Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.
John Muir, among our nation’s earliest and most passionate conservationists, died on Christmas Eve, 1914. Yet I swear I can hear his voice, crystal clear, responding to President Donald Trump’s recent actions.
Earlier this month, Trump directed federal agencies to seek ways environmental regulations could be circumvented with plans of increasing timber production in 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands. He signed an executive order allowing the U.S. to bypass Endangered Species Act protections.
National forests; public lands. Simply stated, these trees belong to you and me.
Encompassed in the executive order is an investigation into whether other countries are dumping lumber into the U.S. On again, off again tariffs imposed on Canadian lumber—in 2023, the U.S. imported $11.5 billion in wood products from Canada—is obviously one arrow in our “trade quiver”. Worth noting: we also export forestry products to Canada, $2.23 billion in 2024.
In this fluid environment, with clashing interests pointed in many different directions, it seems appropriate to search for guideposts. Muir himself grasped how interrelated matters are, observing, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” (Okay, maybe not everything in the Universe… still a statement that merits reflection.)
I contend Muir’s early years in Wisconsin, from 1849 to 1863, age 11 to 25, grounded him. In these formative years, Muir’s curiosity and his love of nature emerged. For all our current president’s traits, both good and bad, curiosity and love of nature don’t make the list. So, it seems inevitable that Muir‘s and Trump’s thinking would clash.
A Wisconsin boyhood predated Muir’s efforts to create Yosemite
John Muir isn’t available to debate these issues; nevertheless, his words live on. In 1897, Muir penned an essay for The Atlantic Monthly entitled, “The American Forests,” almost 4,000 carefully chosen words. Long, glorious paragraphs, pared down below to capture key points.
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.
Everywhere, everywhere over all the blessed continent, there were beauty, and melody, and kindly, wholesome, foodful abundance. … In the settlement and civilization of the country, bread more than timber or beauty was wanted; and in the blindness of hunger, the early settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide, regarded God’s trees as only a larger kind of pernicious weeds.
Accordingly, with no eye to the future, these pious destroyers waged interminable forest wars; chips flew thick and fast; trees in their beauty fell crashing by millions, smashed to confusion, and the smoke of their burning has been rising to heaven more than two hundred years.
Surely, then, it should not be wondered at that lovers of their country, bewailing its baldness, are now crying aloud, ‘Save what is left of the forests!’ Clearing has surely now gone far enough; soon timber will be scarce, and not a grove will be left to rest in or pray in. … Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time – and long before that – God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools, – only Uncle Sam can do that.
Thank you, John Muir, for articulating a defense of forests. Is Muir’s statement still applicable? And if so, might he now contend that Uncle Sam is the fool?
Top photo of Superior National Forest in Minnesota, viewed from the summit of Eagle Mountain, is by Yinan Chen, available via Wikimedia Commons.