Muir And More

The Orkney Islands are a place of mystery and magic, where the past and the present meet, ancient standing stones walk and burial mounds are the home of the trows. Orkney Folk Tales walks the reader across invisible islands that are home to fin folk and mermaids, and seals that are often far more than they appear to be. Here Orkney witches raise storms and predict the outcome of battles, ghosts seek revenge and the Devil sits in the rafters of St Magnus Cathedral, taking notes! Using ancient tales told by the firesides of the Picts and Vikings, storyteller Tom Muir takes the reader on a magical journey where he reveals how the islands were created from the teeth of a monster, how a giant built lochs and hills in his greed for fertile land, and how the waves are controlled by the hand of a goddess.

The best of John Muir -- 332 quotations, the distillation of his thought, the essence of his beliefs. Muir was the foremost conservationist of his time -- nature writer, social critic, realist, a romantic, a visionary. A long-needed collection that features an excellent subject index. Painstaking bibliographic references make this an invaluable addition to one's Muir Library. (Yosemite Association.) If asked for a succinct statement of his beliefs, Muir might have replied:

Trevor Muir uses the power of storytelling and brain science to give educators practical and proven practices to achieve real student engagement, and in return, learning that is permanent and memorable. Any teacher, in any subject area, and in any grade level can use the story-centered framework to transform their classrooms into settings where students are engaged, challenged, and transformed.

In 1849, 11-year-old John Muir immigrated from Scotland to America. Here, he rose from farmer and sawmill worker to become a noted authority on the botany, glaciers, and forestry of the nation's wilderness. Best known for his long association with the Yosemite Valley and Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Muir also explored, mostly afoot, the southern States, Alaska, the Great Basin, and the Mojave Desert. His studies of nature took him around the world and generated volumes of poetic, evocative writings. As America expanded relentlessly westward, Muir witnessed the plunder and exploitation of the land and became a driving force in efforts to protect the natural world. A modest and private man, married and father of two doting daughters, his conservationist views forced him into battle with powerful political and industrial interests. Some battles he won, influencing four US Presidents to sponsor legislation that protected forests and established or expanded America's national parks. Muir lost his last, and perhaps most personal battle. He fought until near the end of his life to prevent the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park from becoming a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. Some of his conservationsist friends believed the conflict so sapped his physical, emotional, and spiritual strength that it contributed to his death. Remembered as the founder of the Sierra Club, father of America's conservation movement, and architect of a still growing wilderness ethic, Muir set an example many still follow, fighting today's threats to the environment. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

New information on the life of the famed environmentalist presented in 2001 at the John Muir Institute, hosted by the John Muir Center.

John Muir is best known for his work in preserving the great natural areas of America. What is not commonly known is that he was also a great contemplative thinker - a sort of "wilderness mystic" - one who experienced union with the Divine through contact with the great natural areas of the Western United States. Muir's preservation efforts were motivated in large part by his experience of the spiritual dimension of Nature. It was Muir's earthy mysticism that motivated him to work so diligently for the preservation of wild places, which he viewed as "God's First Temples." This book is a sort of "bible" of Muir quotations related to a vibrant and ecstatic spirituality of Nature. It includes a new selection of never-before published selections from original journals contained in the John Muir Papers, as well as passages from his published works. Anyone interested in experiencing a deeper communion with Nature will find this book invaluable.

Follow the man who made the U.S. go green. John Muir was the confidant of presidents, father of American National Parks, trailblazer of world conservation, and voted man of the millennium in the U.S. This book brings refreshing new insights into the hero of world conservation. In a lively, intimate, humorous, and anecdotal account, Good draws on Muir's own books, articles, letters and diaries. She set herself On the Trail of John Muir to write his book - Dunbar in Scotland, the sand country of Fountain Lake and Hickory Hill, Meaford, Ontario, Wisconsin, the Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, the Sierra Nevada, California, and the "Range of Light", Alaska.

Advancing for the first time the concept of "post-pastoral practice," Reconnecting with John Muir springs from Terry Gifford's understanding of the great naturalist as an exemplar of integrated, environmentally conscious knowing and writing. Just as the discourses of science and the arts were closer in Muir's day--in part, arguably, because of Muir--it is time we learned from ecology to recognize how integrated our own lives are as readers, students, scholars, teachers, and writers. When we defy the institutional separations, purposely straying from narrow career tracks, the activities of reading, scholarship, teaching, and writing can inform each other in a holistic "post-pastoral" professional practice. Healing the separations of culture and nature represents the next way forward from the current crossroads in the now established field of ecocriticism. The mountain environment provides a common ground for the diverse modes of engagement and mediation Gifford discusses. By attempting to understand the meaning of Muir's assertion that "going to the mountains is going home," Gifford points us toward a practice of integrated reading, scholarship, teaching, and writing that is adequate to our environmental crisis.