Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness by Robert Aquinas McNally
John Muir was a 19th century environmentalist whose writings inspired the national park system. He drank in the high sublime of the American wilderness, especially the magnificent mountains and forests. His frontier wanderings began in Wisconsin, where his family moved from Scotland in 1849. Sadly, his parents adhered to a Protestantism that saw North America as the New Zion, fit for conquest by the Anglo-Saxons and other Northern Europeans. Indigenous culture had to be extinguished and Indigenous people displaced.
In Cast Out of Eden, Robert Aquinas McNally finds that Muir was shaped by that dogma as well as his era’s racist science of eugenics. For him, wilderness had value, the mountains and rivers were priceless—and the original inhabitants were blocking the view. Cast Out of Eden is another chapter in the painful process of evaluating major historical figures, recognizing that the same people who made significant, positive contributions could also be guilty of being terribly wrong.
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