J. William T. Youngs, Professor of History, Eastern Washington University
2012 Thoreau Society Annual Gathering
“Celebrating 150 Years of Thoreau’s Life, Works, and Legacy”
I want to begin by confessing to the singularity of my using a MacBook for my lecture notes today. I am currently criss-crossing the country in an RV with a Thoreau library, a computer, and a printer. But until last night I had not attempted to use the printer, which is new, and as it turns out, useless! Perhaps its failure it Thoreau’s way of reminding me to simplify. I’m sure he would approve of a MacBook!
My first confession leads to a second: Writers often propose a lecture topic and then months later, when the time comes to present, wish they had proposed a somewhat different title. Such, I confess, is my dilemma. So while your conference program lists my talk as “Henry David Thoreau as Environmentalist and Preservationist,” and this is indeed my topic for today, I want to alert you to t he fact that my actual argument is more accurately summarized by the following title: “Henry David Thoreau as Environmentalist, AND [caps], by God, Emphatically, and as Opposed to various arguments to the contrary, he was a PRESERVATIONIST [caps again] as Well!!!” [three explanation marks!]
Now, none would deny the first part of the title, the statement that Thoreau was an environmentalist. After all Thoreau is known far and wide as the person who wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” And his Walden and other works were among the first to celebrate be beauty and importance of nature.
But two lines of argument challenge Thoreau’s credentials as preservationist — as one who advocated the setting aside of tracts of land as nature preserves for the good of the people. One position, represented best by Roderick Nash in Wilderness and the American Mind, argues that Thoreau was never comfortable with raw wilderness, preferring to commune with a kind of tamed nature, such as he found at the safe environs of Walden Pond, an easy walk from Concord and home. Nash contends that when Thoreau came face to face with genuinely wild nature at Mount Katahdin in Maine, he was frightened and repulsed — nearly “hysterical.” (91) According to Nash, Thoreau “accepted as axiomatic [that] man’s optimum environment is a blend of wildness and civilization.” (Nash, 81)
In his book, A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson echoes and amplifies this position: “The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years…. Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core. This wasn’t the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbidding, oppressive, primeval country that was ‘grim and wild … savage and dreary,’ fit only for ‘men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we.’ The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, ‘near hysterical.’” (Bryson, 45)
Since Thoreau was not really comfortable with raw nature, how could he be a preservationist?
A second critique of Thoreau as preservationist was set forth recently in an article by Kent Curtis in Environmental History (January, 2010) titled, “The Virtue of Thoreau: Biography, Geography, and History in Walden Woods.” Curtis finds much to admire in Thoreau’s appreciatory writings about nature, but finds nothing in his writing to support the argument that Thoreau was a preservationist. Curtis writes:
“Thoreau nowhere suggested nature’s frailty or a loss of natural balance at the hands of human society. More often than not, Thoreau concerned himself with aesthetics or with the tenacity of living things, decrying a civilization that would be constructed without a general celebration of the wild tendencies they encountered. There were no crimes against nature in Thoreau’s pages.”
Let’s consider these arguments, one by one: First, that Thoreau was a kind of “wilderness wimp” who only appreciated “tamed” nature; and second, that although he liked nature, he said and did nothing on behalf of wilderness preservation.
First, in confronting the “wilderness wimp” argument, it is important to remember that Henry David Thoreau was remarkably “fit.” He commonly walked ten or twenty miles in a day. On longer hiking and camping trips he commonly carried a pack that would crush all but the strongest of today’s campers. The canvas tents of his time weighed many times more than our modern light-weight tends. And instead of a three or four pound sleeping bag, he carried a “buffalo” – the contemporary name for bedding made from buffalo hides, and weighing as much as several modern sleeping bags. His physical stamina was such that on a journey to Minnesota in 1861, when he was so crippled by tuberculosis that he had difficulty carrying on a conversation, due to his coughing, he still took strenuous hikes.
And what of his famous encounter with Katahdin? Read The Maine Woods, Thoreau’s account of his three journeys into the interior of Maine, and you are in the company of a man who poles a boat with river men and hikes on Katahdin far in advance of his companions. In 1846 only a half dozen men had actually climbed Katahdin. Thoreau came close to the summit – far closer than any of his fellow-hikers that day – but he was driven back by fog. Was he frightened to the core by this experience? Here is the most arresting passage in his account of the experience:
“Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. We were passing over ‘Burnt Lands,’ burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there…. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe… There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste…. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, — that my body might, — but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
What we see in this passage is hardly a timorous greenhorn, overwhelmed by his first contact with “real” wilderness. To the contrary, this is the same Thoreau who travelled much in Concord and made sense of nature as he encountered it in its many manifestations. Yes, he saw new landscapes at Katahdin and he even experienced new sensations, but in this passage and others in his Maine writings, we see Thoreau at work, exposing himself to wild nature and thoughtfully working out the lessons in the experience.
To round out the argument that Thoreau did indeed expose himself to raw nature, I want to draw your attention to one more place where these encounters took place. Thoreau writes:
As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither…. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale–a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow–no gate–no front-yard–and no path to the civilized world.
This place is, of course, Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Many passages in Walden tell us how much of the many forms of wilderness Thoreau encountered there. To underscore this point, I want to tell you about a personal encounter (or encounters) with Walden Pond – and make yet another confession. Fifty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard College, I used to take a break from college life by putting a sleeping bag, a lantern, and a copy of Walden into a back pack, and ride my Lambretta motor scooter from Cambridge out to the pond. In those days the regulations about pond “usage” were less formal than now, and I would simply “scoot” down one of the paths to the environs of Thoreau’s cabin and camp for the night. On each journey I would read a portion of Walden by lantern light, and once of twice (in my imagination) I actually saw Henry David step forth from his cabin and walk down to his pond. Exactly fifty years ago, I spent the summer riding my Lambretta on an 8,000 mile criss-cross country trip from Cambridge to Los Angeles, camping at such places at Mesa Verde, Yellowstone, Glacier, and the Olympic Penninsula. Today I live in Cheney, Washington, teach courses on the History of the American Wilderness and the History of the American National Parks, and live within a day’s drive of seven major American and seven major Canadian national parks. This summer and fall I’m repeating that long Lambretta journey of 50 years ago, using a 400-page diary I wrote back then, as a kind of template for the journey, and traveling in rig consisting of an RV and a trailer hauling a Can-Am Spyder, a three-wheeled motor cycle. In the mean time, I get back from Washington to Walden as often as possible, sometimes two or three times per year. A few days ago I camped in the shadow of the magnificent Devel’s Tower in Wyoming.
Now I hope to make (or underscore) a point with this autobiographical digression: having experienced many of the nation’s great wilderness areas, and having gotten to know Walden pretty well over the course of many decades, I think it is quite pointless to suggest that Thoreau did not experience wilderness at Walden just because he could walk into Concord for dinner!
So I do not think there is any merit in the argument that Thoreau was not a preservationist because he did not really know or like wilderness. But what about the second argument, that whatever he may have thought of raw nature, he said and did nothing on behalf of wilderness preservation.
Here, too, the assertion breaks down in the face of the facts. By way of context, I’d like to introduce you to a proposition that I find useful in teaching my students about the origins of the American National Parks – those monuments to the idea of wilderness preservation. Just as the American Revolution drew heavily on the Lockean Ideology, a body of thought about government that long ante-dated Independence, the wilderness preservation movement build on intellectual changes that came before the first national parks. To help my students with this idea I ask them to consider the acronym, ALP — with apologies that the best acronym I can suggest comes from a European mountain range!
The A in ALP stands for Appreciation: before anyone could argue in favor of wilderness preservation, men and women needed to develop an appreciation for raw nature. For the Purtans, who characterized early America as a “howling wilderness” full of “wild beasts and wild men,” the wilderness was there to conquer, not to preserve. But as Americans began to appreciate and celebrate nature’s wonders in the new world, particularly during the early nineteenth century, there was so much of untamed nature, that calls for preservation were “few and far between.
That brings us to the L of ALP – Lamentation. Some citizens needed to argue that the nation was losing and abusing its natural heritage before anyone would likely do anything about preserving wild nature. And even then, lamentation was not enough if (as was often the case) it failed to go beyond a minor, doleful refrain coupled with generally enthusiastic statements about the “inevitable” “progress” of civilization.
That brings us to the P of ALP – explicit calls for Preservation. Those did not become common until well into the second half of the nineteenth century.
What I hope to show during the next few minutes is that in Thoreau’s writings we find important examples of A, L, AND P – admiration, lamentation, and preservation. So far this afternoon I’ve tried to show that not only did Thoreau admire nature, but that the nature he encountered was as genuine and wild as any we can find in America today. But what about Lamentation and Preservation? Curtis tells us: “There were no crimes against nature in Thoreau’s pages.” No crimes? then presumably no need for “crime prevention.”
Thoreau does, however, describe crimes against the natural world. Here, for example, is what he says about the woodsmen of Maine and their attitude towards trees:
“When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen. In my mind’s eye, I can see these unwieldy tame deer, with a yoke binding them together, and brazen-tipped horns betraying their servitude, taking their stand on the stump of each giant pine in succession throughout this whole forest, and chewing their cud there, until it is nothing but an ox-pasture…. The character of the logger’s admiration is betrayed by his very mode of expressing it. If he told all that was in his mind, he would say, it was so big that I cut it down and then a yoke of oxen could stand on its stump. He admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the tree. Why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump, and a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can, if you had not cut it down. What right have you to celebrate the virtues of the man you murdered?”
Thoreau also uses the word “murder” in describing the killing of a moose in the Maine woods. Here he describes his feelings after men in his party have slain a moose:
“But, on more accounts than one, I had had enough of moose-hunting. I had not come to the woods for this purpose, nor had I foreseen it…. The afternoon’s tragedy, and my share in it, as it affected the innocence, destroyed the pleasure of my adventure…. This hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him, — not even for the sake of his hide, — without making any extraordinary exertion or running any risk yourself, is too much like going out by night to some wood-side pasture and shooting your neighbor’s horses…. This afternoon’s experience suggested to me how base or coarse are the motives which commonly carry men into the wilderness… For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indians and hunters make of Nature!…As I sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around me, I remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire; for Nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose.”
There are many other instances of “Lamentation” over the destruction of nature in Thoreau’s writings. One also finds explicit calls for preservation. Arguably the most coherent plea for setting aside mountains and forests for public enjoyment occurs in his essay, “Huckleberries,” which he completed during the last years of his life.
I am not overflowing with respect and gratitude to the fathers who thus laid out our New England villages,… At the same time that they built meeting-houses why did they not preserve from desecration and destruction far grander temples not made with hands?
What are the natural features which make a township handsome and worth going far to dwell in? A river with its waterfalls-meadows, ·lakes-hills, cliffs or individual rocks, a forest and single ancient trees-such things are beautiful. They have a high use which dollars and cents never represent. If the inhabitants of a town were wise they would seek to preserve these things though at a considerable expense. For such things educate far more than any hired teachers or preachers, or any at present recognized system of school education….
It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed, to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If, here is the largest boulder in the country, then it should not belong to – individual nor be made into door-steps. In some countries precious metals belong to the crown-so here more precious objects of great natural beauty should belong to the public….
In passages such as these – and there are many others in “Huckleberries” and scattered throughout Thoreau’s work – we see him embracing admiration, lamentation, and preservation. Thoreau anticipates, in fact, this key phrase from the National Parks Organic Act (1916), the single most important document in National Parks History: the act states that the park system will “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein…unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
Admittedly, Thoreau was not, like John Muir, the spiritual guardian of wild places such as Yosemite, nor like Muir was he the founder of a great wilderness preservation society, such as the Sierra Club. These political movements came later in American history. But they built on the foundational values articulated by Henry David Thoreau.
Moreover, the trajectory of Thoreau’s life at the time of his death in 1862 was towards a more explicit embracing of preservation. Here we should recall that he lived only 44 years – little more than half the life span of either Ralph Waldo Emerson or John Muir. Had he, like them, lived into his late seventies, he would have been alive well into the 1890s, long after the creation of Yosemite and Yellowstone Parks and after the formation of the Sierra Club. It is not too much to imagine that a few years after his Minnesota trip, he would have gone by train to California, seen Yosemite, hiked with John Muir, and helped create the Sierra Club. After all, Thoreau had followed the same progression from concerned citizen to committed activist in becoming one of the foremost defenders of John Brown.
To return from what might have been to what was: Henry David Thoreau was one of the great preservationists in American history, the spiritual parent of the argument that “In wildness is the preservation of the world” and by logical extension the advocate for the position that “in the preservation of wilderness is the enrichment of America.”