Glen & Jon — Manzanita School

John Muir’s Legacy & A Changing Approach To Environmentalism

The grandfather of environmentalism, John Muir saved Yosemite and helped establish a national park system. But now—100 years after Muir’s death—some question whether our efforts to preserve natural land is enough to save the environment. We’re joined by U.C.L.A. professors Glen MacDonald and Jon Christensen discussed the relevance of Muir’s legacy in today’s world.

Catch Up on the Conversation:

Glen MacDonald and Jon Christensen in the L.A. Times.
Glen MacDonald joins Warren Olney on KCRW’s ‘Which Way, L.A.?’

Glen M. MacDonald is the John Muir Memorial Chair of Geography and a UCLA Distinguished Professor. He is a former UC Presidential Chair and former Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. His research focuses on climate change, its causes and its impact on the environment and society. He works on climate variability and environmental change using observational and other records. He has worked on climate and environmental change issues in North America, Eurasia and Africa. A particular focus of his work has been on water resources in western North America and the global semi-arid regions. He is known for work on the concept of the ‘Perfect Drought’. He has also written on John Muir and his legacy. The author of over 150 scientific and popular press pieces and an award winning book on biogeography, Glen MacDonald is a Guggenheim Fellow, Rockefeller Bellagio Resident and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement. He has received the University of Helsinki Medal, the Henry C. Cowles Award from the American Association of Geographers (twice), a Visiting Fellowship and Life Membership at Clare Hall Cambridge, and a Visiting Fellowship at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. He has also won distinguished teaching awards at McMaster University and UCLA.

Watch this video from Glen MacDonald.
Visit Glen MacDonald’s homepage.
Find Glen MacDonald on Facebook.

Jon Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of History, and the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a journalist-in-residence at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and a senior fellow in UCLA’s cityLAB. He is a regular columnist at LA Observed and editor of Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly magazine published by the University of California Press that brings scholars, researchers, journalists, writers, artists, photographers, policymakers, advocates, and the public into common conversations about California in the world. And he is a partner and strategic adviser at Stamen Design, an interactive design studio specializing in mapping, data visualization, and storytelling. He is currently finishing a book entitled “Critical Habitat: A History of Thinking with Things in Nature,” is engaged in a multidisciplinary digital environmental humanities research project on nature in cities, as well as a large collaborative project to crowdsource a new, public environmental history of the San Francisco Bay Area. And he is on the board of trustees of the California Historical Society.

Find Jon Christensen on Facebook.