Classroom and cathedral

Glaciers advance and retreat, but the joie d'esprit of John Muir is eternal. Anyone who today hikes the Sierra Nevada -- or, for that matter, their own special wild place -- is honoring Muir's environmental activist legacy. To Muir, sequoias were God's great spires, spruce groves all-season cathedrals and mountains his wayward home. Not only did Muir write with the poetic authority of Thoreau, but he also joined the U.S. Forestry Commission, offering practical land management. Besides writing the classics "Our National Parks" (1901) and "Travels in Alaska" (1915), he could play the wonk when necessary. No lover of California, in particular, had a way with words quite like Muir. After camping with Muir in Yosemite National Park in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt fell under his spell. "John Muir talked even better than he wrote," Roosevelt famously boasted. "His greatest influence was always upon those who were brought into personal contact with him."

Reading Donald Worster's superb new biography, "A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir," is as close as history will ever get to understanding what made the multidimensional Sierra Club founder tick. Yosemite's great bard bursts through Worster's fine prose in all his cosmic grace and preservationist pluck. The Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas, Worster is perhaps best known for his Bancroft Prize-winning "Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s" (1979) and, more recently, a hefty biography (probably definitive) of John Wesley Powell. But to thousands of doctoral students (former and current) he is the grand pooh-bah who launched environmental history as a field of serious academic pursuit in the 1970s. For decades now, Worster's keen insights into the American West's curse of aridity have been model studies of both cutting-edge historiography and sound contemporary living advice. In "The Wealth of Nature" (1993) and "A River Running West" (2001) Worster repressed his more mystic inclinations in favor of scholarly detachment. Academics often feel clumsy in the world of adjectives, but Worster isn't this time:

"Through knowing John Muir better, we can see how the modern love of nature began as an integral part of the great modern movement toward freedom and social equality, which has led to the pulling down of so many oppressive hierarchies that once plagued the world. We come to realize that fighting to save the great whales, the tropical rain forests, or even a single acre of prairie has been a logical outcome of that movement, along with all efforts to decrease the human footprint on the planet to use resources more justly and responsibly, and to achieve a greener society."