It's the Economy, Stupid

The Cronon article makes an excellent companion piece to Jenny Price’s “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.” The ideological framework that Cronon provides for Price’s observations helped me to more fully appreciate her article. The two pieces bracket the course nicely.

In the beginning Cronon makes Thoreau into a whipping boy for myth making, be it the myth of the mountain as cathedral or the myth of the wilderness. In the end, though, he seems to give Thoreau a reprieve. In distinguishing between wildness and wilderness, Cronon notes that Thoreau was right in attributing to the former the agency to preserve the world. Nevertheless, it requires a close reading to remove the impression of Thoreau as the mother of all tree huggers, particularly from someone already predisposed to such a view. I can imagine the reaction of those who arrange their reading schedules to suit their seatings on the throne: “Wildness, Wilderness, what’s the difference?” There’s no danger of these people ever reading Walden. So here’s my digest for them. It’s an ideal length.

The purpose of an economy is to maximum the benefit of a society’s material resources by creating a system of exchange. Thus if A grows wheat and B owns a forest, A, after putting aside all the wheat he needs to make bread, exchanges his surplus wheat with B for the surplus wood that he has after he has built his cabin. This way they can each have a life, so to speak, which would not have been likely if A lived in the elements and B went hungry. But what if someone can provide shelter and food by his own industry, and still have time for a life, in fact only has to work six weeks out of the year? He then has a very successful economy of one. He is Henry David Thoreau. Granted, it would be difficult if not impossible for someone to do in today’s advanced industrial, urbanized society what Thoreau did over 150 years ago. But, ironically,  (speaking of irony, I would have enjoyed reading Thoreau more if he occasionally displayed a little irony of his own. Reading a book without any irony in it is like driving cross country without a pit stop . . . alright, no more potty metaphors) technology is approaching the day—if we are not there already—when half the current work force can produce all the current goods and services. This creates the potential for people to work half the time they currently work and to have more leisure time to read and take nature walks that don’t add to carbon emissions. Now that’s a Thoreau thought.

This is not to suggest that Thoreau had no ecological impact on his environment. The white pine trees he cut down contributed to the erosion of soil, the crops he planted emitted carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and his second-hand nails were produced by machines powered by fossil fuel. As Cronon suggests, in order to pass through this world without leaving your mark on nature would require reverting to a hunter-gatherer culture. But this would not necessarily be prosperous for Man. For instance, seventeenth century capture narratives show that the early Native Americans were often plagued by starvation, especially in the winter. So there is no danger of this blogger succumbing to the myth of the frontier. But I agree with Cronon that we should explore the middle ground—investigate ways to improve the world for “humans and nonhumans, rich people and poor, women and men, white folks and people of color. . .” . . . wait a minute, the rich people? I don’t think that the one-percenters need my help. But all people would do well to contemplate another Thoreau thought: “All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”