Classroom and cathedral

From the 1870s onward, Muir's mystic-like life was framed by Yosemite benchmarks: first, his ascent of Cathedral Peak; taking Emerson to see the waterfalls; publishing his first California article on glaciers; and promoting the wilderness protection ethos in Century magazine. He began sneering at sheepherders whose overgrazing was destroying magnificent valleys. In between there were all sorts of fine adventures ranging from climbing Mt. Shasta (more than 14,100 feet) to floating down the Chico River. But somehow it always got back to holy Yosemite. Muir's discoveries in Alaska, promotion of U.S. national parks and creation of the Sierra Club brought him heaps of celebrity back East. He became wild California personified to the New York literary set. When Muir published his first book in 1894, "The Mountains of California," he became widely known as the Sage of the Sierras, the West Coast version of John Burroughs. The California naturalist, in fact, wrote so much high-quality prose that Worster employs the term "Muirian" in his endnotes to describe what's become a cottage industry.

A marvelous father and husband, albeit a globe-trotting one, Muir always had folk wisdom to share with everybody. Unlike Roosevelt, for example, who believed that hunting and fishing provided "ideal training for manhood" and would "save the nation" from effeminacy, Muir scoffed at such "Strenuous Life" appeals. Famously he asked Roosevelt (whom he loved as an outdoors companion), "When are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things? . . . Are you not getting far enough along to leave that off?" And Muir wasn't merely tweaking the president for his big-game hunting penchant. His dissent was pure. According to Worster, when Muir received a solicitation of support from a Boy Scout-like society called the Sons of Daniel Boone, he politely deferred. Young Americans, Muir wrote back, needed to abandon "natural hunting, blood-loving savagery into natural sympathy with all our fellow mortals -- plants and animals as well as men."

Appropriately the last chapters of "A Passion for Nature" deal with Hetch Hetchy -- the glacial valley filled by the Tuolumne River in 1923 with the construction of the O'Shaughnessy Dam. What a sad tragedy! The destruction of Hetch Hetchy -- once an integral part of Yosemite National Park -- was flooded for what Muir called "mean commercialism." The principal villain of the sordid act was ex-San Francisco Mayor James Phelan, a first-rate greedy scoundrel. The Hetch Hetchy saga involved three U.S. presidents, their roles all recounted by Worster with admirable drama. The Muir quoted in "A Passion for Nature" over the reservoir fight sounds like an Old Testament prophet, shaking his angry fists at "robbers of every degree from Satan to Senators."

Muir may have lost the Hetch Hetchy fight, but his battlefield-style methods have won over millions to the modern environmental movement -- particularly through the terrific ongoing work of the Sierra Club. The very thought of a tireless Muir inspires citizens to stand up to the blind infidels of offshore oil-drilling, thoughtless timbering and unnecessary irrigation projects. One hundred years ago the call was to save Hetch Hetchy. Today it is to protect Alaska's ANWR from corporate exploitation and defiling. Luckily, for us, the guiding hand of Muir remains, urging society onward with an 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not mar unnecessarily.