Family Portrait of the Sons of Muir : THE HISTORY OF THE SIERRA CLUB, 1892-1970 <i> by Michael P. Cohen (Sierra Club Books: $29.95; 576 pp.) </i>

The Sierra Club is arguably the most influential conservation organization on the planet. Yet unlike most of its distinguished fellows--the National Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, to name a few--the Sierra Club remains a profoundly amateur association. For all its huge membership and glittering publications, the club continues to behave not as corporate animal but as a personal one, still proud of the irascible, the eccentric, the rugged characters that have populated its membership and its directorate.

Now it has commissioned a history: Michael P. Cohen has compiled an insider’s look at the club’s first 78 years, beginning with its first days as an extension of John Muir, to the famous power struggle of 1969 from which it emerged just in time to celebrate Earth Day and the coming of age of the modern American conservation movement. “The History of the Sierra Club” is a strikingly inside view: Cohen not only had the club’s entire archives at his disposal, his personal association with the club and its leaders were clearly an important resource. Cohen’s first book, “The Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness,” won several scholarly awards and set the stage for this ambitious effort. Neither a conventional history nor a critical analysis of the organization, this is nonetheless an eminently readable, open chronicle of the club seen largely through the debates and actions of its directors.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that John Muir, a single man in possession of a vision, founded the Sierra Club,” begins Cohen’s saga. Indeed, among men seemingly larger than life who have emerged from the membership and guided the club down the years, Muir remains pre-eminent. Muir’s battles in the 1880s to protect the Yosemite region and the headwaters of the Kings River in his beloved Sierra Nevada as national parks--one victory and one defeat--had acquainted Muir with a circle of men in the San Francisco Bay area who were interested in mountaineering and the protection of wilderness. Organizers and doers, they encouraged Muir to pursue an association that would “do something for wilderness and make the mountains glad.” In 1892, the Sierra Club incorporated with 283 charter members, including many with considerable clout and erudition. Together, these gentlemen conceived an organization that would “explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast . . . publish authentic information concerning them . . . and enlist the support and cooperation of the people and the government in preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” This mix of exploration, education and preservation would reflect the nature of the club for many decades.

The early years of the Sierra Club were as tumultuous as they were timely. While Muir had come to personify the infant national park movement--Yellowstone, Sequoia and Yosemite having come into existence--the use of America’s vast public lands was a matter of lively debate. Muir’s onetime fellow traveler, Gifford Pinchot, had led others, including President Theodore Roosevelt, along the path of “Progressive Conservation,” scientific management and economic benefit of wildlands that would produce a network of national forests and a Forest Service ultimately competitive with the National Park Service. Appalled at the effects of grazing and timber-cutting, Muir bitterly parted ways with Pinchot. Hardly naive devotees of Muir, the club membership debated the meaning of conservation and the appropriate stewardship of forests and other wildlands from the beginning, says Cohen.

For all its political work, the early Sierra Club was from the start a sponsor of recreation. Early on, William Colby, who would serve the club for 49 years as director, secretary and president, proposed an annual outing. The first outing in 1901 included 96 members on a journey to Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows. It was a huge success and led to a grand tradition that not only attracted new members to the mountains and the club’s values but produced some lively narratives. Today the outing program takes members all over the globe.

For years, Muir had campaigned against the plan to dam Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley to supply water and power to San Francisco. The club itself, headquartered in San Francisco, was divided on the issue. Eventually a referendum to the membership and subsequent heated meeting led to strong support for leaving Hetch Hetchy wild but cost the young club some of its founding members. In the end, Muir and the club lost to the utilitarians, and the dam was authorized in 1913. In Cohen’s view, the battle to save Hetch Hetchy became an anthem of the Sierra Club. And while it destroyed Muir, William Colby emerged as a tough and savvy campaigner who recognized that Hetch Hetchy had awakened a growing wilderness ethic.

As Cohen tells it, a striking feature of the early years of the Sierra Club was its symbiotic relationship with the National Park Service, and to a lesser extent with the University of California. Stephen Mather, appointed by Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane to establish a national park service, freely used the club and the university as intellectual resources and sources of manpower. In those early days, it was often the Sierra Club that favored greater access and more development of parks, while Mather demurred.

The Sierra Club began to emerge in its modern trappings as a national organization after World War II, when it successfully stopped the damming of the Colorado River in Dinosaur National Monument. Dams similarly threatened Glacier National Park and Kings Canyon National Park and eventually consumed Glen Canyon. The struggle to weigh national forests and their timber production against wilderness brought the Sierra Club to the fray again in the 1960s over Redwood National Park. At about the same time, the club began to face the alternative costs of nuclear versus hydroelectric energy production.

Some of the most interesting material in Cohen’s saga takes place at its very close, when David Brower was executive director and very nearly the manifestation of the Sierra Club. Brower built a powerful and effective publishing program, attracted thousands of new members, generated intense media coverage of club issues . . . and threatened to destroy the club’s democratic soul with a cult of personality and its solvency with madcap spending habits. His ouster in 1969 marked the maturation of the Sierra Club.

“The History of the Sierra Club” wins high marks for detail, readability and openness. It’s an absorbing read . . . at least if conservation is your thing. It fails utterly as criticism, but that is not its intention. But its insistence on viewing the club from the inside is, in the end, parochial, often puzzling, and sometimes tiresome. This book wants a larger context, for the Sierra Club has acted on a much larger stage: the American conservation movement.