ABSTRACT
Born to the family Muir, meaning 'a wild stretch of land', in Dunbar, Scotland on 21 April 1838, son of Daniel and his second wife Anne Gilrye, John Muir spent a lifetime living up to the name and to his father's stern expectations. Muir's dutiful and passionate engagement with learning led him from a Wisconsin farm to which his family had emigrated, to University of Wisconsin where he took no degree but took the courses he felt he needed. Avoiding American Civil War and often depressed and lonely, Muir wandered and worked in Ontario and Wisconsin. Muir came to a turning point in his life when, while working at a wagon factory, he was blinded by a file flying into his right eye and by a sympathetic reaction in his left eye. Within his own historical context Muir had remarkable influence – literary, political and philosophical – on those who were to follow him in environmental ethics and environmental education.
