Book review: A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir

MOST SCOTS WILL HAVE HEARD about John Muir, the Dunbar-born conservationist who was one of the first to campaign to preserve America's wildernesses. But for all those who realise his importance as an early environmentalist, only a few have any sense of what the man himself was like. Despite the reverence he is accorded, Muir is indistinct in most people's minds. Just the right subject, in other words, for a biography.

Donald Worster aims to fill the gap. For all his qualifications as an environmental historian, however, he lacks the ability to tell a story. Readers with a merely casual interest in Muir aren't likely to persist, no matter how thoroughly Worster supplies the context for his thoughts and actions.

Muir spent his first 11 years in Dunbar, where his father, Daniel, a successful merchant, was a man of intense religious convictions. These drew him to the restoration movement associated with Alexander Campbell, which claimed to return to the unspoiled beginnings of the Christian faith, free of the excrescences that had built up in the intervening centuries. In 1849, the Muir family emigrated to the United States, where the Campbellite movement began, and settled in Wisconsin. Young John was expected to work long hours, and his father was a cruel taskmaster. Many years later, in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), he recalled the beatings he received, sometimes accompanied by ranting sermons. Little wonder he grew up to reject his father's creed.

But Muir did not settle into bitterness. On the contrary: he took an inexhaustible delight in the natural world, seeing in it the hand of a God who differed greatly from the grim deity his father believed in.

For all that, as Worster makes clear, Muir came close to setting aside this great love after he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in the early 1860s. A rather aimless period followed until he found a job in Indianapolis at Osgood, Smith & Company, a steam-powered factory that made wooden hubs and spokes for wagon wheels. Muir excelled at the job and was soon promoted. He took an intense interest in questions of efficient management. Given his later reputation as an evangelist for the unspoiled, unpolluted environment, this might seem rather odd. Not so, argues Worster: "regardless of where he travelled, he would remain a Lowland Scot all his days" and he could easily have become yet another dynamic industrialist in the Scottish Diaspora.

One day, while Muir was repairing a belt for a circular saw, a file flew into his face, temporarily blinding him. Although he healed well and regained his sight, the shock of the experience made a lasting impact. "Those weeks of darkness," Worster writes, "had wrought a permanent change in his thinking, and that change would gather force during the spring and ensuing summer. He would never go back to Osgood, Smith. He would throw down his tools, abandon forever any career in industry or invention, and seek his own independent way on earth."

In a film or a novel, this turning point might be dismissed as heavy-handed, but real life isn't so fastidious. From this decisive moment, Muir went on to become "John Muir", lean and bearded, roaming everywhere from the Yosemite Valley to the Mojave Desert, fighting the good conservation fight (though his heart was never in politics), writing articles and books that prepared the way for the modern environmental movement.

Worster reproaches his subject for backsliding: "As he aged and became more prosperous and prominent, with a national following, he became more traditional in his beliefs – by no means reverting to a conservative, evangelical Christianity, but sounding more and more like a typical theist or Transcendentalist seeking beyond nature a God in heaven, a Creator of the world's material forms, or a great Spirit hovering over the earth."

Worster goes so far as to attribute this alleged change in Muir's outlook to the effects of money and fame, which "had made him more of a conformist than he seems to have realised". I see no warrant for this ungenerous judgment. Muir's mature faith was formed by the time he left Osgood, Smith – and it always contained a strong sense of divine presence. When Muir decided to leave the factory behind, he wrote, it was "adieu to all thoughts of inventing machinery"; instead, he would spend his life "studying the inventions of God".

For Muir, as Worster acknowledges, this faith wasn't threatened in the least by the ideas of Charles Darwin, whom he defended as a "devout and indefatigable seeker after truth", though Muir vigorously rejected the notion that evolution disenchanted the world, leaving us to come to terms with nature red in tooth and claw.

When Muir died, he left an estate worth the equivalent of more than 1.5 million in today's money, thanks to his years of hard work and frugality. He suffered many disappointments, losses and vexations and yet to the end he possessed an unshakeable assurance in the goodness of things that still echoes down the years.