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.
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