His association, born in 1892, anticipated the WWF, Greenpeace and many others by almost a century acronyms

"No temple made by human hands can compete with Yosemite", and "Yosemite is the greatest of all the temples of Nature."

John Muir was a stubborn man, forerunner in unsuspecting times of the need to preserve nature , without compromises and without bowing to the logic of money.

A faithful lover of the American mountains, especially the Yosemite Valley, in the Sierra Nevada mountain area, where Muir discovered a natural paradise, already then endangered by the exploitation of its meadows for breeding.

John Muir was born in Dunbar, on the Scottish coast, not far from Edinburgh on April 21, 1828 and emigrated to the United States, with his family, in 1849 with the intention of opening a farm that would give sustenance and well-being to all.

He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but was struck by the botany lessons and decided to travel thousands of miles on foot, from Indiana to Florida in 1866-67.

In March 1868 he learned of a place called Yosemite and wanted to visit it, creating such a great astonishment in him as to convince him to return there permanently, finding a employment on the local railways.

In 1880 he married Louisa Wanda Strentzel and entered the family ranch permanently where he worked continuously, continuing to actively take care of the nature protection.

On September 30, 1890 he managed to promulgate a law for environmental protection, inserting the Yosemite area as an area of national naturalistic interest, thus establishing Yosemite Valley National Park, under the control of the state of California.

Two years later, in 1892, John Muir established the Sierra Club environmental association, of which he became the first president, a position he held until his death in 1914.

In his life he was a true fighter in the integral defense of mountain areas, so much so that he was forced more than once to disturb influential friends , like US President Roosevelt, to try to block projects that could modify the natural habitat.

In addition to the advance of the railways, at that time the construction of a dam on the Toulumne river was planned, which would have allowed create a water reservoir for the city of San Francisco, but it involved excavating and flooding Hetch Hetchy Valley, which Muir compared in beauty to Yosemite Valley.

Through the Sierra Club association he gave legal battle to stop the project, urging the president of the United States to block the initiative.

The lawsuits followed one another over the years, but with the election of the new American president, Woodrow Wilson, Muir lost the battle and the construction of the dam became law on December 19, 1913.

Supporters of the Sierra Club will remember Muir's death the following year in 1914 as a result of the heartbreaking grief of losing his environmental battle, but clinically died of pneumonia.

John Muir operated in a period in which industrialization, chemistry and demographic and economic development had not yet created an embrace of death with nature, but he understood, almost a century before the most well-known modern environmental acronyms were born, starting with the WWF or Greenpeace and many others, that nature must be protected without compromise.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.