I was walking through a Barnes & Noble the other day and saw a table with the sign 'Green Reads'. Curious, I stopped to look over the titles. There were some books about making your home more green, gardening, something with Al Gore's name on it, and, oddly, Walden. I was surprised, maybe even a little shocked.
Having just blown by the half-way mark in the book, I certainly hadn't thought about it as a "green" book. The words of Walden were a good 150 years older than what surrounded it on that table, and they certainly were not preaching about environmental responsibility. In fact, there's not much that they do preach about. That's when it hit me. Most people simply don't get it. Oh, I think people understand the book in portions. There are parts which are unabashedly nature worshiping. There are also parts which exalt simplicity in a complicated world. I think people get those parts, but then latch on to them too tightly, missing the overall framework into which they fit.
There is no question that Thoreau was in love with nature. He was a Transcendentalist, after all, staying on another Transcendentalist's land (Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the woods around Walden Pond). Transcendentalism, by the by, is what the Americans called the Romantic movement. Think Wordsworth or Byron.
At any rate, Thoreau did nothing to hide his emotional connection to the land he settled in, especially the pond: "A lake ... is earth's eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." The chapter "The Ponds" is especially thick with such moving language and could easily help any doubter along the path to loving this planet. When I read the line, "How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?" I thought Thoreau might appreciate the song "Big Yellow Taxi." At the same time, though not in the same chapter, he also sings a song for the railroad.
In "Sounds" he says "when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils ... it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it." At first glance, the sentiments seem to be at odds. The railroad is an icon of the industrial revolution, belching smoke and cutting its iron way across the wilderness. Industrialization and the environment have always been at odds, still are, but that's not what Thoreau was writing about. He was more making observations of the world he inhabited than trying to father a movement. Given the choice, I'm positive he would take the woods track free in a heartbeat, but since the world doesn't offer him such options, he makes do, just as he does with society.
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