“A PASSION FOR NATURE: The Life of John Muir” is a new book written by Donald Worster, which attempts to give greater insight into the man and separate that man from the myths surrounding him. Many know Muir as the passionate environmentalist, conservationist, hiker and writer and champion advocate for the creation of national parks, as well as the founder of the Sierra Club. But few would know that he was also a devoted husband and father, a businessman and farmer, and someone who adeptly bridged his love of the wilderness, with the populated world and knew the value of symbiosis between the two.
Mr. Muir was a prodigious hiker, thinking nothing of walking from San Francisco up through the giant sequoia redwoods in what would become Muir Woods, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, then heading up and hiking into Yosemite in what is now Yosemite National Park. But he was not a social outcast or loner; in-fact, Muir was charismatic, a good speaker, and had a gift for making friends, including many professors, businessmen, and politicians who would help him in his interests and pursuits throughout his lifetime. He could often be found at his California home, entertaining those influential people who might help his environmental efforts. Muir comingled the often disparate interests of the worlds in which he resided to good effect. As a result of his marriage to wife Louisa Strentzel, Muir came to manage the business of his father-in-laws vineyards and orchards and was quite successful in doing so, offering him a rural balance to complement the grand scale of Yosemite, as well as providing him with a means of support for his passions. He was thoroughly adept at melding his ideals with pragmatism, comfortably and successfully leveraging one world for the benefit of the other.
An engagingly written book drawing extensively from John Muir’s writings, "A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir" offers an effectively balanced assessment of the man and his pursuits during the backdrop of these early days of the environmental movement which had begun to bloom in the late 19th century. The author, Worster, a highly regarded historian of environmental movements, paints a much more studied and complex portrait of John Muir, accurately depicting John Muir as he was, a man, more than a myth.
