“John Muir came off as a nutburger.”
________________
I read a biography on him, and some of his writings. Yes, he was eccentric, no doubt about it. But nosing around the wilderness was a good thing for an eccentric guy like him to do. He was the right guy to drum up excitement for our country’s natural beauty and interest in preserving it. Our country is lucky in that sometimes our highly eccentric and ambitious people manage to accomplish good things the rest of us would not.
Before watching Burns’s documentary, I had a higher opinion of Muir. Burns turned him into the patron saint of animism, a worshiper of creation rather than the creator; this, despite the fact that Muir had committed the entire New Testament to memory.