John Muir: Outside Reading: A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf

John Muir was a naturalist who advocated for the preservation of the wilderness. Muir believed that human creations such as artificial gardens are corruptive towards God’s actual intention for life. Human creations do nothing but try to imitate the divine order of nature. Muir compares the aesthetical destruction of nature to nature’s grandeur: “Nature's grandeur in so abrupt contrast with paltry artificial gardens. The fashionable hotel grounds are in exact parlor taste, with many a beautiful plan cultivated to deformity, and arranged in strict geometrical beds, the whole pretty affair a laborious failure side by side with Divine beauty” (A Thousand Mile Walk 255). According to Muir, human civilization and culture have caused us to have this viewpoint of nature. Human civilization and culture have transmitted the effects of original sin to mankind.