'Going to the Woods Is Going Home'
What better essay to read on Earth Day than one by the father of modern American environmentalism?
John Muir Apr 22 2013, 1:56 PM ET
Sierra Club founder and nature writer John Muir spent years in the Yosemite Valley, an area he was instrumental in preserving as a state park, before it finally became the Yosemite National Park we know today. Muir was a great lover of the essays of fellow nature-lover Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was delighted when the transcendentalist showed up in Yosemite with some friends on a Western adventure in 1871. Below is an essay by Muir on the stunning beauty of the Sierra Nevada, his encounter with his Emerson, and his joy in showing Emerson around his great love: the Yosemite Valley. It also contains his bitter disappointment that his aged idol was unable to appreciate the trees of the area as he did, and that his Boston friends hurried him along. The piece was published by The Atlantic Monthly in April of 1900.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/going-to-the-woods-is-going-home/275179/