As Muir moved across the states and eventually came to the hills of California, we see how his rambling and his faith forged a wilderness ethic through which he would come to view not only his relationship to the land, but also his relationship to the universe, to his work and to society. Worster does a wonderful job of grappling with these complexities and communicating that even for Muir, such questions of human's proper relationship to the natural world is never simple. One of the more revolutionary of Muir's ethos was that he extended morality to living biota beyond the narrow confines of human society: for Muir plants and animals were as worthy of care, notice and rights as any person.
Given that Muir's life revolved around wilderness, and that Worster is a historian by training, Worster treats the notion of wilderness in Muir's and the American mind in a surprisingly ahistorical manner. What Worster gives, at best, passing mention to, is that Muir and most Americans in the 19th century were experiencing "wild" landscapes that were very much a construction of their society and their predecessors. This is not to marginalize Muir's very real feelings about "big outside"and his foundational beliefs concerning divinity, however, as Worster tries to skip between 19th and 21st century morality, it is something that could have stood a bit of examination.
What Worster has accomplished is a fluid and easily consumable biography that gives a reader a better sense of Muir as a man and as a mind. Worster's call at the end, though a touch simplistic, is very appropriate: would that we could live out Muir's vision on Earth.
