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Show 508. It is naive to think of t h i s as selflessness on Muir's part; rather, i t was good p o l i t i c a l sense. Muir's p o l i t i c s , as near as he was capable of manipulating the circumstances, were c a r r i e d on in the mountains. Men like Roosevelt and Taft, Burroughs and Harriman, came to his world in Alaska and Yosemite. Muir did not go to Washington or even Sacramento unless he had t o . This was important, and suggested that the Sierra Club Outing was the means necessary for a r e - c r e a t i o n of human society. Mountain thinking was d i f f e r e n t , and so consequently was mountain society. If only the conversion in the wilderness could be made strong enough, i t would be c a r r i e d back down to the lowlands, and change the c i t i e s. When I worked on Sierra Club Outings, there was s t i ll hope that the outings would e n l i s t the "support and cooperation" of people. The a i r was a l i v e with i t . How could people fail to gain something a f t e r camping for two weeks in the company of Norman Clyde? There was a place on a Sierra Club Outing for a young man l i k e George Dyson, a place where he could escape from the obsessional world of his f a t h e r ' s vision of nuclear-powered space t r a v e l as an escape from a polluted and over- Populated world. He could find a congenial group, a cult of revolutionaries who believed that our own world was our only world, and one worth saving. Even doctors and lawyers became something different when they went into the wilderness; they teamed a new s e t of manners and a new set of values. That |