Passion For Nature John Muir

In A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, Donald Worster tells the tale of a legendary man beloved by many, now revered as the epitome of the conservation movement: John Muir. Although many stories about Muir have been told before, none have captured his true essence or presented such a comprehensive narrative of Muir’s extraordinary, yet complex life. Worster’s account immerses Muir amidst the political, social, economic, and historical changes that defined that time period. Worster believes that Muir, through his complexity and proximity, personified the American liberal democratic ideals of the time, thereby becoming the figurehead for the environmental movement. The Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend and admirer

The poet Robert Burns, a fellow Scot, was Muir’s first introduction to Romanticism. This would lead to the discovery of other Romantics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth. From their words he would encounter his first taste of the “exuberant embrace of liberty, fraternity, and equality, the ideals of . . . modern liberal democracy” (32). He would expand on that idea to include nature. This coincided with the American liberal democratic movement that “seemed to encourage a strong feeling for nature” (9). After Muir moved to America, other influences would lead him toward liberal democracy as well as his passion for

While reluctant to be a leader, he did become a figurehead. He became the first president of the Sierra Club although he did not create it. His passion for Yosemite helped establish it as a national park but he was not leading that charge. He tried to avoid politics and was not seen on the forefront of any fight until late in his life. He fought hard for the preservation of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, only to lose the battle and see it succumb to capitalism. That fight, although lost, “ignited a conservation movement across the country that was political, religious, aesthetic, and moral in scope, one that would on against the hydra-headed developers for generations to come” (451-52). This preservationist image, sometimes portrayed as a solitary mountain man, was only part the complexity that was John