There were those in the movement, however, who saw in the threats to their country’s most beautiful places signs of a deeper cultural crisis. For instance, John Muir, the great naturalist writer who helped found the Sierra Club in 1892, excoriated the industrialists who dammed wild rivers and drowned beautiful valleys. To him they were heathens—“devotees of ravaging commercialism” who “instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”
