As executive director from 1952 to 1968, David Brower guided the Sierra Club from a small, western mountaineering society to a pillar of the environmental movement.

Tom Turner’s concern that Brower, once the most prominent U.S. environmentalist, may slip from memory prompts him to chronicle how the man’s insight and activism stimulated the evolution of an entire movement: Brower joined the Sierra Club in 1933 for its mountaineering activities, but eventually expanded its mission to defend against pollution, reckless development, and nuclear hazard. He was a master mountaineer who made first ascents of Sierra peaks, and he was a brilliant skier. Yet stopping the construction of a gigantic ski resort in the 1940s was one of his (and the Sierra Club’s) important victories.

Brower was also a brilliant writer and editor. As executive director, he developed large-format books with beautiful photos of wild areas by Ansel Adams and other leading photographers and language from the poet Robinson Jeffers—works of art that helped save treasures like Dinosaur National Park. The Sierra Club’s greatest achievement during his tenure was to prevent the Grand Canyon from being flooded behind dams.

But Turner is frank about Brower’s faults, telling the inside story of his firing in 1968 for sloppy financial management and disregard of board authority. Leaving the Sierra Club, Brower went on to found Friends of the Earth, only to endure another break with another board, after which he established Earth Island Institute.

The book is more detailed career saga than tell-all biopic, but we do get a fair share of personal bits: the heroic mountaineer was afraid of heights; the powerful orator was terribly shy; Brower cut his own hair and was a good pianist. And the many photos are revealing enough, some even featuring our handsome outdoorsman in short shorts. One is from the Sierra in the 1930s: he’s wearing an alpine hat, playing a huge accordion.