Don’t miss the new book A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir which tells the fascinating story of the American conservationist John Muir and his lasting influence on wilderness preservation.
A native of Scotland, John Muir moved to the United States as a young boy. He would become one of its greatest advocates for the natural environment, calling for the preservation of the Yosemite Valley, the Great Sequoia and coastal redwood groves, and other American wild places. Muir was an avid adventurer and mountaineer, walking from Indiana to Florida, exploring the Alaskan coast and climbing Mt. Rainier. During his time in Yosemite, he studied its geology and ecology, advocating new scientific theories about how the valley came to be through glacial melt and earthquakes.
In his later life he became well known as a preservation advocate and as a journalist, inspiring others to protect the environment, and established friendships with powerful and well-known figures of the day including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was a founder of the Sierra Club, which remains a powerful force in American conservation politics.
“I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer,” John Muir wrote. “Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. My own special self is nothing.”
In Donald Worster’s magisterial biography, John Muir’s “special self” is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir’s full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man.
Order your copy of A Passion for Nature today! (This book is on special offer until 30 April 2009.)