Book Alert / A Passion For Nature

A Passion For Nature -- The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster, Oxford UP '08, $34.95, 535 pages, ISBN #0195166825. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"Victory has a thousand fathers," said President John F. Kennedy, "but defeat is an orphan." No wonder few clamored in Kennedy's day for the title of the "father of environmentalism," whose followers then would have been considered dreamy, unrealistic tree-huggers.

How the worm has turned. With millions of households seriously planning to reduce their carbon footprint, with reliable documententation of shrinking polar ice caps and global warming, and auto companies vying with one another to turn out alternative-fuel vehicles, it's no surprise that author Donald Worster should elbow Henry David Thoreau aside in claiming for his subject, John Muir, the mantle of "father of environmentalism." Sorry Teddy Roosevelt and Al Gore; it's every man for himself now.

Worster, a University of Kansas historian, relies on Muir's archives of correspondence in probing "the life of a struggling writer, a self-made man, a world traveler, a father and husband, a scientist, great thinker, a champion for natural wonders like Yosemite, and the founder of the Sierra Club." In following in the steps Muir took during his lifetime, Worster transports his readers to Scotland, Finland, the fishing village of Florida's Cedar Key, a Savannah, GA, cemetery, Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park, and New Zealand."