Thoreau to the Rescue

Practical Questions for an Environmental Life

July 12, 2016

By Bill McKibben

Replica of Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond

Happy birthday to Henry David Thoreau! His groundbreaking book Walden, first published in 1854, continues to influence generations of readers and inspire anyone with an open mind and a love of nature. His writings about a simpler life attuned with the natural world are more relevant than ever for the new millennium. As environmentalist Bill McKibben points out here in his introduction to Walden, our propensity for rampant consumerism has a direct impact on our environment. Now, more than ever, Thoreau’s philosophy can serve as a guide not only for climate justice, but also for a more balanced lifestyle. 

***

The hawk sat on a limb three feet above my head and did not stir as I walked under—that was the first sign.

I’d been off hiking for about a week, a long solo backpack through my home mountains, the Adirondacks of upstate New York. The first few days out I might as well have been back in my room—I strode purposefully along the trail, eyes fixed on focusless middle-distance that you stare at when you drive. My mind chattered happily away—my own little CNN delivering an around-the-clock broadcast of ideas, plans, opinions: What was I going to work on next? Who would win the presidential election? What were some neat things I could buy? My mind was buzzing, following all its usual tracks though I was deep in the woods.

The days wore on. The imposed input lessened—no radio, no paper, no conversation. I could feel the chatter in my head begin to subside. Either the peace of the forest was beginning to penetrate, or the stocks of mental junk food were starting to dwindle; whatever the cause, the buzz turned to hum, and once in a while to quiet.

And so I was not completely surprised when the hawk kept his perch, or a few minutes later when I passed a pair of grazing deer and they merely looked up a moment, didn’t spook. I was still wearing the rustling fluorescent uniform of the modern hiker, but I’d begun, perhaps, to give off fewer, calmer vibrations.

I’d been walking through rain for days; it had long since penetrated my Gore-Tex hide, and so that afternoon when the sun finally came out I made an early camp by the lake. I hung out my clothes in the branches to warm; held my white and wrinkled feet up to the sky to toast; unfolded in the lovely heat like a snake on a stone. Soon a band of merganser chicks, trailing their mother, circled the small cove by which I lay, paying no attention to me. My aura of invisibility lasted all day, soothing one creature after another, until I was feeling part creature myself. Naked, hidden by the fringe of birch leaves, I watched canoeists paddle chattily by, and they seemed nearly to belong to another race. That night I was aware of every second of the endless sunset: the first long rays of the sun as the afternoon turned late, the long twilight, the turn of the sky from blue to blue to blue to—just as it turned black, a heron came stalking through my cove, standing silently and then spearing with a sudden spasm; I couldn’t see her, not really, but I knew where she was. The sky darkened, the stars in this dark place spread across the sky bright and insistent. We were unimaginably small, this heron and I, and extremely right.

I tell this memory—one of my happiest—as a way of plunging into that great sea called Walden. Understanding the whole of this book is a hopeless task. Its writing resembles nothing so much as Scripture; ideas are condensed to epigrams, four or five to a paragraph. Its magic density yields dozens of different readings—psychological, spiritual, literary, political, cultural. To my mind, though, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is most crucial to read Walden as a practical environmentalist’s volume, and to search for Thoreau’s heirs among those trying to change our relation to the planet. We need to understand that when Thoreau sat in the dooryard of his cabin “from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house,” he was offering counsel and example exactly suited for our perilous moment in time... (continues)