Read the following passage carefully:

As long-time environmental leaders, we have gotten together to write about Sierra Club founder John Muir, who hasn’t been immune to present-day scrutiny. Muir’s story is complicated. Like many of us, he had his blind spots and prejudices, particularly in his early writings. But also, like many of us, he increased his knowledge and understanding of people different than him as he gained more exposure and experience. In all, he kickstarted a new era of environmentalism, fuelled by ideals that are still relevant as we continue to face a series of ecological crises.

It’s important to think critically about our movement’s historical figures, John Muir included. However, some recent articles by environmentalists and environmental writers — though perhaps guided by good intentions, and well-written and researched in other respects — contain some inaccurate and unfounded information that could create damaging divisions among the conservation movement and environmental justice advocates. We aim to set the record straight.

A 2020 Sierra Club online column, for example, insinuated that Muir aligned with the abhorrent views of white supremacist Joseph LeConte and eugenicist David Starr Jordan, both of whom were on the early Sierra Club board of directors with Muir. The post generated headlines. One national news story after another reported the inaccurate claim that John Muir was a racist, despite the fact that Muir’s association with LeConte and Jordan pertained to their shared interests in geology and wildlife and Muir did not espouse either their white supremacist views nor support their writings on eugenics or LeConte’s history of enslaving people.

Implying or equating Muir with eugenics proponents like LeConte or Jordan and their works is both factually and historically wrong. In My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir mused, “How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows; probably a great many, extending far beyond the time Columbus touched our shores.” And Muir specifically noted how Native peoples interacted with the landscape while living in harmony with wild nature.

It is true that in some of his earlier personal journal writings in the years before he became an environmental advocate, Muir, who was raised by an abusive and racist father, used derogatory and hurtful language regarding Black and Indigenous people.

Like many great social change leaders of the nineteenth century, Muir grew and evolved through personal experience and knowledge. In a conversation in 1880 with an Army colonel, Muir attacked what he described as the US government’s “mean, brutal policy” toward Native Americans.

In his later public writings, he expressed the sentiment that Indigenous peoples had been unjustly “pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by alien races who were cutting off their means of livelihood.” He came to believe deeply in the equality of all people, writing, “We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favoured races and places.”

John Muir remains worthy of honour and respect as a person who studied, recorded, and shared the natural areas of the United States and the world, and the role of humans within the environment. If John Muir can transform from a narrow-minded Scottish immigrant farm boy to a global citizen who understood the interconnectedness of all life, so can we.

Attempt the following questions based on the passage:

Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?