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Rhetorical Analysis Of John Muir

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Although considered by John Muir as the equivalent to Yosemite Valley, the lesser known Hetch Hetchy Valley, is seldom called by its name. More commonly, citizens of San Francisco refer to it as “the reservoir” which it became after the construction O'Shaughnessy Dam in 1913. However, the decision to allow a city the control of land within a federally owned park was the source of much controversy. In 1892, Muir co-founded the Sierra Club with the mission to “explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; to practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources; to educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out …show more content…

Muir felt the same love of nature as transcendentalists before him; however, Muir’s writing convades not only a call to nature but a call for the nation to protect it. Through conversations with people of affluence, and printed appeals in newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, Muir was able to present a clear message to the American people.In a Sierra Club bulletin written in 1908, Muir wrote, “In these ravaging money-mad days monopolizing San Francisco capitalists are now doing their best to destroy the Yosemite Park.”Another piece written by Muir is layden with religious imagery to compare the sin of capitalistic interest in building the reservoir to the sin which banished mankind from the garden of Eden. Righter the author of The Battle over Hetch Hetchy suggests, that of some the modern methods used to sway public opinion have the orgins in the persuasion tactics used by the leaders of the Hetch Hetchy protest. In addition to the success of Muir’s persuasion to increase awareness against the damming of Hetch Hetchy, Righter also implicates the effects of Muir’s resounding words and the impact they had on Environmentalist, David Brower a leader of Muir’s charge who was not even alive when those words were written. For both his lifetime and the years following, Muir’s writings have spread the framework for American …show more content…

Even though Muir died before the O’Shaughnessy Dam was completed, younger Sierra Club Members including William Colby and William Bade who were descendants of Muir’s ideology, gained political experience from their contributions to the Hetch Hetchy campaign. As a result of Hetch Hetchy, Colby saw the need for a bill to protect national parks and a country wide organization that cooperated better on such matters.Colby’s ideas came to fruition when congress passed the National Park Act in 1916 and the National Parks Association a year later. But these changes also have roots back to Muir’s campaign. The congressional record of the bill which granted Hetch Hetchy to San Francisco reveals the implications of Muir’s protest on influential Senators such as Frank Mondell and Reed Smoot. Like Muir, Mondell was convinced that the damming of Hetch Hetchy set a dangerous precedent which the bill did not address. Additionally, even though John Raker, a senator from California had led the charge to dam Hetch Hetchy, with the Ranker Act in 1913, three years later he was involved with the National Park Act. Albright, a legal assistant in the Department of the Interior, speculates, “Ranker was motivated to pass the National Park Service Bill because his name had been tarnished in the state of California due to its connection with the

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