Thoreau

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Walden in the Anthropocene

Statue of Thoreau appearing to stare at a real iPhone that someone has placed in his hand.
Thoreau statue at Walden Pond.

On my way to the Annual Gathering of the Thoreau Society in Concord last July, I overheard a conversation between two women, one a younger woman from Phoenix, the other, an older woman living in Seattle. Phoenix, as you will recall, was experiencing a heat wave with temperatures above 110 degrees. The older woman was commiserating with the younger one. “The heat must be unbearable,” she said. “It’s not always like this,” the younger woman replied. “Besides it’s dry heat, and we had a wet spring this year.”

I say this to illustrate that people often minimize the threats of weather-related events. How else to explain why people continue to flock to places like Arizona and Florida? Now that smoke from fires in Canada has blanketed eastern states, people there have come to understand what those of us out west have had to contend with. But once the smoke clears many wonder what the fuss was all about. Apparently, the threat only becomes existential when it’s your home that’s at risk of fire or flood.

The theme of last year’s Annual Gathering was “Thoreau and the Politics of Extinction,” which seemed appropriate considering what’s been happening all around us. In 2019, one million species of plants and animals were at risk of extinction. Here in the northwest, the continued existence of the Southern Resident Orcas is threatened by the decline of Chinook salmon in the Salish Sea. Elsewhere, trees are dying en masse from fungal infections and invasive insects. Monarch butterflies are endangered for lack of milkweed on their annual migrations. The list goes on and on.

The causes vary—not only from global warming, pollution, over-harvesting, and urban development, but also from greed, ignorance, neglect, and political failure. The one common denominator is humanity. Many respected scientists, some of them Nobel Prizewinners, have concluded that we are now living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the age of humans. This is the recognition that there is no part of nature that is unaffected by human activity.

To say this is not to imply the end of nature. Nature will continue whether we are here or not. Nor is the term predictive of any particular outcome, good or bad. But it does indicate that human activities have permanently altered life on earth, and that we have left traces in the geological record that will persist far into the future whether or not their impact results in another instance of mass extinction. Whatever happens, we will only have ourselves to thank or blame. Which will it be?

What can Thoreau tell us?

Given the enormity of the challenges that we face, how can a man who went off to the woods for two years—woods he almost burned down himself a year earlier—tell us anything about the Anthropocene, global warming, and the threat of extinction? And what advice can someone who was born two hundred years ago offer to the living today?

I think there are several things Thoreau can tell us if we are willing to listen. His first and most important message is that in order to save the earth, we must love it. As he wrote, “You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake.” He had empathy with all living things, or what biologist E.O. Wilson called “biophilia.”

In his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he expressed sympathy with fish, including the shad, that were prevented from their migrations by a dam on the river and the mills downstream. “Poor shad!,” he wrote, “where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate?” To the shad, “armed only with innocence and a just cause,” he said, “I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that Bellerica dam?” Our philanthropy should include the fishes as well as human beings. “Who hears the fishes when they cry?” he asks.

The prospect of the extinction of species took a toll on Thoreau’s peace of mind and self- respect. “When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here—the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey—I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country,” he wrote in his journal. For him nature was not a resource to be exploited, but preserved and maintained. It is a life- enhancing panacea. He viewed it as a remedy for what today we call nature deficit disorder. He advocated setting aside natural areas for education and spiritual renewal.

On Bainbridge Island where I live, we have over 50 parks, hiking trails, and nature preserves. The local Land Trust has preserved almost 1500 acres of land, most of which is open to the public. And IslandWood provides outdoor learning experiences for 25,000 students a year, coming from 50 school districts. Similar efforts are happening elsewhere.

Another important lesson Thoreau teaches us is sustainability. He built his cabin at Walden Pond himself with recycled wood and other materials found nearby. He constructed his fireplace and chimney with stones from around the pond. He was mostly a vegetarian, eating fruits and vegetables he grew in his own gardens. At any given time, had only one coat and one pair of pants. When his boots wore out, he had them resoled.

He believed in living beneath one’s means rather than above them; that is to say, in maximizing one’s pleasure by minimizing one’s wants. As he wrote in Walden, his how-to guide in simple living, “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind…. When [we] have obtained those things that are necessary to life; there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, [our] vacation from humbler toil having commenced.”

At our present rates of the consumption of water and the production of greenhouse gasses, we are headed for disaster. Obviously, we need to harness human will and technical skill, collectively and individually, to avert tragedy. While none of us can solve these problems by ourselves, each of us can contribute to the solution by limiting our impact on the environment through recycling and reusing, avoiding waste of food and water, lessening our consumption of meat, getting rid of plastic, and using alternative sources of energy.

A third message Thoreau has for us is to pay attention. As he wrote in Walden, “For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully.” His journal—amounting to more than two million words—is as much an account of his observations of nature as it is of his thoughts.

He carefully examined the course and currents of the Assabet, Sudbury and Concord rivers, which he charted on a seven-foot map. He also kept a meticulous “Kalendar” of seasonal phenomena in which he noted, among other things, the daily weather, the first flowering of flowers and bushes, and the annual return of migrating birds. In addition, he studied and wrote about the succession of forest trees and the dispersion of seeds.

Grounds for hope in a dark time

Thoreau had a front row seat in witnessing the onset of the Anthropocene epoch. His work is recognized as a valuable base-line account on the basis of which contemporary biologists and ecologists have determined that the arrival of spring occurs weeks earlier today than it did in his time, that birds and animals common then are now gone, and that development has significantly encroached on natural habitat. He would be shocked at the extent to which climate change has impacted the environment.

We are living in a dark time. Not since the Civil War has the survival of democracy been so threatened as it is today. Racism, inequality, and homelessness eat away at our social fabric. Looming over these is the specter of climate change, coming faster and more devastating than previously imagined. Although it seems unavoidable, I do not believe it is inevitable. There are grounds for hope.

Rebecca Solnit, author of the book, Hope in the Dark, says hope “is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It is also not a sunny everything-is- getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.”

Solnit calls to our attention the tremendous human rights achievements of the past half- century and the rise of new forms of resistance enabled by innovative ways of communicating, organizing, and forming alliances across distance and difference. “Hope,” she says, “locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” It is “an embrace of the unknown and unknowable,” a glimmer of light in the darkness. Change is not assured, but pessimism is fatal.

There is yet another message Thoreau has for us. He, too, lived in difficult times. But he never succumbed to despair or ceased believing, as he once wrote, that “surely, joy is the condition of life.” He used the word, “surely,” in recognition that, in spite of evidence to the contrary, “joy is the condition of life.” Joy is the antidote to despair. If we lose joy, we lose everything.

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THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THIS MOMENT

The Gospel According to the Moment by Barry M. Andrews

Henry David Thoreau is known for many things. He was by turns a schoolteacher, a pencil maker, a surveyor, and a handyman. He was also an advocate of simple living, civil disobedience, and environmental preservation in addition to being a naturalist and a writer. I believe that the thread on which all the beads of his many-faceted life are strung is his idiosyncratic and unconventional religious faith.

As for describing his religious views, we should perhaps heed his own admonition: “What is religion?” he once asked. “That which is never spoken,” he said. What we can say, I believe, is that his religious views were experiential and nature-centered. God, for him, was immanent rather than transcendent. He was, if anything, a nature mystic and a pantheist.

He had little use for religious creeds, rites and institutions. He was put off by the hypocrisy and absolutism of sectarian religion. “I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another,” he wrote. “I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make transient and partial and puerile distinctions between one man’s faith or form of faith and another’s,—as Christian and heathen. I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration, bigotry. To the philosopher all sects, all nations, are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the Great Spirit, as well as God.”

His god was in the woods, not in a church. “I feel that I draw nearest to understanding the great secret of my life in my closest intercourse with nature,” he said. “I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature.” Thoreau’s spirituality was devoid of doctrines or formulas or philosophical propositions. It had primarily to do with transcendent experiences triggered by his encounters with the natural world. “To watch for, describe all the divine features which I detect in Nature,” he wrote, “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature—to know his lurking places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.”

He often referred to such experiences as ecstasies, or what we might call mystic states, like this one described in his journal:

In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me. This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us—such ecstasies begotten of the breezes!… I was daily intoxicated and yet no man could call be intemperate. With all your science can you tell me how it is and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?

As the frequency of these mystic states diminished over time, he was drawn to the idea that he might, through a certain kind of regimen, put himself in a receptive frame of mind and thereby enhance the odds that such experiences might recur. 

His spiritual practice was in keeping with what was then termed “self-culture,” or the cultivation of the soul. “The art of life!” he called it. “Was there anything memorable written upon it? By what disciplines to secure the most life—with what care to watch our thoughts.” The disciplines he practiced and described in Walden and elsewhere include leisure, self-reliance, reading, contemplation, solitude, conversation, sauntering in nature, action from principle, and simple living. By such practices we may, even today, attempt “to secure the most life.”

From my forthcoming book, The Gospel According to This Moment: The Spiritual Message of Henry David Thoreau to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press, spring 2024.

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The Spirituality of Henry David Thoreau

In September Harvard Divinity School hosted a program on Henry Thoreau’s religious views. I was on a panel with Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life; Richard Higgins, author of Thoreau and the Language of Trees, and Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Hour of Land. What follows is a shortened version of my remarks that evening.

Barry M Andrews at the Harvard Divinity School on a Panel discussing Henry David Thoreau's Religion

Barry M Andrews at HDS

This bicentennial year at least a dozen books have been published about Henry David Thoreau. This scholarship is a boon to those of us who feel that Thoreau is worth the effort to understand him better and discover more about his interests and subsequent influence on American life and culture.

The danger we encounter amidst the welter of information produced in the wake of this recent scholarship, as Rebecca Solnit points out in her essay on the “Thoreau Problem,” is that we will end up compartmentalizing him, as in Thoreau the writer, Thoreau the abolitionist, Thoreau the naturalist, and so on. Or, worse yet, bifurcating his life between the recluse of Walden Pond on the one hand and the tax-resister in the Concord jail on the other; or between the dreamy Transcendentalist of his youth and the hard-headed scientist of his later years. Thus, we fail to see how the myriad parts of his life are of a piece and hang together.

From my perspective as a minister and a student of Transcendentalism, the thread on which all the beads of Thoreau’s many-faceted life are strung is his idiosyncratic and unconventional faith—a dimension largely unexplored in Thoreau scholarship. Richard Higgins is one of the few to venture into this area. It is a major thread of Laura Walls’ recent biography as well.

Thoreau’s earliest religious views were informed by his Unitarian upbringing. He was baptized and catechized in Concord’s First Parish Church. His mother and father were members there. But he signed off from the church when he was a young man. By the time he entered college in 1833, he was perhaps not a devout Unitarian, but his Harvard education was nevertheless steeped in Unitarian tradition, the school having been a training ground for over a generation of Unitarian ministers. Many of his professors were noted Unitarians. His textbooks expounded the virtues of Unitarian moral philosophy.

However, as a student he was drawn to counter-cultural ideas then in vogue, the so-called “new views” of religion, self and society that were being entertained by a younger generation of Unitarian intellectuals and divines. The Transcendentalists, with whom he came to identify, were generally of the opinion that the religious sentiment is natural and universal in human experience, whereas religious institutions are but parochial and limited forms which this sentiment takes. They also believed that religious truth is known by experience, intuitively, and thus does not depend on religious scriptures or church teachings. They conceived of a natural or absolute religion, shorn of sectarian elements.

Professor Walls has suggested that Thoreau’s purpose in going to live at Walden Pond was “profoundly religious,” and that in writing of his experience he was intending to produce a “scripture for the modern world.” To this, I would add that Walden is not only a religious treatise, it is also a manual of spiritual practice.

Self-culture played a central role in Transcendentalist spirituality. Sometimes termed “the art of life,” for them it meant the cultivation of the soul. “The art of life!” Thoreau wrote in his journal. “Was there anything memorable written on it? By what disciplines to secure the most life, with what care to watch our thoughts.” The disciplines he practiced and described in Walden include leisure, self-reliance, reading, contemplation, solitude, conversation, sauntering in nature, simple living and action from principle. By such practices we may, even today, attempt “to secure the most life.”

As for Thoreau’s religion we should perhaps heed his own admonition: “What is religion?” he queried in his journal. “That which is never spoken.” Part of the difficulty we have in describing Thoreau’s religion is that the word “religion” was only then in the process—one accelerated by the Transcendentalists themselves—of being thought of apart from its historical manifestations in the various faith traditions.

What we can say, I believe, is that his religious views were experiential, nature centered, and pluralistic. God, for him, was immanent rather than transcendent. He was, if anything a nature mystic and a pantheist. He was familiar with the Bible since he read it in Greek at Harvard and frequently drew from Biblical language and imagery in his own writings, but—in my view at least—he was not Christian in any meaningful sense of the word.

Leigh Eric Schmidt argues in his book, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, that the Transcendentalists were responsible for introducing the distinction between religion and spirituality, a prominent feature of religious life today. Thoreau eschewed religious institutions, but was a deeply spiritual person. And this is one of the reasons that many people today find him so appealing. He may have been decried as a heretic and an atheist in his own time, but now he is viewed as the avatar of an alternative way of being religious in the world.

Read more about the event on Harvard Divinity School’s News & Events page.

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Why Transcendentalist Spirituality?

People often ask me why I am attracted to the Transcendentalists. For the Greeks and Romans, to be a philosopher was not to craft subtle arguments, but to live a philosophical life. As Thoreau said in Walden, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates.” For the ancients, philosophy was akin to what today we call spirituality. I, too, aspire to live a philosophical or spiritual life, and for me the Transcendentalists offer the best model for doing so.

Their discipline, or praxis, was termed self-culture. For them, culture was not high-brow entertainment, as it is for us today. It did not “consist in polishing or varnishing,” Emerson said. Rather, culture meant cultivation. And the self in question is not the self of modern psychology, but the soul. Self-culture is the cultivation of the soul. Their spiritual exercises included contemplation, solitude, walks in nature, reading, journal writing, conversation, simple living, and action from principle.

Theoria, for the Greeks and Romans, was wisdom gained through contemplation. The wisdom of the Transcendentalists consisted in the belief that there is a cosmos, or unity of nature, including human nature. It is best expressed in these words of Emerson: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”

My own spiritual practice has been enriched and guided by what I have learned from the Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau above all.