The Green Thoreau: America's First Environmentalist on Technology, Possessions, Livelihood, and More

by Henry David Thoreau, Carol Spenard LaRusso (Editor)

Overview

Henry David Thoreau saw nature as teacher and companion, and many of his philosophies guide the contemporary environmental movement. What Thoreau wrote about simplicity, materialism, technology, and our troubled relationship with nature is perhaps even more relevant to our lives today than it was in the nineteenth century. In these pages, editor Carol Spenard LaRusso presents quotations by Thoreau on nature, technology, livelihood, living, possessions, time, diet and food, and aspiration. At turns passionate, funny, and profound, this collection serves as a compelling introduction — or vivid reminder — of why Thoreau is one of America’s iconoclastic greats.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608681433
Publisher:	New World Library
Publication date:	09/11/2012
Edition description:	Revised Edition
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 5.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life except for brief sojourns out of state and to Canada. Educated at Harvard, he returned home to Concord, and supported himself in diverse ways — in the family pencil-making business, and as handyman, teacher, lecturer, and surveyor.

On July 4, 1845, Thoreau decided to move to Walden Pond, on the outskirts of Concord, where he built a cabin in the woods, remaining there for a little over two years. He recounted his experience in essential living in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854, seven years after leaving Walden Pond.

Thoreau is not only one of the greatest American authors, but commands a major place in world literature as well; his works have been translated into virtually every modern language. He wrote many books and essays, in addition to his voluminous Journal from which he drew much of the material for his other works. Thoreau died in Concord of tuberculosis, on May 6, 1862.

Editor Carol Spenard LaRusso lives in Santa Rosa, California.

Date of Birth:

July 12, 1817

Date of Death:

May 6, 1862

Place of Birth:

Concord, Massachusetts

Place of Death:

Concord, Massachusetts

Education:

Concord Academy, 1828-33); Harvard University, 1837

Read an Excerpt

The Green Thoreau

America's First Environmentalist on Technology, Possessions, Livelihood, and More

---

By Carol Spenard LaRusso

New World Library

Copyright © 2012 Carol LaRusso
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60868-143-3

---

CHAPTER 1

Nature

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit — not a fossil earth, but a living earth.

Walden, Spring

This winter they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever.... Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!

Journal, January 21, 1852

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Life Without Principle

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Walking

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

Walking

He who cuts down woods beyond a certain limit exterminates birds.

Journal, May 17, 1853

When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here — the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc. — I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.

Journal, March 23, 1856

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.

Walden, Spring

Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.

Journal, October 15, 1859

Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum — many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! We are safe on that side for the present. It is for the very reason that some do not care for those things that we need to continue to protect all from the vandalism of a few.

Journal, January 3, 1861

The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.... I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!

Wild Apples

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have "seen the elephant"? ... Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it....

The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel and powder, and every sizable pine or oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one.

The Maine Woods, Chesuncook

It concerns us all whether these proprietors choose to cut down all the woods this winter or not.

Journal, January 22, 1852

They have cut down two or three of the very rare celtis trees, not found anywhere else in town. The Lord deliver us from these vandalic proprietors!...

If some are prosecuted for abusing children, others deserve to be prosecuted for maltreating the face of nature committed to their care.

Journal, September 28, 1857

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Familiar Letters, Thoreau to Harrison Blake, May 20, 1860

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature.

Walden, Spring

The seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world ... The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-traveled and untamable to be familiar....

Though once there were more whales cast up here, I think that it was never more wild than now. We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.... The aspect of the shore only has changed. The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe.... Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.

Cape Cod, The Sea and the Desert

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.... Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.

Walking

"Nothing that naturally happens to man can hurt him, earthquakes and thunderstorms not excepted," said a man of genius, who at this time lived a few miles farther on our road. When compelled by a shower to take shelter under a tree, we may improve that opportunity for a more minute inspection of some of Nature's works. I have stood under a tree in the woods half a day at a time, during a heavy rain in the summer, and yet employed myself happily and profitably there prying with microscopic eye into the crevices of the bark or the leaves of the fungi at my feet.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thursday

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

Walking

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

Walking

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners' deeds, as it were in some faraway field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass, and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

Walking

I seek acquaintance with Nature — to know her moods and manners. Primitive Nature is the most interesting to me. I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.

Journal, March 23, 1856

CHAPTER 2

Technology

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Walden, Economy

The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors....

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.

Walden, Economy

The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is ... an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is in rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.... We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us.

Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Walden, Economy

Only make something to take the place of something, and men will behave as if it was the very thing they wanted.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Monday

Almost all our improvements, so called, tend to convert the country into the town.

Journal, August 22, 1860

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

Walden, Economy

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers — for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers — a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough.

Walking

How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws. How many fine inventions are there which do not clutter the ground? We think that those only succeed which minister to our sensible and animal wants, which bake or brew, wash or warm, or the like. But are those of no account which are patented by fancy and imagination, and succeed so admirably in our dreams that they give the tone still to our waking thoughts? Already nature is serving all those uses which science slowly derives on a much higher and grander scale to him that will be served by her. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet, he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially realize from age to age. The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.

Paradise (to Be) Regained

There are the powers, too, of the Tide and Waves, constantly ebbing and flowing, lapsing and relapsing, but they serve man in but few ways. They turn a few tide-mills, and perform a few other insignificant and accidental services only. We all perceive the effect of the tide; how imperceptibly it creeps up into our harbors and rivers, and raises the heaviest navies as easily as the lightest chip. Everything that floats must yield to it. But man, slow to take nature's constant hint of assistance, makes slight and irregular use of this power, in careening ships and getting them afloat when aground....

This power may be applied in various ways. A large body, of the heaviest materials that will float, may first be raised by it, and being attached to the end of a balance reaching from the land, or from a stationary support fastened to the bottom, when the tide falls the whole weight will be brought to bear upon the end of the balance. Also, when the tide rises, it may be made to exert a nearly equal force in the opposite direction.

Paradise (to Be) Regained

Finally, there is the power to be derived from Sunshine, by the principle on which Archimedes contrived his burning-mirrors, a multiplication of mirrors reflecting the rays of the sun upon the same spot, till the requisite degree of heat is obtained. The principal application of this power will be to the boiling of water and production of steam. So much for these few and more obvious powers, already used to a trifling extent. But there are innumerable others in nature, not described nor discovered. These, however, will do for the present. This would be to make the sun and the moon equally our satellites. For, as the moon is the cause of the tides, and the sun the cause of the wind, which, in turn, is the cause of the waves, all the work of this planet would be performed by these far influences.

Paradise (to Be) Regained

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Green Thoreau by Carol Spenard LaRusso. Copyright © 2012 Carol LaRusso. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction,
Chapter 1. Nature,
Chapter 2. Technology,
Chapter 3. Livelihood,
Chapter 4. Living,
Chapter 5. Possessions,
Chapter 6. Time,
Chapter 7. Diet and Food,
Chapter 8. Aspiration,
Bibliographic Notes,
About the Author,
About the Editor,

Editorial Reviews

“[Thoreau] took man’s relation to nature and man’s dilemma in society...beat all these matters together...and produced an original omelet from which people can draw nourishment on a hungry day.”
— E. B. White on Walden

From the Publisher