Metropolitan Library System

Essayist. Preservationist. Mountain man. Inventor. John Muir may be California's best-known icon. A literary naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club and Yosemite National Park, Muir left his legacy on the landscape and on paper. But the celebrity of John Muir does not tell the whole story. In Essential Muir, for the first time, Muir's selected writings include those that show his ecological vision without ignoring his racism, providing a more complete...

“A convincing case for Powell’s legacy as a pioneering conservationist.”—The Wall Street Journal

"A bold study of an eco-visionary at a watershed moment in US history."—Nature
A timely, thrilling account of the explorer who dared to lead the first successful expedition down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon—and waged a bitterly-contested campaign for sustainability in the West.
John...

A Sand County almanac is often hailed as a foundational work of the modern environmental movement. Here, it is paired with over fifty other pieces by Leopold: uncollected articles, essays, speeches, and other writings that chart the evolution of his ideas over the course of three decades.

Often called the mother of the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson rocked the world in 1962 with her book Silent Spring, which warned the American public of the impact of pesticides on the environment and unleashed an extraordinary national debate about science and safety. At the center of that firestorm stood Ms. Carson, a strong, intensely private woman who balanced her love of the natural world and passion for writing with personal strife....