Rochelle L. Johnson
What we generally call the “literature of the environment” of the United States emerged in the nineteenth century from the confluence of a particular set of cultural and historical circumstances, including a rapidly altered landscape, the professionalization of science, and a tradition of experiencing spiritual fulfillment through the close observation of nature. We consider Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) a foundational figure in environmental literature partly because his writings help demonstrate the ways in which these circumstances inform the genre. Indeed, when we consider Thoreau’s contributions to environmental literature alongside those of some of his nineteenth‐century contemporaries, we observe not only the dawning of the environmental literary tradition but also the beginnings of the US environmental preservation movement, the emergence of the science of ecology, and the development of what most of us now experience as the rarefied world of science. In addition, Thoreau’s corpus is integral to the transatlantic philosophical tradition of exploring the relation between the self and the non‐human environment. That is, he explored the ways in which the close observation of natural phenomena could enrich the individual human experience of the dynamic material surroundings that we call our world. Thoreau’s writings also serve a specifically scientific function, as climate scientists today look to his close phenological observations as an historical indicator of the species of plants and animals that occurred in his region of eastern Massachusetts. Thoreau’s records delineated when these species migrated, appeared, bloomed, or bred in the nineteenth century, thus enabling our understanding of how the climate is changing over time (see Primack 2014). In short, Thoreau’s writings are noteworthy both within their historical context and because of their influence on generations of writers and environmental thinkers. He serves as a model to nearly all who followed him in the environmental literary tradition.
Thoreau remains one of the most celebrated environmental writers, best known for his Walden (1854). However, his modern reputation offers a study in misunderstanding. In our popular culture and in many environmental circles, he represents a specific type of individual seeking a particular type of nature – a person, that is, who seeks to escape other people and the strictures of society by pursuing solace and solitude in wild, remote locales. Yet Thoreau typically neither dwelled in wild nature nor resisted humanity. With the exception of a handful of relatively short absences, in fact, Thoreau lived the vast majority of his life in Concord and in the company of others. Even when he resided at Walden Pond, his walk from his native village spanned a distance of less than two miles, and he frequently both returned to town and welcomed visitors. He tells us these things in Walden. Still, Thoreau has come to represent what he actually rarely pursued: the solitary escape from civilization to primitive wilderness landscapes.
Following Thoreau, the writers most widely recognized as forming the environmental literary tradition in the United States write non‐fiction prose that examines directly both the human encounter with the non‐human world and the ways in which human civilization is both embedded in – and inevitably alters – the other‐than‐human material realm.1 However, one could argue that all literature should be considered literature of the environment; after all, literature reflects (and often shapes) the environment from which it emerges, whether we consider that environment to be cultural, economic, physical, or psychological. Yet the body of writing that scholars have come to call literature of the environment overtly addresses the human relationship to the non‐human world. Moreover, literature of the environment takes as its subject, at least in part, the relationship between being human and the fact that human existence is an integral part of the material world.
Thoreau memorably focused his best remembered work on pursuing the fullest possible experience of humanity within its context of the physical environment. As he wrote in Walden, “[M]an’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried” (1971: 10). To measure these capacities, Thoreau turns to the material world in which he finds himself – to the world of rock and tree, plant and plover. He looks here for answers because he believes he can escape his habits of being human only by exploring the most basic foundation of his own humanity: the material realm of which he is a part. Throughout his corpus, the workings of non‐human nature shape Thoreau’s model of how to have the most heightened experience of his own humanity – or, as he puts it in Walden, of how to “live deliberately” (1971: 90): “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature,” he urges, and so he gives time to watching nature’s ways, considering nature’s example, and attending to “the present moment” as it unfolds in time and place (97).
Thoreau’s “experiment” (40) in living deliberately at the pond thus involves time as much as place; as he explains in an early section of Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear” (90, italics mine). Here Thoreau expresses his deep desire to know what life is, to know what it means to live and what it means to have lived well. For this, he will take no one else’s answer; he must know why he is alive, and he must know for himself. This is a question we must each face, and we each do – if our lives hold enough of privilege to grant us the spiritual space to ask such questions. And ultimately, this is a spiritual quest – to find for oneself a source of meaning in this life.
For Thoreau, life was precious to the point that he wanted to consider each moment exquisite, each minute an opportunity for splendor and solace, each second a chance “to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line” (17). Time is all we have, argued Thoreau. Indeed, this is the case for all of us, which is why Thoreau explains himself as “anxious to improve the nick of time” (17). To those who go through life unaware of the preciousness of time, he chides, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity” (8). Each moment counts for Thoreau, and he will squander none. To do so is to waste life, which must, he reasons, damage futurity: “living,” he reminds us, “is so dear” (90).
However, Thoreau’s experiment with time also represents a spiritual engagement with the physical environment. He had asked a key question in Walden, and he spent the remainder of his life pursuing its particulars: “Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?” (225). As he gathered data about when specific plants bloomed each year, when migrating birds returned to his area each spring, when the pond froze each winter, and when he saw particular fish species, certain plants in bud, or certain tree leaves turn a specific autumnal color, he was tracking his world in order to live deliberately, improve the nick of time, and know that he had lived. Even well beyond the two years, two months, and two days comprising his Walden Pond experiment, Thoreau would devote his days to walking, reading, and writing – those pastimes he found most fitting to living most deliberately.
Given these historical foundations, we cannot separate the tradition of literature of environment from the tradition of finding personal meaning through interaction with the physical landscape. Thoreau’s works attest to the fact that understanding the place of the literature of the environment in the nineteenth century requires recognizing the historical belief in the material world as a source of value, even when it exceeds our comprehension. Put differently, the literature of the environment that emerges out of the nineteenth century struggled less than we do in our modern era with the notion that spirituality inheres in materiality. Much literature of the environment assumes that all forms of being have worth. From its origins, then, literature of the environment has engaged moral questions even as it has pursued meaningful empirical knowledge of the physical realm.
Given its assumption of the relation of the material to the moral and spiritual, it is not surprising that environmental literature often figures a diminished experience of nature as necessarily tied to a reduced experience of what it might mean to be fully human. This stems, in part, from the fact that by the closing decades of the nineteenth century – and well into the twentieth – certain aspects of US culture were perceived to be diminishing the human capacity to experience the natural world. Primary among these factors was the rapidly transforming landscape.
For Thoreau and his contemporaries in the environmental literary tradition, the speed with which the landscapes of especially the eastern United States were changing became a moral – and even a spiritual – issue. Thoreau most fully records the changing landscape of the middle decades of the nineteenth century in his journals, which have come to be regarded by literary scholars as his most significant contribution to environmental literature. Thoreau began keeping a journal in 1837, and he continued the practice until his death in 1862, writing nearly daily about his reading, his thoughts, and his excursions in the outdoors. He observed natural phenomena very closely, and his landscape was no wilderness – though he frequently sought its wildness. This distinction is important for Thoreau, as he believed that even domesticated plants and animals – even humans – possessed some degree of wildness. But his surroundings differed significantly from those encountered by the settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; as Foster (1999) notes, “Thoreau […] lived through the peak of” the period during which New Englanders altered the landscape “through a relentless clearing of forests, piling of rocks, and toiling in fields and barns” (xi). This was also a period when advances in industry “led to one of the most remarkable [landscape] transformations in world history” (Foster 1999: 8).
We frequently find Thoreau reflecting in his journal on these landscape changes and on the way in which they affect his own experience of the environment, and these passages are often marked by a sense of grief or loss. On 23 March 1856, for example, he writes of his experience of the land in comparison to that of the early Euro‐American settlers:
when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, – the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., – I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country. […] Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with? […] All the great trees and beasts, fishes and fowl are gone. The streams, perchance, are somewhat shrunk. (VIII, 220–222)2
Thoreau laments what he considers a wounded landscape, and he does so partly because of his sense that people are somehow diminished by experiencing this transformed region. Thoreau does not engage here in some sort of naive nostalgia for a long‐ago‐altered land; rather, he grieves a very recent and rapid loss of species from his region, as well as alterations to the landscape that had indeed resulted in less water flow in area streams. We also see that Thoreau understood himself as a component of the physical environment – part and parcel, as it were, of the material realm. Yet when he refers to the “maimed and imperfect nature” which he experiences, he signals his belief that – in Foster’s words – “nature can only be understood through an awareness of its history” (1999: xii). That is, he recognizes that the natural history of an area is relevant to its human inhabitation – that, in fact, the two cannot be separated.
A landscape that is decreasing in diversity and fecundity suggests to Thoreau a humanity in the process of a lamentable simplification, as well. In other words, Thoreau finds that the landscape is what ecologists now call a “cultural landscape,” that the natural world remains deeply imbricated in the civilized one (and vice versa), and that his own humanity has changed along with the landscape itself (Foster 1999: 10). As he indicates elsewhere in his writings, the landscape bears traces of human history, and it cannot be experienced as separate from that history and human experience – whether in the form of a railroad that rushes past a pond, or of pond ice carried away to New Yorkers during the winter, or, as he puts it in “Wild Apples” (1862), of “the history of the Apple‐tree [as] connected with that of man” (Thoreau 2007: 261). Such considerations of the human embeddedness in non‐human nature would become something of a convention in environmental literature into the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries.
Given Thoreau’s and other expressions of concern for a landscape increasingly impacted by humanity, we might make the case that environmentalism in the United States was born in the nineteenth century of a handful of observant individuals who attended closely to the physical details comprising the landscapes of the nation (see Philippon 2004). These individuals were particularly observant of – and thoughtful about – the landscapes in which they pursued their days, and they shared their observations and concern with readers in an attempt to raise awareness about the rate of environmental change and its possible implications for human and non‐human nature alike. They watched landscapes manifest the seasons and absorb the transformations wrought by growing agriculture, industry, transportation, and commerce, and then they wrote about what they saw, noting in their written works what environmental historian William Cronon (1983) has called “changes in the land.” Throughout the nineteenth century, they would take their experience in watching especially the eastern landscapes of the United States go from a wild or rural setting to an industrial‐pastoral or intensely agricultural one, and from a land of relatively dispersed small cities to one increasingly dominated by larger cities with booming populations.
In addition to witnessing changes in the land, Thoreau and his contemporaries also saw significant changes in the cultural function of scientific observation. On 5 March 1853, Thoreau wrote in his journal about the changing role of science in his culture. At this point in his developing career, Thoreau had given public lectures on subjects ranging from literature to citizenship, and from nature to slavery. Also by 1853, he had published several poems, translations, and various essays, including a relatively lengthy one called “The Natural History of Massachusetts” (1842), which surveyed recent scientific publications concerning his home state. And he had published a book about a two‐week journey with his brother in a boat they had made themselves: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).
On 5 March 1853 in particular, Thoreau reflects in his journal on himself not as an author or an antislavery activist, but as a scientist. He writes that he had received a form – nearly a mass mailing, he assumes – asking him to describe for the Association for the Advancement of Science “what branch of science [he] was specially interested in.” The question gave Thoreau pause, as he believed that his rather capacious understanding of what it meant to experience the natural world would earn only scorn from the scientists writing from Washington, DC. He laments, “How absurd that though I probably stand as near to nature as any of them, and am by constitution as good an observer as most – yet a true account of my relation to nature should excite their ridicule only.” The problem, he writes, is that “they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher law.” Through his phrase “higher law,” Thoreau refers to philosophical, metaphysical, and even spiritual considerations of the human relationship to the natural environment. Given their different approaches to science, Thoreau replies to the survey in a way that “speak[s] to their condition and describe[s] to them that poor part of me which alone they can understand.” What he considers the richer aspect of his relation to nature, he keeps to himself, believing that it would only “make myself the laughing stock of the scientific community.” The changing world of professional science leads Thoreau to yield to what he believes the contemporary scientific community will understand – a “science,” that is, distinct from spiritual concerns (5: 469–470).
What Thoreau supposes is a fact now well known to the history of science: this period marked significant changes in understandings of the relationship between science and philosophical pursuits and, thus, between science and literature. Increasingly, science would concern itself with the objective study of the natural world, whereas the meaning and value of nature, as well as its relation to the human spirit – those matters related to the imagination and to subjectivity which Thoreau refers to as “higher law” – would be left to other ways of knowing the world, such as philosophy and literature. Yet his own adherence to a science that also valued higher law should not strike us as unusual, given his era. This is because the rending of literature (and the other humanities disciplines) from what we now think of as “science” is a fairly recent development in the history of Western culture. The world of literary study (and the other arts and humanities) may now seem quite distinct from the world of science, but in Thoreau’s early years this was not so clearly the case. Yet, as his March 1853 journal entry suggests, this situation was changing as science grew into a profession demanding the objective pursuit of certain types of knowledge. As Daston (1998) notes, “Successful art could and did emulate scientific standards of truth to nature, and successful science could emulate artistic standards of imaginative beauty,” “[b]ut whereas in the eighteenth century both artists and scientists had seen no conflict in embracing both standards simultaneously, the chasm that had opened up between the categories of objectivity and subjectivity in the middle decades of the nineteenth century […] forced an either/or choice” (86). This was a choice Thoreau did not wish to have to make.
Nonetheless, through the early decades of the nineteenth century the pursuit of knowledge of the natural world was most commonly called “natural history,” following the notion that to observe the phenomena of the material world was to familiarize oneself with the “story” of nature. This “story” included what we now think of as many separate disciplines within science; as Regis (1999) explains, natural history constituted “a broad area of scientific inquiry circumscribing the present‐day disciplines of meteorology, geology, botany, zoology, and ethnology.” In short, “Natural historians took for their subject matter all of what they called the Creation” – and in early America, the “Creation” was assumed to be physical evidence of specifically Judeo‐Christian conceptions of creation and of God. That is, natural history was presumed an inherently spiritual activity (xi).
In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that in the pre‐nineteenth‐century United States, most Euro‐Americans considered nature study a practice in piety, even a type of prayer. This certainly was the case for the influential eighteenth‐century New England minister Jonathan Edwards, for whom nature forcefully evinced God and his spirit. Clearly, to this way of thinking, human embeddedness in the natural world held deep spiritual meaning, and the pursuit of knowledge of nature could enrich one’s experience in the world and beyond. That humans found spiritual sustenance through non‐human nature was a long‐held cultural assumption that informed the rise of environmental literature.
Over time, science mounted challenges to this model of finding God in nature. The eighteenth‐century geological studies of Scotsman James Hutton provided one such challenge; they posited that the material world had existed for much longer than people had assumed and that the earth was a dynamic system of processes continuously at work. In the nineteenth century, the Englishman Charles Lyell furthered Hutton’s work, suggesting that earth had preexisted man. Together, and alongside other advances in knowledge, these findings eventually disputed long‐held beliefs that the earth existed as a fixed entity, or, as it was figured metaphorically in the early nineteenth century by William Paley, as a sort of timepiece or watch, once set by God in a predictable motion with a set of predictable dynamics, and perpetually continuing in that same state. Once Euro‐Americans encountered the idea that the earth had existed before humankind and that its landscapes had changed considerably over time, they could no longer hold to a static model of an earth that had been set in motion and simply persisted in its fixed routines. Instead, the earth seemed a dynamic and complicated system, one with changing processes and varied results over time. Not surprisingly, these findings also eventually tested the well‐accepted notion that the earth was created for humanity.
At this same time – that is, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – other thinkers were uncovering the workings of such phenomena as energy, electricity, planetary motion, chemistry, and, as the nineteenth century progressed, speciation and evolution, among other bodies of “scientific” knowledge. As this knowledge circulated through the reading public and became more widely embraced, the Western world had to further adapt many of its long‐standing assumptions about itself in relation to the rest of materiality. Whereas in 1691 the naturalist John Ray could title a book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, few would persist long in the belief that the natural world simply revealed God’s wisdom. How could this be the case if the natural world changed over time, if creatures and creation – including the landscape itself – changed and adapted to new conditions such as a changing climate? A watch designed by the creator was no longer an effective metaphor for the earth and its dynamic workings. Soon, many would question the entire notion that the material world existed in relation to any god at all, let alone as an embodiment or illustration of the Judeo‐Christian one.
These substantial cultural changes directly impacted amateur naturalists who nonetheless considered themselves skilled observers of nature, such as Thoreau. On the one hand, knowledge of the natural world was growing, and as that knowledge grew, so did the role that science and scientists would play in managing that knowledge. On the other hand, as Goldstein (1994) explains, until late in the nineteenth century even a self‐taught naturalist could make meaningful contributions to the advance of knowledge. In fact, “[d]ividing the community into professionals and amateurs based on individuals’ education, occupation, and society membership did not work until after 1900” (591). While eventually this new set of affairs left little place for the amateur natural historian to contribute to science, the professionalization of science was a gradual process – one that depended, somewhat ironically, on the work of amateur naturalists, like Thoreau.
Indeed, the early voices of literary environmentalism were Thoreau’s contemporaries and near‐contemporaries in amateur natural history: Susan Fenimore Cooper, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, and John Burroughs were among them, although there were others. Their warnings were scientifically informed and often emotionally moving, because they drew much meaning from what they witnessed in the changing landscape. They wrote so that others might notice natural phenomena as well, and so that those readers might find meaning and value in studying their own regions. And these writers of environmental literature were scientifically informed. They bridged, that is, science and higher law.
Two literary documents illustrate the blurry line between amateur and professional science straddled by environmental literature in the nineteenth‐century United States, and they also illustrate the deeply collaborative nature of literary‐natural history in this era. The first document is the 8 October 1852 entry from Thoreau’s journal. The second one is the 21 October 1850 letter from Spencer Fullerton Baird (1823–1887), who at the time served as assistant secretary to the newly created Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to the writer and naturalist Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813–1894) of Cooperstown, New York. Together, these documents demonstrate the unclear distinction between professional science and amateur naturalism in the nineteenth century, as well as the crucial role that individual amateur literary‐naturalists would play in shaping scientific environmental understanding in the young nation.
The first document, Thoreau’s journal entry of 8 October 1852, narrates an encounter that he had with a loon on Walden Pond:
As I was paddling along the N[orth] shore […] suddenly a loon sailing toward the middle a few rods in front set up his wild laugh – & betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle. […] So long winded was he so unweariable that he would immediately plunge again. […] He had time & ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deeper part. (5: 367–368)
Later, as he completed Walden (1854), Thoreau revised this entry, creating one of the most famous passages in all of US literature (1971: 234–36); but in its original journal form the passage continues with these seemingly inconsequential sentences: “A newspaper authority says a fisherman […] has caught loon in Seneca [L]ake N[ew]Y[ork] 80 feet beneath the surface with hooks set for trout. Miss [Susan Fenimore] Cooper had said the same” (5: 368). Here Thoreau reinforces his experience of a deep‐diving loon against both a “newspaper authority” and Susan Fenimore Cooper, who had recorded on the first pages of Rural Hours (1850) her own loon sighting and had similarly provided an accounting of records of the depths to which loons might dive (1998: 4–5). In his journal entry, Thoreau indicates his desire to situate his own observations within those of other naturalists, as well as his participation in a loose network of often self‐taught observers of nature who desire deeper understanding of the natural phenomena of the United States. Individuals such as Cooper and Thoreau would check their amateur observations against one another and against the published work of increasingly professional scientists.
The second document similarly illustrates the collaborative nature of deepening environmental understanding in the United States while also demonstrating how the professionalization of science depended upon the work of amateur nature observers such as Thoreau and Cooper. Baird’s letter reached Cooper just a few months following the anonymous publication of a book – Rural Hours – that would quickly earn Cooper recognition as one of the nation’s leading voices concerning the physical landscape. In her famous book, Cooper recounted in journal form one year spent in her rural village, featuring entries focused on the natural as well as the cultural worlds, demonstrating the integration of the two. As she describes the seasonal migrations of birds and the blooming times of plants, for example, she also describes the human traditions associated with certain seasons of the year. She notes the presence of plant and bird species native to the continent and points out others that result from Euro‐American colonization. She also reflects on how the local landscape has adapted to the presence of a growing population. She mentions issues that directly concern the physical environment, including plant and animal species that had become locally extinct and the environmental effects of deforestation and agriculture. And, as Thoreau noted, Cooper discusses the depths to which loons dive.
Cooper, like most women of her era, lacked both formal training in science and a university education – a fact that the scientist Spencer Fullerton Baird likely would have suspected when he wrote to introduce himself to the author of Rural Hours. As a naturalist, Cooper was taught only by her family, her extensive reading, and her attentive observations. Baird, on the other hand, was an established professional with university training and a building career that eventually would make him one of the most important scientists of his era. Despite that difference, Baird’s letter reveals that he saw Cooper’s book as a key contributor to the important scientific endeavor of charting the natural history of the nation. As Goldstein (1994) explains, Baird “undertook to build a national network of correspondents to aid the institution’s work in the earth and life sciences”; through letters such as those he wrote to Cooper, he “sought to marshal, direct, and support the combined efforts of America’s naturalists and natural history enthusiasts in almost every field” (576). In her period, then, Cooper was part of “the segment of the scientifically active population that facilitated” what Goldstein calls the “dramatic emergence of science as a modern profession” (574).
As Baird well knew, amateur natural‐historical writings such as those by Cooper and Thoreau grew out of a long transatlantic tradition of contemplative attentiveness to the natural world. In fact, he compliments Cooper in his letter by likening her Rural Hours to the work of Englishman Gilbert White, who combined attentiveness to the natural world with reflections on village life, cultural and agricultural traditions, and the specific habits of animals and plants. Like Cooper in Rural Hours, White – in his The Natural History of Selbourne (1789) – had lamented locally extinct species, counted bird nests as a means of monitoring bird populations, and blended human and natural history into a unified account of a specific place. Literary‐natural history had emerged from a proto‐scientific commitment to observing one’s immediate surroundings.
These gradual changes also altered the traditional relationship between nature study and expressions of spirituality. As the professionalization of science progressed, science would increasingly be divorced from the pursuit of Judeo‐Christian spirituality once endemic to natural history. In fact, just as Thoreau remarked in his journal of March 1853, explorations of spirituality or “higher laws” amid scientific pursuits would come to mark those pursuits as amateurish. As Keeney (1992: 100) notes, “As professionals abandoned an open adherence to natural theology, they increasingly viewed it as a distinguishing characteristic of amateurism.” Literary writers of the environment continued the tradition of infusing their observations of nature with expressions of their spiritual connectedness to nature, but as the century progressed their observations were taken less seriously as the stuff of science.
The changing understandings of science would affect the literature of environment, largely by categorizing the genre – given literature’s association with the imagination – in the realm of art rather than in the realm of science, which was increasingly considered to be a more meaningful contribution to knowledge and even to culture. Daston (1998) explains this division between an objective, professional science and a subjective, amateur science as centered on the role of the imagination (74) and further argues that the pursuit of science became the domain of a group as opposed to an individual (82–83). This shift represents a telling moment in intellectual history. At one time, an author could pursue simultaneously knowledge, imagination, and spirituality in writing that contained firsthand observations of the environment and explorations of the author’s own sense of wonder. Later, this would change: knowledge might belong to science, but the imagination and spirit would be set aside in any pursuit of scientific objectivity. Paradoxically, then, while the literature of environment increasingly existed outside of the world of science, it had emerged right out of the science once known as natural history. We might say that in its infancy, environmental literature helped create the world of science that later left it behind.
Perhaps most important about these cultural shifts is that they brought with them changing meanings of nature. We find nineteenth‐century writers grappling with this – attempting, that is, to articulate their understanding of nature’s meaning in their lives and the sources of their spiritual experience of the world, all in ways that fit the changing scientific culture. For example, whereas Thoreau notes pithily in his journal his relinquishment of traditional forms of religion – “I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature” (2: 55) – he also writes in Walden in more complex terms about his spiritual experience of nature:
Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But […] God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. (1971: 96–97)
These two passages illustrate what happens throughout the nineteenth century: a continued investment of nature with spirituality. However, increasingly that spirituality is blurred in terms of its representing any specific religious position.
Much literature of the environment would follow Thoreau’s model by pursuing a passion for living the fullest life possible in the context of a materiality that often exceeds our full comprehension. While the language of religious experience often infuses writings about the environment, that language is nonetheless frequently secularized, referring to a subjective fulfillment that is experienced through a felt connection of human to world, of self to surroundings. In her 28 July passage of Rural Hours, for example, Cooper had written what amounts to an essay‐length preservationist plea for trees and forests, and as she does so, she negotiates the many spheres of nature’s developing meanings. While she indulges her own view of the material realm as the creation of a traditional Christian God deserving of human respect and obedience, she also nods to those who find meaning in forests for their economic value; their aesthetic functions; their historic value as testament to an earlier wilderness condition; their role in teaching us about cycles of life, mortality, and what would become known as the principles of forest succession; their utility in terms of providing fuel and shelter; their service in terms of “shed[ding] repose over the spirit”; and their own variety in terms of providing homes to so many species (including, of course, tree species). She argues for the preservation of trees when she proclaims “the hewers of wood” “an unsparing race,” and then advocates thinning rather than clearing forests (1998: 125, 132). Like Thoreau, who in Walden would condemn many of his contemporaries for valuing busy‐ness over the true “necessaries of life” and who exhorts, “Simplify, simplify” (1971: 11, 91), Cooper condemns the “mere show and parade” – the luxuries that are assumed to mark civilization – and instead advocates “simplicity” and “common sense.” She also declares that trees have many “values,” in addition to “their market value in dollars and cents,” and it may be here that we most clearly see Cooper grasping toward what, in the twentieth century, Aldo Leopold would call in his Sand County Almanac (1949) a “land ethic,” or an environmental ethic (1989: 201). Cooper argues that the non‐economic values of forests “are connected with the civilization of a country” and have “importance in an intellectual and in a moral sense.” While she does not explicitly state what this “sense” is, she claims that preserved trees “will continue a good” to non‐human life forms “for more years, perhaps, than we can tell” (1998: 125–135). Here she suggests that trees serve a function in the natural world that may elude humanity’s comprehension, as well as its religious beliefs.
No longer presumed an embodiment of a god or a model for human morality, nature would acquire new meaning and value throughout the nineteenth century. For scientifically minded professionals, this meaning would likely reach toward facts and objectivity. For the amateur, studying nature could lead to wonder and subjectivity. While such stark distinctions among people never reflect the complexities of reality, and while certainly some scientists are driven by wonder and some amateurs by objectivity, historians of science nonetheless agree that this demarcation indicates the degree to which, in general, the professionalization of science brought with it the dismissal of imagination and spirituality. This has had tragic consequences for US culture, as the astute, place‐based observations and integrative perspectives of literary‐environmental writers have largely escaped the notice of science and have, no doubt as a result, been slow to enter the popular understanding of the physical world.
For example, had the insights of George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), a Vermont farmer, lawyer, and businessman (turned diplomat) been taken seriously by the public, the massive alterations of waterways and acidification of soils that have so plagued the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries might have been avoided. Concern over irreparable nineteenth‐century environmental damage is perhaps most thoroughly documented in Marsh’s Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864). Little read today, Man and Nature was the first book published in the United States to lay out most of the principles of ecology, and to read it now is to be shocked at the degree to which at least one mid‐nineteenth‐century citizen understood how thoroughly humanity was affecting the natural world. But as is always the case, one person is never ahead of his time; that is, Marsh did not attain an understanding that others did not at least in part share. Indeed, he drew on published studies from all over the Western world, as well as from his own observations of a changing landscape in Vermont, to reach his conclusions.
Marsh’s book anticipates many of the tenets of twentieth‐century ecology. Like Cooper, who had enumerated the plant species in the region that were being driven to local extinction by non‐native species, Marsh points to the perils of invasive species. He also describes the effects of what we now recognize to be the impacts of European exploration and settlement on plants, insects, fish, other aquatic lifeforms, and bird and other land‐animal species. Marsh notes the manner in which deforested landscapes inevitably lead to drier microclimates, and he offers much evidence for the relationship between tree cover and temperature, anticipating contemporary discussions of urban heat islands and decreasing soil moisture. He also issues the sorts of dire warnings we frequently hear today about the future of humanity on earth: “The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence […] would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species” (2003: 43). Like Cooper, who had blamed the “utilitarian age” that drove the United States to unnecessary deforestation (1998: 181), Marsh points in Man and Nature to the “instability of American life” as a contributing factor to unnecessary environmental destruction (2003: 279).
Whereas Thoreau had urged readers to “live deliberately” and Cooper encouraged people to “simplify” in the face of an industrializing culture of increasing commodification and commercialism that Marsh believed left life unstable, later writers such as John Muir (1838–1914) would face the challenge of preventing completely irreparable, large‐scale physical changes to specific sites. Muir would focus specifically on “despoiling gain‐seekers,” “the Almighty Dollar,” and “ravaging commercialism” as contributors to an increasing alienation from the nation’s physical environment that he saw as propelling massive human‐induced changes to the land (1912: 257, 262, 261). Muir’s founding of the Sierra Club and his popular writings educated readers about the Sierra Mountains and the glacial land‐ and seascapes of Alaska, and his work successfully urged the conservation of specific landscapes, such as Yosemite. Muir also, however, lamented the degradation of other places, such as the Hetch Hetchy Valley of California, and argued that unless people saw and experienced such locations, they were unlikely to support their protection. As he said of the Hetch Hetchy Valley before it was dammed, “So far as I have learned, few of all the thousands who have seen the [valley] and seek rest and peace in it are in favor of this outrageous scheme” (Muir 1912: 259). Unless people could see – or, at least, imagine – the variety of the natural world firsthand, Muir believed they were unlikely to preserve it. As he wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), “The most extravagant description I might give of this view to any one who has not seen similar landscapes with his own eyes would not so much as hint as its grandeur and the spiritual glow that covered it” (153). Still, Muir devoted much of his career to describing for readers the landscapes he experienced – mostly through periodical publications – so that he might witness to them from afar his spiritual experience of nature’s particulars.
Muir’s contemporary and fellow traveler to Alaska, John Burroughs (1837–1921), adopted a similar perspective on his fellow Americans and their alienation from non‐human nature. Although not as widely remembered as Muir, Burroughs was active in conservation efforts and brought his well‐trained eye to readers through his many and popular books of writings about the environment. Demonstrating his respect for accurate knowledge of the natural world, Burroughs also instigated the “nature fakers” controversy, in which he attacked other popular writers for their ill‐informed literary representations of the natural world. Burroughs valued direct observation, informed interpretation, and scientific accuracy: as he wrote in an essay called “Reading the Book of Nature” (1905), “In studying Nature, the important thing is not so much what we see as how we interpret what we see. Do we get at the true meaning of the facts? Do we draw the right inference? The fossils in the rocks were long observed before men drew the right inference from them. So with a hundred other things in nature and life” (231). Like Muir, Burroughs understood that close observation of the natural world demanded a perceiving, well‐trained eye and that, increasingly in his era, much of the population lacked a desire to see well.3
Given its criticism of human communities, as well as its association of experience in natural settings with an individual’s capacity to experience his or her own humanity most fully, environmental literature has often been criticized for expressing a foolish longing for an impossible relationship between humans and landscapes. These criticisms relate to others directed at Thoreau at the turn of the twentieth century, when he was dismissed as “a poor naturalist on the one hand” and “a failed creative artist” on the other, “because he could not keep the elementary distinctions between the two realms” – the “poetic” and the “scientific” – clear (Sattelmeyer 1980: xxv). Yet, as Sattelmeyer (1980) argues, this judgment stems less from Thoreau’s performance as scientist and writer and more from “our own implicit and unexamined assumption about the unbridgeable gap between scientific and imaginative truth” (xxvi). Such judgment stems, in other words, from the assumption that empirical science remains divorced from higher law. Such judgments also arise from cavalier dismissals of the human‐induced environmental changes that have occurred in our landscapes and have brought severe decreases to ecosystem resilience, as well as from the assumption that most of humanity does not seek meaningful relationship to the non‐human material world. Yet this last assumption seems unfounded, as many of today’s writers and intellectual leaders continue the tradition of conveying a sense of loss and grief in the face of environmental (and climate) disruption.
In his posthumously published essay “Walking” (1862), Thoreau asked, “Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?” (2007: 208). Both during and since his lifetime, the literature of the environment has undertaken the work of attempting to articulate, in our necessarily limited human way, a cosmos of becoming that, for all our efforts scientific and otherwise, continues to exceed our attempts at articulating its complexity and its meaning in our lives. Put differently, the literature of the environment has been an attempted convergence of science and higher law – that is, an attempt at expressing the meaning that a human being finds in encountering the facts of the material world. This is an endeavor both of natural history and of morality, of data and of feeling, of science and of spirit.
I wish to thank Chuck Yates and Samantha C. Harvey for their feedback on early versions of this chapter.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 2 (TRAVEL WRITING); CHAPTER 5 (RALPH WALDO EMERSON, MARGARET FULLER, AND TRANSCENDENTALISM); CHAPTER 12 (THE LITERATURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM).