Classroom and cathedral

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."

Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21, 1838. His father was abusive. In his memoir "The Story of My Boyhood and Youth," Muir claimed that his outdoors preference emanated from a "natural inherited wildness in our blood." At 11, he emigrated with his family from Glasgow to Wisconsin. Throughout his adolescent years he toiled on his father's farm and tinkered with building clocks, barometers and hydrometers. During the Civil War he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, inventing a student desk clock that retrieved a book, held it stationary for hours, then automatically replaced it with a different volume. (The illustration from the Wisconsin Historical Society confirms Muir drew one mega-weird contraption.) Muir also devoured the works of Robert Burns and Walt Whitman. The great seer Ralph Waldo Emerson, in fact, who encountered Muir in his dotage, deemed him as "one of my men," a true-blue Transcendentalist through and through.

Over time botany developed into Muir's true passion. In 1863, he took his first botanical tramp along the Wisconsin River to the upper Mississippi River. Hunting for plants liberated him from religious orthodoxy and family commitment. He drifted up to Ontario, Canada, working for a long spell at a sawmill and broom-rake factory. While in Ontario, he discovered the rare orchid Calypso borealis (this led to his first published article in the Boston Recorder). Odd jobs became Muir's specialty: It was his way to finance romps.