Sierra Club calls out founder John Muir for racist views

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Sierra Club is calling out its founder, naturalist John Muir, for racist remarks he made more then a century ago as the influential environmental group grapples with a harmful history that perpetuated white supremacy.

Executive Director Michael Brune said Wednesday that it was “time to take down some of our own monuments” as statues of Confederate officers and colonists are toppled in a reckoning with the nation's racist history following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Muir, who founded the club in 1892, helped spawn the environmental movement and is called “father of our national parks,” is the focus of what Brune called a “truth-telling” about the group's history.

“He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life," Brune wrote on the group's website. “As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color.”

Muir, who was born in Scotland, came to the U.S. as a young man and traveled extensively, writing eloquently about nature and the need to preserve it but also dismissively describing “dirty” people he encountered, a word he used for Black people and American Indians, whom he also referred to as “savages.”

He also kept company with other early club members and leaders, such as Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan, who advocated for white supremacy and promoting the race through eugenics, which called for forced sterilization of Blacks and other minority groups, Brune said.

Until recent years, Muir's legacy has been largely untarnished and focused on his...