Writing in the New York Times in 1957, economist David Cushman Coyle laid out the case for wilderness preservation in an era of rampant resource exploitation. Once America’s remaining pristine places had been mined, drilled, or logged, he pointed out, “it may be impossible to restore [them] by any human agency, or by nature in any foreseeable future.” Left intact, they would protect watersheds, prevent soil erosion, provide refuge for plants and animals, and offer a living laboratory of genetics, zoology, botany, and geology. The argument was farsighted in the late 1950s, but Coyle’s choice of the Times as a vehicle for this message is even more suggestive. Most of New York City’s nearly eight million residents would never travel to these remote corners of the continent, and they were likely to benefit more from the material resources these places could yield than from the ecological or recreational rewards they promised. Still, Coyle assumed his readers would “find pleasure and reassurance simply in knowing that such untouched places exist.” They were, he thought, more interested in the idea of wilderness than in its potential personal benefit.1
That same year wilderness advocate Olaus Murie spoke before a congressional committee that would present to Congress the nation’s first wilderness bill in 1958. Murie, like Coyle, made his argument not so much by listing the personal benefits of wilderness preservation as by defending the idea of wilderness, this time by quoting iconic figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Law Olmsted, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold. He ended his plea with Henry David Thoreau’s ringing proclamation, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Speaking before the same committee, Representative John Saylor of Pennsylvania again quoted Thoreau and explained that his famous book, Walden, was set “in the wild lands around Concord,” where Thoreau first discovered the “the tonic of wilderness.”2
These presentations foreshadowed a subtle tension in the emerging environmental movement. As Coyle and Murie believed, Americans were willing to sacrifice economic resources to protect a nature they would almost surely never experience, but as Saylor suggested, they also wished to experience the tonic of wilderness at a deeply personal level—in a world, perhaps, as familiar as Thoreau’s Walden Woods. The environmental activist Ray Mungo faced this tension on a canoe trip commemorating Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1970. He made the trip because Thoreau used rivers as abstract symbols of free-flowing nature, but Mungo’s journey was in fact very concrete; it ended just south of Lowell with his canoe wedged between slimy rocks and abandoned cars and surrounded by “bobbing clumps of feces.”3 How could wildness preserve the world when Thoreau’s own backyard was so hopelessly polluted? The tension between abstract nature and concrete nature—between wilderness imagining and environmental living—complicated Thoreau’s legacy in the 1970s. He presented a compelling vision of wilderness as a realm of personal freedom but formulated this idea from the vantage of his well-trammeled Walden Woods. Only rarely did scholars, critics, or partisans concern themselves with the ironies of this juxtaposition, but when they did, they discovered a formula that would have pleased Saylor and perhaps even Ray Mungo as he sat in his canoe among the concrete blocks and rusting shopping carts in the lower Merrimack River.
As partisans like Murie and Saylor knew, wilderness preservation was a war of words, and Thoreau’s eight resounding words—“In Wildness is the preservation of the World”—were among the most powerful ever written in the defense of nature. By the 1970s Walden had been published in 150 editions and translated into every major language; his words had enormous agency, and environmentalists, like the activists of the 1960s, were quick to enlist them. Environmentalists inherited from that stormy earlier decade a Thoreau branded by Left and Right as a protester, reformer, anarchist, individualist, idealist, and counterculturist, and out of these many possibilities they forged a new, more uniform symbol for the environmental age. But fitting Thoreau to the procrustean bed of environmental advocacy took some doing.4 Just how he became part of the warp and weave of American environmental consciousness is a complicated story.
By the 1970s Thoreau had been firmly established as America’s foremost nature writer, but the decade brought a profound change in how writers and scholars approached the connection between Thoreau and nature. As early as the 1940s they were beginning to perceive him as a nature advocate. Although postwar Americans were not particularly sensitive to environmental issues, the legacy of New Deal water, soil, timber, and recreational conservation lingered, and organizations such as the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Izaak Walton League, and Audubon Society were beginning to raise concerns not simply about animals, fish, and birds but about their habitats as well. Others voiced fears that the rapidly growing postwar economy would exhaust the world’s natural resources. In 1954 Elizabeth Keiper added a somber note to the centennial of Walden’s publication in pointing out that the author would have been dismayed at the difficulty of saving even “a bit of forest, a bird sanctuary, a pond or a swamp where the ways and the meaning of the natural world may be learned.”5
Statements such as this spread through the media, as conservation advocates discovered a trove of supportive ideas in Thoreau’s writing. In 1957 Wayne State University professor Leo Stoller published an influential book titled After Walden: Thoreau’s Changing Views on Economic Man in which he positioned his subject as a founder of the American conservation tradition. After living at Walden Pond, according to Stoller, Thoreau realized that it was impossible to overcome his alienation from nature without addressing his alienation from society. He began recording conversations with farmers and handicraft workers who still followed the old ways, and this taught him that an intimate knowledge of nature’s dynamics could be the basis of a new agricultural and industrial order. In Stoller’s analysis, Thoreau was less interested in the “untouchable sacred grove” than in the well-managed woodlot, and to this end he filled his journal with thoughts on ways to properly manage Concord’s forest resources. He groped his way, as Stoller said, “to the threshold of a fundamentally modern forestry” not by idealizing nature but by showing his neighbors how to work with it. Although he was criticized at the time for his strained interpretations, Stoller effectively presented Thoreau’s passion for nature in ways appropriate to the emerging ethic of environmentalism.6
This view was popularized in two new biographies in the years surrounding Stoller’s book: William Condry’s 1954 Thoreau and August Derleth’s Concord Rebel, published in 1962. Both argued that conservation was a major theme in Thoreau’s later journal entries, where he recorded, among other things, the devastating effect of human intervention on passenger pigeons, fish, and forests. The decisive turn in Thoreau’s reputation came in 1963 with publication of Stewart Udall’s The Quiet Crisis. In this widely read historical account, itself a benchmark in environmentalist thinking, the interior secretary used the thoughts of explorers, scholars, philosophers, and politicians to piece together a national conservation tradition. Emerson, he wrote, urged scholars to create a national literary tradition by responding “to the rhythms of the . . . earth,” and this inspired his Concord neighbor to champion the cause of nature. Like earlier partisans who enlisted Thoreau in their causes, Udall found his intractable individualism a source of frustration. “With his negative feelings about government and politics, he failed to perceive that it would take government action to stop the destruction.” Nevertheless, “ideas must precede action, and sometimes the seeds of thought have a long period of germination.”7
On a more scholarly plane, researchers were beginning to express a greater appreciation for Thoreau’s contribution to science. When his journals were first published in 1906, naturalists such as John Burroughs and Bradford Torrey found several misidentifications in his bird and plant species and puzzled over this casual attitude toward scientific detail, but as natural history shifted from taxonomy to habitat and species behavior, commentators overlooked this vagueness in light of Thoreau’s contribution to these new fields. Once they began looking, they found that the later journals were crowded with fine-grained descriptions of physical nature. To literary scholars, this was evidence of Thoreau’s waning literary creativity. “The last years of the Journal are crammed with tedious and fruitless observations of nature, as if he no longer had creative ideas,” Brooks Atkinson complained. But to others, the same entries signaled a rediscovery of nature. Horace Taylor described them as thrumming with “imaginative possibilities in science.” The novelist Charles Stewart, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1935, saw him as “capable of the most painstaking routine of the scientist.” He measured snow depths, charted lake bottoms, counted tree rings, inspected birds’ nests, and kept careful records of his findings. Those who dismissed these details as minutiae failed to appreciate the scientific implications. “There is no such thing as an unimportant fact,” Stewart wrote. “Its significance may depend upon how it fits in with other facts; but you have to get your facts first. . . . Eventually something will come of them.” Thoreau brought together his two passions—science and poetry—into a single powerful vision, not unlike the vision required to see nature as an ecological whole.8
Scholars and popularizers viewed Thoreau in the 1950s as a conservationist, but he was not yet an environmentalist. As Stoller saw it, he “protested vigorously against the deforestation of his native Middlesex County” but argued the point by appealing to his neighbors’ economic well-being rather than to the trees’ role in the larger scheme of nature.9 Still, there were some in this era who saw a glimmer of ecological thinking in the balance he struck between poetry and science. Thoreau was first identified as an ecologist in a 1942 Quarterly Review of Biology article by Edward S. Deevey Jr., who pointed to his studies of plant seasonality, tree growth, water temperatures, and thermal stratification and concluded that Thoreau was both “scientist and mystic.” It was precisely this mix of holistic and particular thinking, Deevey thought, that made him a pioneer in the field of ecology. In 1947 no less an ecologist than Aldo Leopold labeled him “the father of phenology in this country,” but the strongest case for Thoreau’s ecological understanding was made in a 1951 Scientific Monthly article by Philip Whitford and Kathryn Whitford, the former an ecologist and the latter a literary scholar. Taking issue with a host of earlier critics like Burroughs and Torrey, Whitford and Whitford argued that Thoreau developed a scientific method appropriate to the standards of his own times: he observed closely, questioned the accuracy of his own observations, and kept extended records. He studied a single plant repeatedly over several seasons in order to understand its entire life cycle, and by careful observation of stumps and sprout wood he could envision the past composition of a woodlot cut three times over. Charles Metzger, writing in the Annals of Science, and Raymond Adams, writing again in Scientific Monthly, concluded that Thoreau made important methodological breakthroughs in showing links between plants, animals, soils, and terrain. He was an ecologist, according to Henry Hayden Clark, “before the name was even invented.”10
In a 1954 article titled “Thoreau, Field Naturalist,” Alec Lucas reminded readers that Thoreau observed nature by participating in it—by assuming he was part of the world he explored. Henry Schnittkind and Dana Schnittkind similarly pointed to his encounter with a fox in the snowy landscape near Walden Pond. His decision to chase the fox was partly scientific, they observed, but it was also a “contest in speed and cunning between two friends.” In this and countless other ways, Thoreau made it clear that animals were brethren and the woods his home—oikos.11
The idea that humans were part of and thus ethically responsible for the ecologies they inhabited appeared intermittently in the scientific literature since the mid-twentieth century. George Perkins Marsh, writing in 1864, considered the implications of nature’s interconnectedness by describing the effects of deforestation on climate, soils, lakes, and streams, and in the following decades a growing number of scientists, including Arthur Tansley in ecosystem analysis, Aldo Leopold and C. Hart Merriam in game management and predator control, Charles Elton in animal relations, Eugene Odum in ecosystem stability, and Henry Cowles in ecological succession, considered the moral implications of their research. In 1935 University of Oklahoma ecologist Paul Sears published a popular study titled Deserts on the March, in which he laid out the principles of ecology as they related to human activities such as deforestation. The following year the economist Stuart Chase published Rich Land Poor Land: A Study of Waste in the Natural Resources of America, challenging the myth of inexhaustibility. According to the historian Paul Brooks, “Chase was less concerned with the esthetic and spiritual values of nature than he was with the bedrock question: ‘Can we find a new ecology which respects nature and still permits technical progress?’”12
In the postwar era ecologists were among the first to recognize the effects of rapid population growth on global resources. The understanding that organisms “reproduce far beyond their capacity to survive” was a basic principle of ecology, and humans were no exception. In 1948 Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society and son of the famed naturalist Henry Fairfield Osborn, published a best-selling study titled Our Plundered Planet, arguing that each diminishing resource had to be considered part of a greater “biological scheme.” William Vogt, director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, expressed similar concerns in his widely read Road to Survival. According to Vogt, the “waster’s psychology” in postwar America amounted to a form of “lunacy—even criminal lunacy.”13
The discipline was further politicized in the 1950s as scientists assessed the ecological implications of nuclear fallout and chemical pesticide and herbicide applications. While the discussion of these topics remained largely within scientific circles, a few sounded the alarm, pointing out that both pesticides and radioisotopes diffused rapidly and broadly through air currents, water circulation, and food cycles; both grew in potency as they traveled up the food chain; and both had indeterminate long-term consequences. Neither could be contained after destroying the intended victim, and the indiscriminate use of both was escalating. “We once thought that dilution of man’s wastes into the earth’s vast currents of air and water was the simple answer to all problems of waste disposal,” one group of ecologists wrote. “We know now that these currents are not vast enough to handle safely all the wastes and poisons man is releasing into them.”14 The point was driven home by images of the earth as a solitary planet hanging in the void of space taken during the 1969 moon landing.
Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring was a benchmark in politicizing the science of ecology. Given the ivory-tower outlook that characterized science in the early 1960s, it was perhaps necessary that this turn toward advocacy came in the form of a woman entering a predominantly male profession. As biographer Linda Lear argues, Carson’s role as a female and outsider in a male-dominated scientific discipline gave her critical perspective, and she used this to apply her scientific understanding to the question of pesticide use and its impact on birds, fish, and, ultimately, humans. According to an earlier biographer, Frank Graham, Silent Spring “leaped onto the best-seller lists almost immediately after publication,” sparking a controversy that divided the scientific community, spilled out into the popular media, and landed this “improbable revolutionary,” as Lear calls her, at the epicenter of an acrimonious debate over the use of chemicals and the health of the environment. Those invested in these chemical applications challenged her conclusions, but as the implications became clear, regulations were tightened, certain pesticides were banned, and a new public attitude toward chemical use took shape. The book, according to Graham, “made large areas of government and the public aware for the first time of the interrelationship of all living things and the dependence of each on a healthy environment for survival.”15
Silent Spring fused the study of ecology to the cause of environmentalism. Carson’s male colleagues, “almost to a man, . . . deserted her before the Establishment which controls the funds that keep scientists fat,” and with the agricultural and chemical industries, the Department of Agriculture, and most of the scientific community on one side and Carson on the other, it “remained for the amateurs, the naturalists, and the rare scientist of independent temperament” to mount her defense. While her citizen-defenders were forging the principles of ecology into a new militant ideology, a younger generation of scientific ecologists was moving out of the ivory tower and into the public sphere. In a 1969 anthology titled The Subversive Science: Essays toward an Ecology of Man, Paul Sears proposed that any ecologist willing to consider humans a part of their ecosystem would be, in the end, an activist.16
The debate over Silent Spring resonated with the new view of Thoreau as a scientist, and in fact there were similarities that linked him to Rachel Carson. Both pursued natural history as a way of getting closer to fellow living organisms, and both possessed, as biographer Mark Hamilton Lytle says, a “touch of the rebellious spirit.” Both were loners and dissenters, and both saw nature as an alternative to materialist encumbrances. And across this great temporal divide, both saw nature as a “web of complex biological relations precious in itself and essential to human survival.” Carson’s notoriety drew attention to Thoreau’s ecological insights, and the similarities between the two, particularly the connection between science and advocacy, underscored Thoreau’s relevance as an activist-ecologist.17
In the years following publication of Silent Spring, Thoreau’s multilayered approach to understanding nature—as scientist, seeker, philosopher, and poet—gained greater visibility. Writing in 1965, the University of Illinois English professor Nina Baym emphasized the moral implications in Thoreau’s studies: like a good ecologist, he looked for relationships rather than discrete phenomena, and like a good poet, he drew moral and spiritual lessons from these relationships. His insistence on precise measurement, his search for higher meaning, and his yearning for mystic communion all pointed to a deep ethical regard for plants, animals, birds, and fish. In this decade ecology blossomed into a popular concern for the totality of nature and the survival of humanity, and Thoreau’s newly discovered ecological sensibilities fitted brilliantly into this new environmentalist outlook. He became, in essence, an ecologically informed advocate for nature—an environmentalist.18
This image was sharpened among academics and educated lay readers when the environmental historian Donald Worster published a wide-ranging history of ecological thought titled Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Idea in 1977. Worster situated Thoreau in a larger search for “holistic or integrated perception” of nature that began with Gilbert White’s 1787 Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. In a section titled “The Subversive Science,” Worster argued that Thoreau’s increasingly methodological approach to field study and his self-conscious immersion in the Concord ecosystem led to a proto-environmentalist understanding of nature. It was becoming apparent to Thoreau, according to Worster, that “man had an enormously greater power to disrupt and exterminate than an earlier, more complacent generation had assumed.” Like Alec Lucas, Worster saw Thoreau as imbedding himself in the ecologies he explored and emerging with a clear understanding of the importance of all natural creation.19
The environmental movement was a response to the revelations in Silent Spring and to a series of dramatic pollution events that kept nature in the news for most of the 1960s and 1970s. Pollution first appeared in newspaper headlines in 1948 when a haze of sulfur dioxide emissions from nearby steel plants killed twenty people and hospitalized more than six hundred in Donora, Pennsylvania. In 1953 smog in New York City led to additional deaths, and two years later Congress passed the nation’s first air pollution–control act, followed in 1956 with the first meaningful attempt at water-pollution control. In the West, rapid industrialization spurred by federal defense contracts and massive dam-building and irrigation projects changed the complexion of both city and country. These developments brought prosperity and optimism but also fierce resentment, as dams blocked passage for migratory fish and flooded iconic canyons. Uranium and mineral mining scared the landscape, and aboveground nuclear testing spread toxic radioisotopes throughout the Great Basin. The prospect of even more dams on the Colorado, Green, and Yampa Rivers drew nationwide protests.20
By the late 1960s environmentalism—political ecology—had become more confrontational. Civil rights and antiwar protest had changed the tenor of American politics, and the strident character of these political activities boosted confidence in grassroots environmental organizing. People across the nation took to the streets in campaigns aimed at protecting the earth, and mainstream conservation organizations became more vocal about dams, oil spills, pollution, offshore drilling, nuclear power generation, solid waste disposal, and unregulated chemical use. These erstwhile protectors of birds, fish, and animals became the backbone of a new, more aggressive environmental crusade.21
Beginning with a White House Conference on Natural Beauty in May 1965 and passage of the Wilderness Act that same year, the Johnson administration began taking steps to correct some of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. In 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency was founded, and this touched off a long legislative campaign for air and water standards, more effective solid waste management, and land-use regulation. The federal government addressed the issue of pesticides and toxic contaminants, and under the terms of the earlier Limited Test Ban Treaty restricted aboveground nuclear testing. Dam building, national forest management, and other federal projects were brought under systematic public review.22
In keeping with the mood of the nation, Thoreau’s popular image as an ecologist assumed confrontational overtones. The local issue that shaped this more aggressive image was a battle over recreational development at Walden Pond. If, as historian Kent Curtis claims, the Walden woods became synonymous with wilderness and love of nature in the environmental decade, it was partly because of a classic environmental battle over the pond between 1957 and 1960.23 Emerson had purchased the land around the pond in the 1840s, and in subsequent years it served as both a commemorative retreat and a recreational space for the surrounding communities. In 1922 Emerson’s daughter Edith arranged for her father’s holdings, along with those of the Heywood and Forbes families, to be given to the state as a reserve to memorialize Emerson and Thoreau and to provide recreational access to the pond—as long as no facilities intruded on the pond’s woodland character. Over the next two decades the county commissioners added a bathhouse and dock at the south end of the pond. The development raised no vocal protest, but townspeople paused when the city government approved a trailer park, a run of hot-dog stands and filling stations, and a town dump in the neighborhood. In the 1950s recreational use grew ever more intense, with as many as ten thousand visitors picnicking at the pond on hot summer Sundays. Newsweek magazine put the dilemma succinctly: locals desperately needed relief from the spreading concrete, yet they found themselves at odds with the “relative few who wish to share the tranquility that Thoreau knew.”24
Although writers continued to romanticize the pond, its magic was no match for the recreational pressures closing in around it. Thoreau enthusiast Robert Whitcomb made a pilgrimage to the cairn in the woods in 1931 and was shocked by the casual use of this sacred space. “The world has worn a path to [Thoreau’s] . . . door,” he remarked, “—a concrete path.” E. B. White likewise visited the pond and composed a mock letter to Thoreau: “I knew I must be nearing your woodland retreat when the Golden Pheasant lunchroom came into view [along with] . . . Sealtest ice cream, toasted sandwiches, hot frankfurters, waffles, tonics and lunches.” In 1951 naturalist Edwin Way Teale wound his way through a thickening ring of hot-dog stands, restaurants, motor cabins, and parking lots and stood aghast at the weekend litter—“fearful and wonderful evidence of America’s high standard of living,” as he put it. The complaint about commercialism, a constant murmur since the 1870s, became a clamor in the 1950s.25
In response to these recreational pressures, in 1957 the Massachusetts Legislature voted $50,000 to “improve” the pond, and almost immediately county commissioners ordered bulldozers in to scrape clear an acre and a half of slope adjacent to the beach and push tons of topsoil and gravel into the bathing area. Commission chair Thomas Brennan assured the public that the hillside would be revegetated, but even he acknowledged the eyesore. Brennan also suggested a blacktop road to the beach, an expanded bathhouse, an additional parking lot, more picnic tables and benches, creosoted timber bank shoring, and roads through the woods to haul boats to the pond, along with a replica of Thoreau’s cabin and removal of the “very unsightly” cairn that marked the original site.26
The Thoreau Society met in Concord only a few days after the bulldozers made their way to the beach. Its annual meeting hosted the ambassador from India, who “looked sadly around at the spot which Gandhi had said he wanted to visit above all others.” The society formed a Save Walden Committee, retained a lawyer, filed an injunction, and began circularizing newspapers across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Within days Concord local politics became international news. One report contrasted the “provincial, narrow minds of the present-day commissioners” with the “universal minds of Emerson and Thoreau,” and the Ottawa Gazette’s Brian Cahill quoted Thoreau: “A man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.’” Mail flooded into Concord from all parts of the country, and with the nation watching, the Chamber of Commerce voted to support the Save Walden Committee, claiming that the pond was a “focal point for countless visitors to our town who come here hoping to experience the solitude and nobility of this great American shrine.”27
Scholars from around the country weighed in. Morris Longstreth, author of Henry Thoreau: American Rebel, reminded Americans that they were already stigmatized as a materialistic people willing to sacrifice “natural beauty . . . to utility every time,” and Frederic Babcock encouraged lovers of great literature to unite in resisting the effort to “obliterate this seat of American culture.” Harvard’s Perry Miller dismissed the complaints, arguing that the pond served more people as a recreation area than as a literary sanctuary, but the Michigan State University historian Russell Nye expressed astonishment that “Thoreau’s own woods” had been “corrupted by the forces of society which he so brilliantly and acidly denounced.” Walden Pond suddenly loomed large as a national treasure, and Thoreau emerged from the controversy a confrontational conservationist.28
In May 1960 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court determined that the commission had acted in violation of the original bequest and ordered a halt to the excavation. In July 1965 the reservation was designated a National Historic Landmark, and in 1975 it came under management of the Massachusetts Department of Natural Resources, which proved more sensitive to its unique character. Still, the county refused to repair the hillside, and for the next twenty-two years the damaged slope remained barren and exposed. Concord’s Mary Sherwood, who had become America’s first certified female forester in 1934, formed the Walden Pond Society in 1978 and renamed it Walden Forever Wild in 1980. With the help of local volunteers and Girl and Boy Scouts, Sherwood, nearly eighty years of age, began filling in gullies, planting trees and native shrubs, and carrying buckets of water to irrigate the seedlings. Maneuvering among beachgoers, Forever Wild volunteers completed the rehabilitation.29
The controversy over these few acres of land and water became an important milestone in environmental protection. It proved that even small victories were important in the “ceaseless battle [waged] on a thousand fronts.” It gave hope to antiquarian groups that historic and literary sites had legal standing, and it served notice to planners, public officials, and developers that environmental opposition could be quickly mobilized on a national and international scale when precious resources were threatened. Perhaps most important, it showed that nature in familiar, even heavily trafficked, places was indeed precious. As Representative John Saylor intimated in his 1957 speech, it was at this pond, less than two miles from his home, that Thoreau found the true tonic of wilderness. Toward the end of the Walden dispute, the journalist and conservationist John B. Oakes wrote in the New York Times that Americans were “suddenly . . . no longer so wealthy as we had thought in unspoiled natural resources. . . . Even Walden Pond itself was grubbed up and poached upon, until some outraged citizens of Massachusetts finally took up the arms of the law.” It would take “desperate measures,” he thought, to “save a little scenery, a little forest, a little land in its original state,” but Walden—and Thoreau—showed that victory in small battles was both possible and significant.30
In Concord planners responded to the Walden dispute by protecting other open spaces. When crews marked trees for road widening or contractors submitted plans for housing projects, citizens besieged the select board with letters, and often the trees or lands were spared. In 1966 public donations allowed Harvard University to purchase six hundred acres of the Estabrook woods in the northwestern section of town, while land trusts acquired another hundred acres as part of the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Other Thoreau haunts—Fairhaven Hill, Going’s Swamp, Owl’s Nest Swamp, and the Walden woods—remained accessible to the public. The inspiration for these measures, a local citizen explained, was “all there” in Walden.31
Conservationists won the battle of Walden, but as Oakes suggested, there were similar threats everywhere, and in the 1970s environmentalists organized across the country to protect nearby nature.32 Places similar to Walden Pond inspired battles to tighten zoning laws, expand park systems, and create green belts and river and wetland protection zones. Land trusts worked with private owners to acquire woods and forests, schoolchildren planted trees along stream banks, and volunteer organizations helped with landscaping. In each case preservationists invoked the legacy of Thoreau, generally by citing his invocation that “each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses—a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.”33
Thoreau’s words slipped seamlessly into the rhetoric of these local preservationist campaigns, but his credentials as a wilderness advocate were not especially sound. While other naturalists of his time were traversing the uncharted spaces in the Great West, he remained tethered to the hills and hollows of his own hometown, content with wildlands only one or two miles from home. Howard Mumford Jones reminded readers that almost daily he interrupted his “life in the woods” at the pond to return to Concord for meals, odd jobs, or conversation with friends. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was a commentary on humanity rather than a study of wild rivers, and subsequent publications focused on the human drama more than the perils and pleasures of primitive travel. The “wilderness lover,” John Hildebridle concluded, was “afraid to leave Concord.34 In fact, John Muir was far better fitted as an icon of American wilderness values. He not only explored the pathless canyons of the High Sierra but also spearheaded the effort to save them. Although Thoreau longed to protect Concord’s woods and fields from avaricious neighbors, he by no means made this his life’s work. Why, then, did Thoreau rise to the pinnacle of wilderness iconography alongside Muir?
The movement to protect wilderness began in the 1920s, when district foresters began setting aside primitive areas in the national forests for recreational purposes. In 1951 Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society called for congressional legislation to protect undeveloped open spaces in national forests and national parks, and in 1958 Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Representative John Saylor of Pennsylvania introduced a wilderness bill in Congress. The movement gained popularity in the 1960s coincident with a backpacking craze brought on by an expansion in leisure time, the emergence of a vigorous outdoor industry specializing in lightweight and portable camping equipment and apparel, and what New York Times commentator Oscar Godbout called an “atavistic impulse to live in a tent.”35
The wilderness movement was accompanied by a new generation of books depicting the experience of nature in rugged and remote regions. Wilderness travelers such as Bob Marshall, William Byron Mowery, and Sigurd Olson described the desolate beauty of undisturbed places where the allure of the land depended in good part on its unforgiving, indeed unwelcoming, character. Given his intense localism, Thoreau was somewhat out of place in this literature, but he was nevertheless quoted widely. Sierra Club director Michael Frome, for instance, used his words frequently but framed them in ways that would have been unfamiliar to the Concord naturalist. In Frome’s vision, wilderness was not a source of self-enlightenment or transcendent thought but rather a rare opportunity for self-mastery and mastery over nature. Wilderness was the thrill of the unplanned moment, the expectation of danger, and the apprehension of beauty amid a harsh natural environment.36
Thoreau gained popular recognition in this new wilderness literature, but academics also associated him with wilderness, particularly after the publication of Wilderness and the American Mind in 1967 by the historian Roderick Nash. In a book surveying wilderness thinking from biblical times on, Nash devoted portions of two chapters to Thoreau’s thoughts on the subject, beginning with the proclamation “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” America, Nash explained, “had not heard the like before,” and in pioneering the romance of wilderness, Thoreau “came to grips with issues which others had only faintly discerned.” The essay “Walking,” according to Nash, was a “classic early call for wilderness preservation” in which Thoreau presented primitive nature as a realm of spiritual truths and confessed his unease at the “disappearance of wild country.” Used widely as a college text in the 1970s, Wilderness and the American Mind placed Thoreau firmly in the tradition of wilderness thinkers.37
In light of the rising interest in wilderness, scholars and activists turned to Thoreau’s Maine woods experience—his only encounter with a truly wild place—for inspiration. The first of the three essays that made up The Maine Woods was based on an 1846 trip up the Penobscot West Branch in the company of an uncle surveying timber prospects. A second trip in 1853 took Thoreau across Moosehead Lake and into the upper West Branch territory, and in 1857 he traveled as far as the headwaters of the north-flowing Allagash River. Published shortly after his death and appearing regularly thereafter in new editions, The Maine Woods yielded any number of vivid aphorisms attesting to the spiritual value of wild nature, but as an endorsement of the wilderness experience, it was confusing. To even the casual reader, it was evident that Thoreau was not at home in this vast and dreary place. He acknowledged at the outset that there would be “no sauntering off to see the country,” and indeed he stuck mostly to the rivers, trails, and haul roads carved out by north woods lumbermen and river drivers.38 In his Concord writings he had carefully crafted the illusion that he was part of the nature he explored; in Maine he was an outside observer traveling under the watchful eye of woodsmen and Indian guides and seldom venturing into the forest itself—except to get lost.
Nowhere was this ambiguity more apparent than in his September 1846 ascent of Mount Katahdin. He first saw the mountain “looming almost menacingly in the distance” from the lower West Branch of the Penobscot River. The party camped near the base, and Thoreau set out alone for the peak, working his way up over a thick growth of dwarf spruce. He ascended to the high tableland, and across this immense space he spied the summit, still distant and barely visible through the mist. Standing astride the barren rocks, he realized that wilderness was indeed “stark with menace and mystery.” There was nothing metaphorical about this windswept, cloud-raked field of boulders, and this terrifying sense of barrenness yielded, as the literary historian R. D. Richardson wrote, “one of the best statements in American literature about what happens when one comes face to face with the primeval world of matter and force.”39
Thoreau had climbed the mountain expecting, as always, to use his observations as a foundation for exploring higher truths through analogy and correspondence, but as he stood bracing against the driving mist, struggling to describe the scene, his thoughts turned to classical mythology’s nonhumans or prehumans: Cyclops, Prometheus, Caucasus, Aeschylus. The aggregation of loose rocks and stubble on the tableland yielded none of the rich human metaphors and associations that animated his Concord woods. True wilderness, he concluded, was not nature but the primal inorganic material out of which nature was made—“raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry.” Where poets and painters before him had kindled the mountain sublime into soaring inspirational themes, Thoreau felt empty.40
On his descent, he passed through a swath of recently burned land, and it was in this dynamic patch of early succession growth, rather than on the barren mountainside, that he reconnected with the regenerative natural forces that he so admired in the cutover forests of Concord. This rather mundane encounter, ironically, inspired the passage most readers associate with his wilderness image: “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. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can.” From this mountain sojourn he returned to Concord, convinced that the poet must, “from time to time, . . . drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.” But needless to say, this was not the wilderness Olaus Murie and John Saylor had in mind when they invoked his name before Congress in 1957.41
The Katahdin passages have been subject to more than a century of critical commentary, with no consensus on their full meaning. Thoreau clearly gained a stronger appreciation for nature’s elemental energies, and no doubt he crafted this seemingly disordered description as carefully as he did all his writing. As Victor Friesen points out, he borrowed this imagery from Alexander Henry’s 1809 Travels and Adventures in Canada, in which he found a description of huge rocks scattered randomly as in a “warfare of Titans.” Like Henry, Thoreau carefully shaped his wilderness images to appeal to a middle-class readership titillated by Miltonian allusions, but this has not stopped scholars from ferreting out deep personal meanings in the words. According to John Blair and Augustus Trowbridge, Katahdin became “a symbol in Thoreau’s mind of the element in nature that defied his understanding,” and it troubled his writing for years. Nash claimed that the experience sharpened Thoreau’s thinking about the “savage and civilized conditions of man,” and as James McIntosh saw it, his “straining attempt to humanize the wilderness” failed as he stood atop the mountain. Leo Stoller claimed that the experience stripped nature of its mystic overtones; it was no longer romantic or mystical but simply a material resource, subject to the conservation ideas he began formulating when he returned to Concord.42
Thoreau clearly found the Katahdin wilderness transforming but in ways perhaps too subtle to be understood in the heat of the 1970s preservationist crusades. On Katahdin he realized, for the first time, that true wilderness was completely separate from humanity. Taken aback by the severity and indifference of Katahdin’s barren landscape, he came to the conclusion that the “mighty streams, precipitous, icy, savage,” that fell from its rock-strewn ravines were like the wild energies that replenished the soul of the poet.43 But those who massaged these words into a call for preservation missed the point that the panoramic sublime also ruled out any personal contact with nature. Atop Katahdin he learned that wilderness fed the poet’s soul, but his deeper sympathies lay with wildness—a subtly different form of inspiration he experienced in his own Concord backyard.
In the 1960s Thoreau’s adaptability enhanced his reputation as a champion of civil rights; in the 1970s this same quality left preservationists free to mold his powerful phrases, however inconsistent, into modern environmentalist slogans. As Paul Oesher wrote in Living Wilderness, he “prized the wilderness and saw in its preservation the hope of the world, yet he took comfort in the warmth of Concord village.” His chemistry, Oesher concluded, required “both positive and negative ions.”44 Thus, despite the ambiguities, The Maine Woods became a classic in American wilderness literature. For some, the three essays simply affirmed the adventure of backcountry travel. William Condry set the precedent for this in his 1954 biography: “He stayed in settlers’ outposts, learned to navigate a batteau in the rapids, made long and strenuous portages round waterfalls, rowed miles along the lakes by moonlight, slept under the stars by log-fires, watched ospreys and bald eagles by day and listened to wolves and owls by night.” In Condry’s account of the Katahdin ascent, it was Thoreau, compass in hand, who led his party “straight into the woods for many weary miles of thick scrub of oak, birch and spruce almost without halting until they reached the mountain’s craggy flank as darkness fell.”45
For others, The Maine Woods offered a more subtle lesson in wilderness appreciation. Thoreau surmised that in desolate places like the Maine woods and the beaches of Cape Cod, we “witness our own limits transgressed,” and the phrase intrigued naturalist and critic Joseph Wood Krutch. Here indeed was a power that transcended human existence, and at a time when technology was hurling humanity toward oblivion, Krutch thought, this was a useful reminder: wilderness taught hubris. The book also demonstrated the importance of solitary movement through wild spaces. The journey was “inward” as well as outward, Philip Gura suggested: not only an account of the wild but also an account of “how a man conceives of himself in relation to it.” The naturalist John K. Terres saw The Maine Woods as a celebration of nature’s most easily overlooked achievements: “useless flowers, useless butterflies, useless warblers, and singing birds, useless hawks, useless fossils, useless wilderness.”46 These judgments and others breathed life into the phrase “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
In a 1964 article in Appalachia, Richard Fleck drew three arguments from The Maine Woods he thought would be useful to the wilderness movement. First, Thoreau’s north woods botanizing showed that wilderness was an invaluable laboratory for understanding natural ecologies. Second, the ebullient phrasing in his account demonstrated the contribution wilderness made to human liberation. And finally, the rich symbolism showed that wilderness could stretch the imagination and broaden outlooks. Fleck’s points were shared widely. Reginald Cook devoted much of his 1966 Passage to Walden to describing the sense of freedom Thoreau felt in nature, and as president of the Thoreau Society, he helped rebuild Thoreau’s reputation around the oft-repeated statement that he wished “to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.”47
Preservationists found food for thought in The Maine Woods, but the book’s ambiguities pointed to the tensions in a movement that proclaimed wilderness a priceless human resource yet described it as the antipode to human experience. Americans may have missed the full meaning of Thoreau’s Katahdin experience, but they well understood the separation and isolation he felt in the driving mist atop the mountain. A sense of alienation pervaded the cultural discourse of the 1970s. The protests of the previous decade had been aimed at clearly identifiable agents of injustice, whether corporations, governments, race supremacists, male chauvinists, or the military-industrial complex. Although the sense of oppression lingered into the 1970s, the source became more diffused and difficult to define. The term quiet desperation echoed through the press, interpreted in various ways to mean disassociation from work, society, people, self, or nature. In 1970 the sociologist Philip Slater produced a small but widely read volume titled The Pursuit of Loneliness, which captured this anxious mood. According to Slater, in the wake of the various reform movements that gave purpose to public life in the 1960s, society was held together by nothing more than a compulsion for individual aggrandizement, and on this scale individualism was not only immoral but also misguided. Human civilization was an “interconnected whole,” he pointed out, and to pretend that each member existed in isolation was socially destructive and personally debilitating. In competition with every other member of society, individuals resorted to chronic calculating behavior, “because they want to look good, impress people, protect themselves from shame and guilt, and avoid confronting people directly.” In an organic society they would respond in more community-directed ways—“neither selfish nor unselfish.”48
Slater’s Pursuit of Loneliness became a best seller in the 1970s, alerting the nation to the perils of alienation and individualism. A second book, equally as popular, addressed these issues from a different perspective. B. F. Skinner’s Walden II, originally published in 1948, became a cult book in the 1970s among young people hungering for community and sensitive to their separation from society and nature. A fictional account of life in a communal agrarian village, Walden II was a response to Thoreau’s claim that the mass of men lived lives of quiet desperation. Skinner, at the time a behavioral psychologist at the University of Minnesota, structured Walden II around a series of conflicts in the original Walden resulting from Thoreau’s individualistic approach to the problem of alienation. Rather than a hermitage, Walden II was a small community founded on rational planning, early behavioral training, and a uniform and collective system of child rearing that left members free to pursue their own interests in music, theater, art, and nature appreciation. The book echoed Thoreau’s insistence that inner peace was more important than material goods, and like Thoreau, Skinner prioritized leisure over acquisition. But unlike Thoreau, he believed that quiet desperation was a problem to be resolved at the community level. As he explained, “Thoreau’s book is Walden for one”; Thoreau “simply didn’t go far enough.” The behaviorist message that individuals could be conditioned to live the good life remained controversial, but at a more subtle level, Skinner’s book launched a broad-based discussion of alienation, individualism, and the meaning of Thoreau’s original Walden experiment.49
The 1970s debate on alienation, coming as it did in the midst of the environmental movement, highlighted Thoreau’s commentary on the separation from nature. In an article titled “A Thoreau for Today,” Edwin Smith observed that the “deliberate cultivation of kinship with nature, common enough in Thoreau’s day, is notably lacking among us a hundred years later,” and John McAleer pointed to the biblical phrase at the conclusion of Thoreau’s essay on wild apples: “The apple tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of men.’” Humanity spurns nature, McAleer concluded, and “courts a new exile.” In his book The Woods: One Man’s Escape to Nature, journalist Charles Seib quoted Henry Beston: “The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.50
Some environmentalists saw The Maine Woods as a classic encounter with an alien and exotic wilderness, while others used Thoreau’s commentary to dramatize humanity’s separation from nature. Clearly, Thoreau sensed the thrill of estrangement on Katahdin, but he also demonstrated there and elsewhere just how much an intimate connection to nature meant to him. It was after he withdrew from the tableland that he had his wilderness epiphany: “Rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” Just how much he needed this contact became clear in the descriptions of his Penobscot guide Joe Polis, whose intimacy with nature was everything Thoreau’s Katahdin experience was not. Polis, according to Stanley Tag,
dresses a deer skin, makes campfires, finds dry bark, constructs fir-branch beds, makes a birch-bark bowl, candle, and pipe, splits spruce roots, mixes pitch for repairing his canoe, cleans and cooks fish, spots, shoots, skins, and cooks moose, finds ingredients for and cooks lily [root] soup, follows animal trails and tracks, imitates snakes, owls, and muskrats, knows birds by sight, knows medicinal uses for plants, knows about the lives and behaviour of red squirrels, herons, caribou, and mosquitoes, navigates through woods and waterways, . . . and paddles and portages canoes through rough water and terrain.
The corrective for alienation was not confrontation with primitive nature but a deeper sense of immersion in it.51
A few wilderness advocates grasped this more subtle message. In a 1962 article, wilderness guide Sigurd Olson explained that Americans’ historic confrontation with western wilderness imprinted them with a “racial consciousness” that rose to the surface in any wilderness setting. But where earlier generations of Americans defined themselves in combat with primitive nature, his backcountry clients, like Joe Polis, defined themselves by connecting to it. Out in the bush, “they laughed more and took pleasure in little things.” Pondering the effects of this experience, Olson recalled Thoreau’s phrase “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Like others, he found these words inspiring but also puzzling. Perhaps it was the electrifying touch of this deep racial consciousness that preserved the world or perhaps the rejuvenating energy of the sublime. Or perhaps it was the peace that came in the succor of an all-enveloping nature. However vague his description, Thoreau was describing an experience deeper than a simple mastery over nature, and Olson imagined his clients discovering the same connection as he guided them through the northern lakes and woods.52
The campaign for wilderness culminated in the 1964 Wilderness Act. Altogether, the land area of the United States, some 2.3 billion acres, included some 55 million acres of roadless wilderness, mostly in national parks, national forests, and wildlife refuges and on Bureau of Land Management lands or Indian reservations. The Wilderness Act protected 9.1 million acres and provided for a ten-year review of 5.4 million acres of similar primitive areas. According to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, these lands presented a unique opportunity:
Elsewhere there are vast tracts of wild land—the Sahara, the Himalayas, the Antarctic—which may always remain inviolate because nature offers terms only the sojourner can accept. But the lands of other temperate countries were long ago pre-empted for specific uses, and only the continental countries with rugged, remote landscapes have a largesse which permits them to weigh the values of a wilderness. . . . And that is why . . . Americans who are convinced that the good life cannot be found in the machine world alone will have their eyes on a document which has been in the hands of Congress since 1958, the Wilderness Bill.
While relatively few Americans would personally reap the rewards of this preservation system, Udall pointed out that “the intensity and rarity” of the wilderness experience gave it a value beyond the idea of the greatest good to the greatest number. Men and women for generations to come, he pointed out, “have a claim that is far larger than our own.”53
The Wilderness Act demonstrated the nation’s resolve in protecting untrammeled landscapes most individuals would never see for themselves, but as John Saylor suggested in his 1957 speech, Americans also longed for a wilderness they could experience personally. Thus, it was the Concord essays, rather than The Maine Woods, that expressed the clearest vision of Thoreau’s connection to the energies that preserved the world. The phrase “In Wildness is the preservation of the World” suggests a subtle difference between wilderness and the term he used in his famous aphorism. The former represented, in his mind, the sparsely settled lands in the American West or on the Canadian Shield. Wildness, by contrast, could be found in more intimate surroundings. As the biologist Daniel Botkin pointed out, it was not the Katahdin heights but the “biologically rich swamp, surrounding him so closely with life that distant vistas were obscured and size became irrelevant, that held the deepest meaning for Thoreau.”54
The phrase itself came from his essay on “Walking,” which was indeed a celebration of the western wilderness, but he explained the term he chose more clearly in an earlier essay titled “Winter Walk,” describing the woods of his familiar Concord neighborhood. To the senses, he wrote, the winter landscape appeared cold and dead, but the frigid air left the walker sensitive to subtle sources of warmth—sunlight heating the bare rocks or steam rising from a spring in the woods. And beneath his feet was another source of warmth: a “slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.” It was this latent wildness, the promise of a resurgent springtime nature in the ground beneath his feet, that he saw as the hope of the world. He tasted this wildness in the tang of a wild apple, smelled it in the musky odor of a wet meadow, saw it in the “dazzling and transcendent beauty” of a pond pickerel laid out on the ice, and sensed it in a minnow’s instinctive struggle against the current in a small stream. This was the reason he wished to “speak a word for Nature,” as he wrote in “Walking,” and this was the way the unsettling images of Katahdin diffused into his tribute to the landscapes of home. The Maine woods taught him to appreciate the elemental energies that made nature so resilient, but it was the Concord landscape that connected him to these energies. There, within a mile of home, he experienced nature’s wildness by immersion, standing “up to [his] . . . chin in some retired swamp a whole summer day, scenting the wild honeysuckle and bilberry blows, and lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitoes.”55 In the Concord woods, to paraphrase Saylor, he first experienced the tonic of wildness, if not wilderness.
Wildness was not a simple concept. In his essays, readers found Thoreau immersing himself in the “organic chaos” of a woods or swamp, only to withdraw again to regard it with the detached eye of a scientist or transcendentalist. As Leo Marx wrote, he embraced wildness as a tonic, but not as an end in itself: “We need it, but not too much of it.” This dance of immersion and detachment no doubt confused those seeking a spiritual guide to nature, but it shed light on their struggle to find commonality with a wilderness world they valued principally for its alien and exotic character.56
The difference between wilderness and wildness became apparent in a 1962 Sierra Club publication titled In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, featuring the work of well-known nature photographer Eliot Porter. Part of a series of large-format glossy pictorials distributed by the club to promote wilderness preservation, the book contained a selection of seventy-two magnificent high-resolution color photographs linked to Thoreau’s comments. In Wildness went through two printings of ten thousand copies each in two years and was followed in the series by The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado, which memorialized the wilderness to be flooded by the Glen Canyon Dam.57
Porter spent his childhood summers on a family-owned island off the Maine coast, and it was there, “among sweet fern, and bunchberry, bay and twin flower,” that he himself first felt “the tonic of wilderness” that Saylor memorialized. Porter taught biochemistry at Harvard before becoming a professional photographer in 1939, and he was already known for his outdoor photography when he was recruited by the Sierra Club. The resulting In Wildness was, by one account, “the finest series of photographs ever made to illustrate texts by Thoreau.”58 Adding the power of image to the power of word, it gave final form to Thoreau’s reputation as a wilderness icon.
Porter’s photographs were clearly inspired by Thoreau’s understanding of wildness. Ansel Adams, whose This Is the American Earth preceded In Wildness in the Sierra Club series, captured the grand sweep of monumental natural features—Yosemite’s Half Dome in wintertime, for instance. Where Adams represented the wilderness sublime, Porter concentrated on the intimate details of wild nature: close-ups of running water, iridescent pools, rock textures, lichens, willows, fallen leaves, and patterns in sandstone. In the introduction to In Wildness, Joseph Wood Krutch described the uniqueness of Porter’s images. “Other writers and other photographers are prone to seek out the unusual, the grandiose, and the far away.” They “shock us into awareness,” he continued, “by flinging into our faces the obviously stupendous.” Porter, like Thoreau, searched for higher truths in the familiar landscape—in “the daily and hourly miracle of the usually unnoticed beauty that is close at hand.” His images conveyed a poignant message about the impact of brute-force technologies on delicate features that had taken thousands or millions of years to create, but they also illustrated Thoreau’s message: true connection with nature implied an intimacy not readily experienced in the sublime.59
Porter’s fidelity to detail suggests one of the many ironies in Thoreau’s role as wilderness prophet. Typically, advocates applied his eight ambiguous words to the great natural monuments of the West—places far more spectacular than Thoreau could have imagined in the 1850s and in every sense as desolate as Katahdin’s tablelands. In his 1957 presidential address to the Thoreau Society, Wilderness Society executive director Howard Zahniser drew on Thoreau to buttress his message about preserving these iconic landscapes. “Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it,” Zahniser quoted. “We need . . . to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe.” Words describing a two-acre New England swamp became emblematic of the great earth monuments of the American West.60
While The Maine Woods inspired young Americans to climb towering mountains and explore vast forests, Walden offered the tonic of wilderness in nature near at hand. “At a time when few of us can afford to rejuvenating escape to exotic wilderness spaces,” Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and Laura Dassow Walls wrote in 2007, “Thoreau gives us instead the ‘wild’ of backyard places.” At Walden Pond, less than two miles from Concord Village, he was able to separate himself from alienating institutions and master the art of “seeing the earth as ‘living poetry,’” and in the pages of Walden he showed how intensely satisfying this communal relation could be. Here he connected to nature in a way that would have been impossible in the Maine woods—or in the western wilderness. Animals “accepted him as one of their own,” biographer Walter Harding wrote. “The rabbits nested beneath his cabin, bumping their foolish heads on the floor as they made their hasty exists. The squirrels explored his furnishings, searching for newer nut supplies. The field mice came to nibble crackers in his fingers.” He labored shoeless in the warm soil in his bean field, cultivating a deeply personal relation to the land.61
The British poet and naturalist Geoffrey Grigson once observed that American nature writers had been impoverished by their obsession with remote and monumental places. The spectacle of towering peaks and panoramic views distracted them from the endless natural diversity at their feet. For this reason Grigson preferred the more subtle descriptions of nature in British writing. Joseph Wood Krutch agreed that writers like John Muir and Enos Mills had been seduced by grand vistas, but in Thoreau he discovered a credible synthesis of sublime scenery and personal connection. In recording his Katahdin emotions, Thoreau stood with the American romantics who understood the inspirational meaning of great swaths of unpeopled space; in his allegiance to Concord, he was kin to England’s Gilbert White, who was at home in Selborne, “fixed and content within the compass of a parish.” He ventured along the wilderness trails of Maine and windswept beaches of Cape Cod, but he also discovered an infinitely varied wildness in the Concord fields and meadows, where the imaginative walker could connect to primitive energies not altogether different from those he witnessed on the slopes of Katahdin. Preservation of the world depended on both wilderness and wildness. For this discovery alone, if for nothing else, Thoreau earned his reputation as an icon of the American wilderness movement.62
In 1982, as the environmental movement went into a new phase devoted to consolidating the legislative victories of the 1970s, the farmer and writer Wendell Berry composed an essay on Thoreau’s environmentalist legacy. By this time the rhetoric of wilderness preservation had ossified into a simple message: nature was sacred and civilization profane, and the purpose of the wilderness movement was to keep the two apart. These polarities had to be transcended, Berry thought, by “some kind of peace, even an alliance, between the domestic and the wild.” Like Thoreau, he believed in the wildness of all landscapes. “The topsoil, to the extent that it is fertile, is wild; it is a dark wilderness, ultimately unknowable, teeming with wildlife”—a smoldering subterranean fire, as Thoreau had said a century earlier. He agreed that this wildness was redemptive, but he insisted on a corollary to Thoreau’s famous aphorism. “So long at least as humans are in the world,” Berry insisted, “in human culture is the preservation of wildness.” A morally integrated society would cherish and preserve the wild world around and within it. “The good worker loves the board before it becomes a table, loves the tree before it yields to board, loves the forests before it gives up the tree.” Alienation threatened both civilization and wilderness; a communal contact between the domestic and the wild preserved both. Lost in the soaring truths environmentalists attached to Thoreau’s passage was the understanding that wilderness was redemptive not only in remote and exotic places but also at home, and as Berry realized, a moral appreciation for the wildness of this working and worked-over landscape was the first step in preserving both society and nature. Only a society fully connected to the organic world—everywhere—could be redeemed by nature’s wildness.63
Thoreau’s odyssey from obscure poet to wilderness icon found its final form in the reasoning Berry lent to these eight powerful words. In the decades after World War II, Thoreau added his voice to the great earth-saving movements of the late twentieth century: conservation, political ecology, environmentalism, and finally wilderness preservation. In these various incarnations, his message to America achieved new resonance. As civil dissenter, he understood the necessity of protecting nature from the avarice he so brilliantly underscored in his social essays; as a conservationist, he demonstrated the importance of protecting the resources on which this avaricious civilization depended; as an ecologist, he understood how much the whole of nature depended on stewarding each of these resources; and as a wilderness advocate, he showed that nature’s unbounded vitality would preserve the vitality of the world itself. In each of these insights, he drove home the message: society and nature were interdependent. And as he and Berry made clear, neither could be preserved without protecting the relationship between them.