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.