Well but he was I think he had invented a lot of stuff in his teen years too though. Right but imagine like you know at 22 in the 1880s or

60s you're almost retired. Imagine the middle age guy showing up at the 4-H fair being like can I enter? One of the things a big relationship in his life that would last throughout his life he studied with a man named Ezra Carr and his wife Jean Carr became a really big mentor for him and exposed him to you know botany basically like she was a scientist and he loved the outdoors but she was like hey but botany is like a real science to it. Yeah. And was a really big influence in his life introduced him to Emerson later like literally picked out a wife for him that was like this is who you need to marry. Yeah apparently she was a good matchmaker then too because it seems like it. Because they loved each other very much and she was totally fine with his comings and

goings and all that. Sure. They were good together. Cummings and goings is then going to like Australia or Japan or something. That made it sound a little bit like you know dalliances. No no nothing like that. No as a matter of fact I read that he left Yosemite at one point because of unwanted attention from a woman. Oh really. He was like he was camping in this lady hiked by and looked at him and he's like I'm out of here. Well he was an interesting dude and that he was a bit like a hermit but apparently also really enjoyed these one-on-one conversations with people he would meet. Yeah along the way. He was kind of billed as a wild man of the wilderness but he very much craved and needed human interaction as well. Yeah very

odd it's usually one way or the other in that sense you know. Yeah so he's working eventually the industrial part of his life because he was such a good tinkerer and engineer. He got work doing stuff like that and in March of 1867 he's working at a carriage part shop in Indianapolis. His and all pierced like literally went into his eye and pierced it and for a while he was blind in both eyes because of that. It was such a bad wound that his other eye was like I'm out too. Yeah just because I feel bad for my buddy over there. Sympathy blindness. And this was a very monumental injury because after this he was like you know what forget this stuff I don't want to ever be around another machine with moving parts again and I just want to walk. He said that he

baited due to all my mechanical inventions determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of all the inventions of God. Yeah he stayed religious we should point out he was super it's not like because of his dad he went atheist or something no like in all of his writings and talking about the natural world. It's all Ezekiel Ezekiel Ezekiel. Well it was all very spiritual and God oriented he was like this is my church though. Exactly. The outdoors which I can you know respect on a certain level. He loved creation with the capital C. Sure so when he's wandering like he really wandered he was kind of a Johnny Appleseed type almost he walked from Indiana where the I guess he recovered from his all injury all the way down to Cedar Key

Florida on the Gulf Coast. It's like a thousand miles he just walked down there and pretty quickly too caught malaria and Cedar Key almost died recovered sailed to the Cuba from there sailed on to Panama from there and made it all the way to San Francisco and apparently there's a story that may or may not be true where he got to San Francisco was immediately overwhelmed by this the hustle and bustle of the city. Yeah I think that's true and said where's the how what's the fastest way out of the city. Yeah I think that's the deal he got right out of there and the guy the guy he asked said well where you want to go and he said anywhere wild and he pointed him in the direction of Yosemite and apparently he walked 300 miles to Yosemite and fell in love.

That's right and on the way out of town someone said you don't forget the Riseroni it's the San Francisco treat and he went what. Sure Jerry's like Jerry like disgusted by the joke yeah he split immediately to get out there and went to California and he's in California well yeah he went to Yosemite. He went to Yosemite but he walked right and he walked because for a very specific reason he walked because that was the most intimate way to see the botanic and and and write about the botanic world around him. Yeah because this was a time when you could be like remember our bone wars episode that you hooked us up with. Who? Bone wars. Oh sure. Like this was a time where like you or I could just start studying books and be like okay I'm a

paleontologist okay I'm a botanist okay I'm a geologist all this stuff these these fields were so young that anybody who had like half a brain and like a pencil and a piece of paper could basically contribute to the field sure and that's what I guess he was doing along the way he definitely did that in Yosemite. Oh yeah he did that everywhere he went and it's a good lesson too to like I remember in when Emily and I lived in LA I had a couple of times where I had to drive to my mechanic and leave my car and this was pre-ride share services and taxis were basically non-existent in LA so I would walk these long distances home and you just you'd notice everything like these neighborhoods that I drove around every day all the time yeah and you would just notice like in

study every house every mailbox every driveway yeah and it's really just a lesson to people like to to walk places when you can. There's a group in the UK I think called amblers. Yeah we talked about them once. Okay and they're they're basically they I think their motto is they're dedicated the idea that humans human locomotion should be no more than like three and a half miles an hour which is about the speed that you walk you know and then that that's how you take in everything it's absolutely true. Yeah that's my two favorite speeds are two and a half miles an hour and like 95 on the expressway. That's right yeah yeah. What do they do? So John Muir makes it to Yosemite. Have we taken a break yet? Nah let's take a break. I think this is a great

place for a break don't you? He's entering Yosemite for the first time everybody imagine it. Hey I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah okay I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this I promise you. Oh god. Seriously I swear and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband Michael um hey that's me. Yep we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boybander

each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh just stop now. If so tell everybody ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest I don't believe in astrology but from the moment I was born it's been a part of my life. In India it's like smoking you might not smoke but you're gonna get second hand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there

is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology it changed whether you're a skeptic or a believer I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay so John Muir is in Yosemite and he decides that he needs a little bit of work.

I think he stayed the first time for like 10 days and a lot of people who know some about John Muir and especially associated with Yosemite in the national parks basically think he showed up in Yosemite and never left and lived and died there. That's not true. No. He lived there for about a six year period I think. Yeah out of 1868. Seventy six years of his life. Yeah so 1868 to 1874 I believe. Yeah and those were a very like California just totally rocked his world. Yeah once he got out there. Yeah because he was living in Indianapolis. So I mean basically anywhere would rock your world but imagine showing up to California

in the mid 19th century or late 19th century and seeing it. Yeah and especially if you've I remember when I did my big out west trip years ago with my best friend over like four months in the summer driving through Utah and Arizona and everywhere it was just so blazing hot and then when you drive over especially Southern California California you drive over that mountain range and it's like someone turned on the air conditioning. Oh yeah. And I just remember thinking like man imagine what it must have been like for westward expansion when they finally got into the LA Basin. Yeah. We're just like whoa. So it's cooler in the LA Basin.

Yeah I mean you go with that mountain range and it's just the Pacific Ocean breezes are just kind of locked in there. Wow it's really hot on the other side then huh. Yeah like Death Valley is hotter than Los Angeles. I'm not up in my California geography. Yeah. I think Germany's landlock. Give me a break. No it's very lovely and cool near the coast. So yeah I can imagine what it must have been like as like a 19th century traveler or something like that but he when John Muir got there as I was saying he stayed for like 10 days and was like I need some money and he went back. I guess he hitched a ride or else walked back got some more money and then he came back to you and he's like I'm staying here for a while.

So he got work in Yosemite as a sheep herder. One of his first jobs was herding 2,000 sheep up into the Sierras. So much fun I bet. He hated it. He learned to hate sheep. He called them hooved locusts and he started to despise sheep because he thought that they had a disproportionately bad impact on the natural surroundings. They just ate everything. Well they did. They kind of ravaged Yosemite to a large degree. Right. So he came to kind of see livestock as an extension of human occupation of these wild lands and how detrimental it was and it really occurred to him during this first little you know few month period where he was a sheep herder. Yeah and I think also the horse and

the horses that led people on expeditions and stuff. Yeah. They also overgrazed and the cattle overgrazed. Yeah. And they were logging and Yosemite was I think it was under the care of the state of California. It was a state park at this point because it had been gifted by well not gifted but it was a land grant from Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War to California. He said I'll tell you what I'm going to do for you. You take Yosemite but it was really mismanaged and just I mean compared to what they're doing now it was in a pretty bad state. Yeah which is one reason why John Muir was pushing for it to become a national park so that it would be under the care of the federal government who hopefully would enforce the laws of preservation a lot

more than California had. So he shows up in Yosemite. He starts shepherding but more than anything the thing that he became known for was these jaunts where he would become like the first white man to scale cathedral rock. Right. He would like know all these fossil formations or take samples of them and send them back to like the newly forming University of California. He would like submit botany like descriptions like he was just basically exploring Yosemite and documenting the whole place while at the same time taking notes for what would become a series of like books essays like he really made his name as like a writer. Like he made a career for himself as a writer. We think of him as like this conservationist

naturalist and that's where he was coming from but at the time he was a successful writer and after he left Yosemite. Yeah. I mean another big kind of central relationship for him was a man named Robert Underwood Johnson who was editor of Century Magazine and Century Magazine was very much a sort of a progressive naturalist rag and he and we should say that this you know we're not like this is the most interesting parts of his life like he also worked for for a decade or more on once he got married. He married a woman named Louie Luisa Wanda Strincel in 1880 and her family had had a couple of daughters Wanda and Helen and her family had a fruit farm fruit ranch and he lived there in Martinez, California

and kind of quit doing his adventuring for a full decade and ran this farm and worked as a farmer. So all this stuff was going on and then Robert Underwood Johnson basically doggedly pursued Muir and said listen man you gotta we need you. You gotta start writing again because you're the foremost naturalist in the country right now according to me and only me right and we need you to start writing some stuff and start pushing for political change and he was working on this farm this whole time and eventually he was like all right you know what do you got for me. So the reason Johnson sought him out was because he had made a name for himself even while he was still living in Yosemite. Yeah like you can kind of look at Muir's life like he went and got all

of the experience he could possibly need in these six years living basically that whole stretch in Yosemite. Living deliberately. And then went and like and used that experience. Yeah. Is that like a nomad land reference? Living deliberately. Yeah. Now wouldn't that throw? Oh yeah. Went to the woods deliberately. Living deliciously is from the witch. But it was basically like imagine if like you had like a crazy six year period in your 20s and then you spent the rest of your life exploiting that writing about it talking about it making a name for yourself being a cause celeb from that experience that's basically what he did. Yeah I feel like there's a lot of people that did that. Sure. Yeah. Who else? I don't know. I can't think of one. Well Thoreau's a great example.

He went and lived at Walden for what a year and that was like we're still talking about that guy today you know. Yeah that's true. And I've even heard that Walden Pond was like town was right there. Yeah it's like the the Pizza Hut next to the pyramids. That's right. Kind of like that but yeah. Sort of. So Muir another big important relationship that he made was with a president named Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt is known for the 280 million acres of federal land that he protected among other things. But Muir was a big reason why. I mean Roosevelt was into preservation anyway. It's not like Muir came in and completely like changed his mind about everything but Roosevelt knew about him and and quite literally said I would like you to take me

camping in Yosemite for four days. He said just the two of us. Didn't they have to like give the Secret Service the slip? Well I think there was Secret Service there because apparently they just never shut up and the Secret Service people in like one of their journals said like these two like won't shut up. All they're doing is just yammering at each other about the woods. So I don't know if they gave him the slip or not but I know that originally the request was Roosevelt was like I don't want anyone around man. I just want you and I to get out there in the woods and like talk about this stuff. Yeah like wax mustache or wax mustache. That's right. So he worked hand in hand with Roosevelt to do a lot of work. I think the first or one of the first

national monuments they established was Petrified Forest in Arizona. Which he went out there and was like oh this place is kind of cool. He moved there for his daughter's health apparently. And while he was there he was like oh there's a Petrified Forest. I'll just start submitting fossil specimens. Yeah. Oh interesting. He just did the same thing there as an older man that he did earlier at Yosemite. Yeah and I think the deal with Yosemite was because it was a state park. The actual Yosemite Valley wasn't part of the park boundaries. Right. The Mariposa Grove of those giant sequoia trees wasn't actually part of the boundary. And Murrow was like man this is what needs to be a part of the boundary more than anything. Yeah so that was one of the first things

that the Sierra Club took up. It was like basically their first initiative. And John Murrow is synonymous with the Sierra Club because he was the first president he was for I think this whole life. Basically 20 years or something like that. The rest of his life. Yeah he died in 1914 and he became the president of the Sierra Club in 1892. So he helped found this organization that's still around today. And one of the first initiatives one of their first pushes was to get the Yosemite Valley and the what's the name of the forest. The or the Mariposa. Mariposa Forest. The sequoia grove included into the boundaries of the national park. And they were finally successful in 1906. And from that success they just started having more and more successes and

eventually expanded because initially they were focused on the west basically. Right. Because that's where all these people who founded the club lived and that's what they cared about. They said well there's other places where this battle needs to be fought as well. There's nice stuff. And they became this national advocacy group that will sue your pants off if you try to mess with the national park. Yeah they opened an office in D.C. in 63. And like you said went off you know Alaska, Florida. Very key in trying to get things like the Clean Air Act passed. The Wilderness Act. The EPA created in 1970. And Alaska is kind of key too in Muir's life because he he gets engaged to Louis. And I think in those days you kind of got just got engaged and got

married pretty quickly. Like there weren't these long drawn out engagements. But there was in his case because he was like all right we're engaged. You are a good match. Thank you Gene Carr. But I'm going to go to Alaska now. And he did. He went to Alaska for a period and if you think Alaska is like you know unchartered and wild now like imagine what it was like back then. I will. I'm sure his diary was like what. No snakes. Amazing. Yeah. What the heck is this place. But like I said they eventually did get married and have those daughters. And she very sadly passed away in 1905 of cancer. Oh yeah. Yeah. And he like he had to go home to be with her when she died. Like he was away when she was partially for part of the time when she was sick. Well it's sad. It's very very sad.

I guess that explains why he and his daughters were the only ones that moved to Arizona for his daughter's health then. I guess she had passed. I think so. Okay. That's sad. Because she supposedly was well known for her. I saw that she was a very gentle person a very sweet person. Yeah and very supportive of his efforts like was truly a good match. He loved the wilderness and nature and God and all those things. Oh she loved God. Don't get her started on God. Should we take our second break. I think so. All right. Ah okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation. If you do you've come to the right place because

I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband Michael. Um hey that's me. Yeah we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest I don't believe in astrology but from the moment

I was born it's been a part of my life. In India it's like smoking. You might not smoke but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer I think your ideas are going to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive and the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're talking about John Muir in the Sierra Club Chuck and it's really hard to understate what Muir like impact. No. Okay. Yes. What impact he had because like I said he was a successful writer. He was really good at writing and also he did really crazy stuff like writing in avalanche. There's a very famous essay that he wrote called the windstorm in the forest that he describes what it was like to climb up the top of a pine tree and hang on for hours during a storm in the Sierras and how awesome nuts it was. And like just basically saying like this is real. This is nature like you could if you go out to these places you could do this stuff but it this is

not going to be around if we keep building railroads through these places or we build dams or we let livestock just graze wherever like we can't just not do something about it has to be preserved and protected and he inspired people during his lifetime and long after his lifetime as well. Yeah I think I watched the pretty cool American Masters documentary on this and this one guy with his story was like there was a little bit of macho involved like he was this great naturalist not to take anything away but like writing the avalanche and like climbing a tree during a snowstorm at the top or a rainstorm at the top of a mountain. He said there was a little like machismo involved in that like sure. It's Hemingway-esque. Yeah or Bode from Point Break.

Wait was that Patrick yeah or was it Keanu? Keanu Reeves that was Johnny Utah my friend. Oh that's right. So Bode was or was that Flea from Red Hot Chili? Peppers. That's right. But it was actually Anthony. Kitas. Kitas that was in Point Break. Sure. Flea may have been in it but Kitas was one of the ruffians that got his foot shot off. I think no no I know he was the leader of the bad guys surfer club but I think Flea was in that club. I think. While was he naked except for a sock on his genitalia? Probably. And pants made of teddy bears. Do we take our second break? Yeah we just did. Yeah we sure did. So but I was leading up to something so we've been talking about what a great guy John Muir was and that's how he was

looked at and respected for decades and decades a century actually and more. He was looked at a great man. Maybe a little macho. Sure but that's forgivable if that machismo is directed toward riding a tree in a storm rather than you know picking bar fights in Lisbon or something like that you know. Yeah good point. Thank you. So when we did our episode on Girl Scouts I talked about how like Juliette Gordon Lowe was one of those rare historic figures from a century or so ago that you were like and actually she holds up today. Right. John Muir is not that same way. There was a real I guess a mea culpa sort of a reckoning. Yeah that's a great way to put it. That's exactly what it was a reckoning by the Sierra Club not too many years ago

where they basically said hey John Muir was great in all these ways. He was also pretty racist and yeah he was a product of his time and the way of thinking which we'll talk about but he was still pretty racist and in fact the whole basis of the national park system was built on this racist ideology and it's we're still basically looking at it the same way today. Yeah I mean it's interesting because the Sierra Club even acknowledged that our first years as a group was based on the notion of white people trying to protect the land that white people wanted to hike through and enjoy as campers and recreationalists. Yes. And in his earlier years I think kind of through his 30s up until his 30s he had sort of bad things to say

about people of color whether it was indigenous peoples in the United States or black people and used disparaging language toward them which the whole thing with the indigenous peoples is really counterintuitive because they were so aligned with his philosophies of how you inhabit a land and share a land and use it and don't abuse it and you know it really doesn't make much sense and supposedly I think in his 40s he started to come around especially when he went to Alaska because they indigenous people served as his guides and he started to learn more from them and I think things turned around a bit at that point. Yeah. But the Sierra Club you know spent a lot of time over the past few years trying to sort of bring this to light and not

whitewash it and say hey this is what it was. No and they did a very good job of it actually. I think so. Yeah. So I was saying that he was a product of his time and he very much was. Yeah. There was an idea before his time say the 1820s 1830s when the West was like the frontier and the United States didn't really need it at the time where there is this view of the Native American as this noble race that was being encroached upon by humanity and that we needed to preserve this wild area. This was decades before John Muir came around this idea that we needed to preserve the stuff but we also needed to preserve Native Americans and their culture in this land that were preserved. Right. So the initial idea for national parks was that

the Native Americans would live on this land just as they always had and it would be their land but it would also be America's national parks that would be protected and then the railroad came and all of a sudden the U.S. started expanding further and further west faster and faster and now the Native Americans weren't this group of people over there. Right. That you could kind of idealize they were now in the way of this westward expansion so racism toward them went through the roof. Yeah. And now there was this idea that Native American culture was already dead that the best of the culture had died in the last decades and centuries and that it was all the white man's fault but what's done is done and so let's just make this decline into

extinction as comfortable as possible and preserve Native Americans not on our national park land but we'll just make reservations for them to go over there and just die off and it's sad but that's just the way it is and that that is the mentality that John Muir became a conservationist within the larger zeitgeist that you know humans should be on the land but in particular Native Americans shouldn't be there anyway because this is our white people land. Yeah and you know what I'm glad this year club and people in general are more comfortable calling this stuff what it is now like even in that American masters that was one line where they said like you know early on he you know he he I don't even remember what they said I don't even think they said disparaging but

like he said some things were not so nice for Native American Indians is what they said. Did he like cough it while he was saying it? Yeah and it was just very quickly like they wouldn't dare say that he had racist points of view. Yeah. He just didn't say stuff like that but I think now people are more comfortable with saying using that word and saying you know this is how he was for a time in his life and we gotta reckon with that because it's part of our history of a foundation. For sure and not just him like the national parks were they they evicted people and not just Native Americans depending on where you were out west Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Yosemite, Yellowstone all of them required forced evictions to basically create this pristine area that was

never pristine and free of human settlement or occupation or use that's they created that yeah to create the national parks and they used like this idea there was this um I've read this really interesting article dude from 2007 so it would have been groundbreaking at the time it's called Ethnic Cleansing and America's Creation of National Parks by Isaac Cantor and Cantor points out that like the people who were setting up and promoting these first national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite would say there were never Native Americans here anyway they were all these were all they were afraid of spirits in this you know in this canyon so they never hung out here anyway but by the way can you send some military to protect us from Native American attacks while we're setting

up this national park yeah so it's um yeah yeah basically but that's a really interesting it was a really good read and it was very eye-opening especially for 2007 so I guess in closing we want to quickly mention one of his last what he was actually trying to do when he died and and failed at doing was preventing the damning of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite and basically what happened in 1906 was there was a devastating earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco which I'd love to cover that as its own episode at some point yeah basically completely destroyed it uh and one of the reasons that the fire destroyed it was because their water uh what do you call them water uh water people their water system I'll just say that um was destroyed

by the earthquake so San Francisco said we need a better more reliable water supply and we can get it in Yosemite with the Hetch Hetchy Valley if we dam that thing up and he was like you can't do this it's in a national park and he lost that effort but he made such a stink uh he was he was basically like there are a lot of other ways you can get water you're just doing this because it's easiest and cheapest but you can get water to San Francisco in other ways uh and like I said he was not successful he did lose that battle um and then passed away of pneumonia at the age of 76 in 1914 but he they haven't there hasn't been a dam built in on national park lands since then yeah because that battle even though he lost it it really raised awareness and it also kind of set a certain

mindset in people's the public's mind that no you don't really mess with national parks and I guess we had to lose one to to to get to that point that's right uh you got anything else I got nothing else so that's John Muir for you everybody go check out his writings and read about him and see what you think and also don't forget uh ethnic cleansing and the creation of America's national parks good stuff uh and since I said good stuff of course it's time for listener man this is on cleft palates from Malcolm who that's new in Calgary that came out today Alberta okay canada usa no north america earth uh hey guys been an avid listener since my friend introduced me on a very hungover car ride home from an iron maiden concert about five years ago nice that's a

great way to get turned on to the show yeah I thought I'd write in to share my experience with my son's cleft palate after listening to the episode my son was born with a midwife in June 2019 and had a ton of trouble breastfeeding which in hindsight was because he couldn't get any suction a couple of days later the midwife noticed what she thought was a cleft in the soft palate we took our newborn to the hospital and she was right we became regulars at the alberta children's hospitals cleft clinic in Calgary Alberta and two years later my son has had a surgery to repair his cleft palate and another to put tubes in his eardrums uh parentheses socialized health care is the best uh the tubes are common with clefts because the muscles that drain the ear canals

don't form properly so the tubes allow fluid to leave the ear canals one thing you didn't mention was the bifid uvula which I have uh it's related to clefts and that the muscles don't quite form properly and it makes your uvula look more like a w than a teardrop I saw that in research I forgot to mention I did too I can't believe I forgot that we are currently visiting a geneticist at the hospital c of cleft in my bifid uvula I'm sorry bifid uvula are genetically related but I think the answer is probably yes loveless and you guys look forward to each episode that is Malcolm nice nice name Malcolm um that's great thank you very much for sharing and also rock on maitan yeah that's your name Malcolm yeah it's my middle name it's a great name sure me and my

friends yeah the night uh we're hanging out me and Emily and Justin Melissa uh-huh we were having a few drinks and we decided to start only going by our middle names oh yeah so it was uh Alex Don Renee and Wayne Wayne hanging out for the rest of the night we were just cracking jokes like someone would say something be like that is so Alex that's a fun thing I don't know if it's gonna stick but it was really weird to think of myself as a Wayne that could be a one night thing I think so that one night I think sticks I will be really surprised I think we determined I determined that you don't have a relation to your middle name like an emotional connection uh-huh if when you hear that name out loud you don't have any reaction like if I hear someone say a chuck or someone else's

chuck I go oh but if I hear someone say Wayne or whatever I don't I don't even didn't even register you're like that name is dead to me yeah sure that sounds about right right sure all right that's so Malcolm well if you want to get in touch with us like Malcolm did not me the other Malcolm uh you want in the middle you can send us an email like Malcolm did to stuffpodcasttheihartradio.com Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows Hey I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass Do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me

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