The man is lying flat on his back, staring at the sky, four thousand miles from the place of his birth. Not even thirty years old, he is in his second month of recuperation from a disease that nearly took his life. He is thinking, among other things, about the happiness of alligators. It is December 1867, and most would not put the words alligator and happiness in the same sentence, especially on the Gulf shores of Florida where he lies, on his back, among the juniper, long-leafed pine and live oak, staring up at the sky. 

In a month, John Muir will head west to San Francisco and ask for directions to "anywhere wild," and his already well-developed love affair with the natural world will find a unique focus in the Yosemite Valley. As a boy, he knew the salty shores of Scotland and later explored the Fox River meadows filled with nuthatches and red-winged blackbirds of his family's Hickory Hill Farm in Wisconsin. He has dropped to his knees in wonder and awe at the beauty of a Calypso orchid in the tamarack swamps of Ontario, where he'd "skedaddled" to in 1864 to evade Lincoln's draft. And now, he has just "botanized" his way a thousand miles, from Louisville, Kentucky to Cedar Keys, Florida, through a post-Civil War landscape, seeking out the "wildest, leafiest and least trodden way." 

On this December day, it is a comfortable sixty-five degrees in the shade and there are alligators to think about. How, exactly, do such man-eating creatures fit into the divine scheme of things according to God? Muir has seen only one alligator, but has heard numerous stories of the thick-skinned beasts rising from the water to steal away a pet or escape with an appendage. Muir could not accept the explanations of his Calvinist father or most of the men of his time: that these fiendish animals resided on man's green earth because a certain woman took a bite of a certain fruit and doomed humanity to a life outside of the Garden. Muir saw the Garden all around him. It was everywhere, alive and well and within it were creatures that not only offered no practical purpose for humans, but were actually capable of committing much harm to them. He thought this was very fine.

So what was the reasoning behind the Creator's creation of  "those man-eating animals -- lions, tigers, alligators -- which smack their lips over raw man?" What about the insects that feed on man's rich blood, the waters of the earth that drown him, the poisonous plants and minerals? "Why," Muir asked, "is the lord of creation subjected to the same laws of life as his subjects?"

The botanizer's answer, so foreign to his time, was this: "Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?" Without using the words inherent worth or intrinsic value, Muir writes in the journal at his side, "Though alligators, snakes, etc. naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God's family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth." 

"The world, we are told, was made especially for man," Muir once wrote, "a presumption not supported by all the facts."

More than a hundred years later, Arne Ness, Norwegian philosopher and mountain climber, would build upon Muir's concept and label it Deep Ecology. It was a synthesis of a century of naturalist thought: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and later Aldo Leopold, although unlike Muir, Emerson refused to sleep under the stars and Thoreau eschewed conservation politics. Ness developed eight tenets of Deep Ecology; the first echoed Muir's 1867 journal musings, though lacks the poetic prose: "The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes." Copernicuses and Galileos of a post-modern era, they believed that it was time to admit that the world did not revolve around the precocious bipeds with opposable thumbs.

John Muir's recovery from what was likely malaria has been slow. Two months earlier, he'd arrived in Cedar Keys, the smell of the sea bringing early years in Dunbar, Scotland vividly to mind. A robust man, he ignored the dullness that he felt, ignored the rare headache and went inquiring about ship passage. The thousand miles thus far was just the beginning. Cuba was next, and then on to the Amazon in South America. But the unease didn't lessen and a craving for lemons and a bath in the salt water of the Gulf didn't alleviate the fever that consumed him and finally left him spent, delirious, on a trail under saw palmettos on October 23rd.

Just one week before, he'd seen his first species of the plant -- twenty-five feet in height, with great polished leaves ten feet in length. While walking on the edge of an immense woodland, he "caught sight of the first palmetto in a grassy place, standing almost alone."  In his journal, filled with sketches and flowering prose, he wrote, "They tell us that plants are perishable, soulless creatures, that only man is immortal, etc.; but this, I think, is something we know very nearly nothing about. Anyhow, this palm was indescribably impressive and told me grander things than I ever got from a human priest." 

Daniel Muir, John's father, was a human priest in spirit and a driven farmer in body. He had raised John and his seven siblings under the strict auspices of God's word and hard work, while his tender wife Anne kept house and nourished the children. He'd taught the boy that the "Bible was the only book human beings can possibly require throughout all the journey from earth to heaven," but the young Muir's view of the sacred had differed from his father's since he was a boy of three when his grandfather had taken him on a walk. The investigation of a "sharp, prickly, stinging cry" revealed a mother field mouse and six naked young nursing in a haystack.  Seventy-two years later Muir would still remember the moment vividly. "This to me," he wrote, "was a wonderful discovery."  

When John Muir did openly disagreed with his tyrannical father, he used enough logic and Biblical references to drive the older man into a silent rage or, occasionally, laughter.  John would claim that his father, who would eventually abandon his family to preach God's word, would call John a "contumacious quibbler too fond of disputation," although the words sounded more like Muir's vocabulary, gleaned from stolen midnight sessions reading the works of Shakespeare and Milton.

Muir's thoughts are interrupted by the sound of long-winged gulls, pelicans and other marsh birds taking flight, startled from their positions in the wet sand of low tide, rising up into the air in unison. Perhaps at that moment he leans up on his elbows, and takes in the stretch of water before him that has become so familiar, his right eye still clouded over since the accident with the file last spring. Across the placid waters of the Gulf lies Texas. Had it not been for the mill owner, Mr. Hodgson, and his wife in Cedar Keys, who nursed the young John Muir back to health, the explorer might have died from the malaria, and he could not lie here on his back, equating God with Nature. He would not have been able to pose the question, "What creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit -- the cosmos?"

The wind rustles through trees draped with Spanish Moss, samples of which he surely pressed and sent back to his sister Sarah in Wisconsin, carefully writing out the Latin name: Tillandsia usneoides. Muir's answer to his own question, infused with humility and wonder both, was that "the universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge." In two weeks he would pack his small bag with all his possessions -- comb, brush, towel, soap, change of underclothes, plant press, small volumes of Robert Burn's poems and Milton's Paradise Lost, his journal and a New Testament -- and continue on his travels. In the front of his journal, he had written, "John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe." Not yet thirty, four thousand miles from the place of his birth, he had already learned that to go out into the wild places of the world was the way into God.

Meera Subramanian lives in Brooklyn, NY, and writes about culture and the environment for The New York Times, The Revealer and other publications.