Among America's foremost Naturalists and Transcendentalists, only Emerson and Thoreau are recognized and respected as the greatest and most influential pioneers in America's environmental movement until the present. The name of John Muir has to subdue to the two names in the collective memories of contemporary Americans.
This thesis argues against the above proposition and aims to present John Muir as the greatest and most influential pioneer in America's environmental movement. With his radical, consistent an intensive opposition toward the anthropocentric Transcendentalism and pro-Genesis Western (American) civilization that encourage the mastership of man over nature by means of technology, at the cost of the environment, John Muir, a preservationist offered an alternative civilization with more deep-ecological approach toward nature. Nature was considered as home, university, religion, fountain of civilization, however the most important of all it had equal right and dignity with man. Only in this way the human (America's) civilization will survive.