“Some of you might wonder what took us so long. Others might wonder whether John Muir is sitting up in his grave. In fact, John Muir had both a deep appreciation for Thoreau and a powerful sense of right and wrong.”

And why is Sierra Club President Michael Brune name checking John Muir and Henry David Thoreau? The San Francisco Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli writes:

The Sierra Club is — for the first time in its history — going to engage in civil disobedience on Feb. 17 in Washington, D.C., which is also a day that greenies predict will be “the largest climate rally in history.”… With Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman approving   the pipeline’s route through his state Tuesday, Sierra Club President Michael Brune hopped onto Facebook to announce that the San Francisco-headquartered Club is “for the first time in our 120-year history….be engaging in peaceful civil disobedience to help stop the dirty and destructive Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. We’re all in!”

By pushing back against the Keystone Pipeline  Brune said the Sierra Club is, “following in the hallowed footsteps of Thoreau, who first articulated the principles of civil disobedience 44 years before John Muir founded the Sierra Club.”  To wit:

What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man. 

And one from Mr. Muir.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.