A Passion for Nature is “The Life of John Muir.” For those of us who watched the television series about our National Parks, John Muir became a familiar figure. He has been called America’s first great environmentalist, and is an inspiration to today’s ecologyminded citizens.

Muir was born and spent his early years in Scotland. Writer Donald Worster says that he “would remain a Lowland Scot all his days.” His father Daniel was a devoted member of a dissenting congregation and a very stern man. He brought the family to America in 1849.

John Muir discovered an ability to invent new machines, and over his father’s objections, he worked on water wheels, locks, thermometers, even an “early-or-late rising machine.” He left home in 1860 to enter his invention in the state fair in Madison, Wisconsin. He was very lonely, but it was the price he paid then and on all his many solitary trips later.

Seeking more education, he enrolled at the university, working to pay his way. During the summer of 1863, he and college friends took off on a botanical and geological excursion, marking a turning point in his life. One of his wanderings took him to Canada, where he spent two years learning about the plants there, but returning to the United States to find work in an American factory.

During a time when he feared that ht would be blind, following a factory accident, he heard from a friend, Jeanne Carr, mentioning the beautiful Yosemite Valley. When he recovered, he decided to spend no more time in the factory world and began his travels. He traveled to the Southeast and to Alaska, settling later in California. He worked in Yosemite for a hotel owner and only later was instrumental in seeing it set aside, first as a state park.

“A nobody in the eyes of the world, he paid little attention to the politics or philosophy of conservation. Instead, he concentrated on his own life, trying to find a personal balance, between the sacred and the profane.” It was only after he began to lead others into the wilderness that he saw that the beauty needed to be preserved from the unregulated self-interest.

Muir saw only glory, and never any gloom, in his mountains, even when they nearly killed him.” Even after he was married and became a father, he returned to the wilds often. Though busy in “civilization” much of his time, in his imagination he was always on a trail somewhere in the high country.

He was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other famous people, but he was himself humble and enjoyed the company of other outdoorsmen, regardless of their stature. He helped found the Sierra Club and the modern conservation movement. He was also a fruit-grower and a talented scientist. Worster concludes with these words: “Muir was a man who tried to find the essential goodness of the world, an optimist about people and nature, an eloquent prophet of a new world that looked to nature for its standard and inspiration.”

A Passion for Nature is available at the Mary Willis Library.