Robert McNally’s Cast Out of Eden takes on a neglected part of California conservationist John Muir’s story: while Muir argued for the preservation of wild sanctuaries that would offer spiritual enlightenment to people like himself, he did not give due consideration to the impact on the people conquered and displaced by the formation of those preserves.

Author McNally and 222 Programmer Denise Low (Delaware heritage) will discuss the conflicted outlooks of Muir and other Californians as well as how, in the 21st century, long-standing injustices are beginning to be undone—a transformation that Muir himself might approve—as Indigenous nations work to ensure that quintessentially American lands from Bears Ears to Yosemite serve all Americans equally.

Robert Aquinas McNally, poet and fiction writer, seeks out stories linking the human and the wild. A member of the National Association of Science Writers and the Western Writers of America, a writer of news, features, and essays about the wild, he wanders, wonders, and writes in Northern California.

A convincing, corrective portrait of a revered but flawed man and of a movement’s original sins.

— San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday, August 10, 3:00 – 5:00 PM