John Muir and the Ambivalence of Technology

One may introduce John Muir in several different ways. He was an amateur scientist, a nature writer, an indefatigable advocate of the national park system and one of the co-founders of the Sierra Club. The so-called Deep Ecologists have singled him out as an early proponent of biocentrism Naess 33 . To many others he was a nature lover in the romantic vein. Such a pluralistic portrayal bears testimony to Muir’s eclectic temperament and dynamism but it can also give rise to some contradictory impressions. Never is this more obvious than when one broaches the subject of Muir’s perception of technology. In the biography Linnie Marsh Wolfe wrote about Muir, the author of My First Summer in the Sierra emerges as a hermit who thrived as long as he kept aloof from human civilization. In a similar fashion Richard Cartwright has depicted Muir as a kind of modern-day John the Baptist 16 . No doubt all of this is true. On several occasions Muir felt no compunction in turning his back on human civilisation and there were no places he disliked as much as big cities. This, however, is not the whole story