OCR Text |
Show 475. 1892 in Wyoming, pitted the interests of profiteers against those of settlers and citizens. Since the Civil War, the federal government had been encouraging the profiteer, the monopolist, not the squatter. After this opening sally in Harper's, Muir was more comprehensive and careful in Atlantic. Though he spoke to the issues raised by the Commission's report, he no longer felt it was necessary to speak for the Commission. "The American Forests" was essentially Muir's definitive statement about the history and future of conservation in America. It began with a view of the whole continent as God's garden, where He grew the best forests He ever planted; it ended with Muir's plea for the trees which could not escape the stupidity of men. But in the middle of the essay, Muir analyzed the history and significance of Americans' destruction of their own environment, and from that drew a picture of the current friends and foes of forests, and the prospects for the future. This was not an optimistic essay, and Muir had little reason to be optimistic. He wrote to Johnson two months before his essay was published: "Those Western Corporations with their shady millions seem invincible in the Senate." And of course he was right. While he grudgingly accepted progress, Muir referred even to settlers as "an invading horde of destroyers." He found that the doom of the forests was sealed when the stone axes of the Indians were replaced by the steel axes of the |