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Show 305 for long. If a place were to remain sacred, i t would have to be sanctified by the society of men who threatened i t . Even while Muir was attempting to show how well Nature's economy worked, men were ransacking her realm indiscriminately. He needed to find a powerful social means to fight t h i s tide of destruction. This must have preyed on h i s conscience while he stayed at the Swett home in San Francisco and nursed the frozen feet he acquired on Shasta in April of 1875. Living with John Swett, he came in contact with serious t a l k about California's most pressing social problem, land monopoly. Ezra Carr had raised his voice over t h i s issue, but John Swett was a close friend of Henry George and other reformers. As his biographer says, Muir was "awakened to the monstrous e v i l s that would have to be subdued i f the forest and the water resources were to be conserved." He may have read in college Spencer's Principles of Biology, with i t s i m p l i c i t social Darwinism. But he was exposed to a more humanitarian view of social relations by his acquaintances in San Francisco. Certainly, from this date he began to condemn in p r i n t the changes men were making in the f o r e s t s . He began to argue that sheep-men, cattle-men, and lumber-men were appropriating the land to their own uses with no goal except a fast p r o f i t . He began to document the new wave of d e s t r u c t i v e c i v i l i z a t i o n , perhaps like the Gold Rush, which was breaking over the Sierra. |