My Walden

Reading Walden this week felt like taking a mini-vacation for me. Not that I’m as big a fan of Thoreau as I am of Austen, although his little jokes do crack me up, but I have another connection to Walden Pond and Thoreau than this class.

I have a sorority sister who lives in suburb of Boston that I used to visit at least once a year, usually on St. Patrick’s Day, and for a week we’d bop around the surrounding areas and sightsee. The first year I visited her was for my first St. Pat’s Day in Boston. Rolling with an Irish family full of cops in Boston on March 17 is a singularly entertaining experience. J 

During the week I stayed there I wanted to see as much as I could because I didn’t know if I would ever be able to go back. We went to Salem and Concord to do the witch-hunt and the Transcendentalist thing. I grew up reading books by Louisa May Alcott and once I got older, her children’s books led me to her novels for adults and her father’s writings. The Alcott’s led me into other Transcendentalist authors, including Emerson and Thoreau. Once I knew I would be visiting Concord, I knew I had to see Orchard House and Walden Pond.

As I was reading Walden, I kept envisioning the place I visited. Even as a tourist attraction it is peaceful and imparts that sense of vitality and fertility that Muir and Thoreau talk about in their writing. I remember the first time that I read that Walden was not written out in the wilderness. Like many others, when I was reading I assumed that Thoreau cut off most of his contact with the outside world and that he was somewhere without contact with the “modern” world. I remember feeling disappointed, as though I had been lied to.

After re-reading I feel like maybe I wasn’t so at fault for thinking that he was off on his own away from everywhere and everything. The text lends itself to the trope of “the man off in the woods”. This reminded me of the nature that isn’t natural idea that we’ve been reading and talking about this quarter. Walden is written as though Thoreau is one man who retreats from the world and into the forest and when he comes out he has been enlightened and has this amazing account to share with the world. This is that fictional nature idea. He wasn’t far from other people or civilization, he only gave up those luxuries that it amused him to do without. His account came from a journal that he revised over and over; it’s not the divinely inspired account that it seems at time. I’ve been having a problem with the idea of “fake nature” but after connecting that idea with my memories of Walden, I’m not sure that it’s such a big problem anymore. That this little bit of pastoral beauty was preserved because someone wrote a sort of fantasy of the wild is okay with me.

 

I’ve been lucky enough to experience the pond in three of four seasons. You haven’t lived until you’ve hiked around the pond while inhaling snow during a blizzard. The blazing colors in the fall and the vibrant greens and blues of the summer setting will be something that I never forget. The fact that I was able to experience a bit of this pastoral/rural fantasy because of the pretense of the wild makes me only grateful that Thoreau and Muir wrote what they did. This pretense and the fiction of other “wild” spaces (like National Parks) seem essential to preservation and conservation in this modern, capitalistic society. That pretense allows a value to be placed on the wild and if that’s the only way to save places like these, I think I need to come to an uneasy truce with the practice. I’ll settle for this approach at least until public opinion changes or becomes more enlightened and the reason to preserve “nature” need only be that it exists and not for what it can provide to humans.

Walden: Narrative Tone

          Since I am presenting on Walden this week I decided to save the profundity for class and organize this blog around rather glib observations, specifically the narrative tone of the book. This was my second time reading the thing and my first time really thinking about what I was reading; whereas the first time I merely scanned over pages with the indifferent eye of a CSULA undergrad. My close reading, however, failed to change my original opinion of the work and especially my opinion of the narrator of Walden: a self-righteous, egotistical, overzealous penny-pinching fanatic with the charisma of a cold sore, who constantly moralizes and tactlessly shoves his extreme views down the reader's throat. 

          While reading Walden I couldn't shake the feeling of one being lectured at, condescendingly, by a puritanical know-it-all who would look down on me for wearing clothes unadorned with rips and patches. Also implicit in the narrator's tone was a sense of superiority and/or elitism, as if only the great prophet Thoreau knows what is best for mankind. And prophet is indeed what Thoreau takes himself for, evidenced by his regular use of biblical references as well as references from various other holy books and holy men. I found it to be a bit much; I wonder if it caused any eye-rolling in its own time, or if this style of narration was the norm for the 1850's. 

          Being a fan of Emerson's writing, I found myself comparing their two styles while reading Walden. Emerson, in my opinion, always comes across as approachable and charming; he doesn't make the reader feel stupid, lazy or ignorant--all feelings that Thoreau excels at instilling in his audience. Emerson comes across more like a father giving advice, patiently and good-naturedly, while Thoreau, with the coldness of a Victorian schoolmaster, pontificates and finger wags with his words. It's a wonder these two men were so close; I'm sure the charismatic Emerson had to do more than his share of damage control for this uncouth fellow-transcendentalist.  

The Concord Elite

I always enjoyed reading Thoreau, mainly for two reasons. One, I feel the romantic relationship between man and nature described by the author is so beautiful, so ideal. To “live deliberately” with only the essentials necessary to life seems like such a simple, yet wonderful concept, that it makes me want to unplug and go for a hike. And two, I actually went to high school about ten minutes away from Walden Pond, so it was always fun to drive past the woods and be reminded of the rich history surrounding me. But let’s check back into reality. I should be ashamed to admit this (though I’m clearly not) – I am NOT a big fan of nature. I hate camping. I hate bugs. I loathe any environment without a proper heating or running water system. What I do enjoy are the aspects of nature artificially developed by man to make me feel like I’m one with Mother Earth, but I can still use my GPS and take a shower with vanilla coconut body wash, ironically not made from nature. Also, I never went to Walden Pond. Did you catch what I said earlier? I drove past it. Always.

So yes, reading Thoreau is an escape into the ideal relationship I should have with nature, which is what the author wants his readers to experience in Walden. He argues for simplicity, and that we should “keep our accounts on our thumbnail” and eliminate the superfluous items overcomplicating our lives. The only cure for our cluttered surroundings is simplicity, which Thoreau argues is the elevation of purpose. Nature, therefore, becomes the place where one should go to experience the sublime feeling of God’s existence. Subsequently, one will also recognize what is not divine by comparing the experiences of the social world to those of the woods. Of course, these ideas are great and wonderful. Who wouldn’t want to check out for a few days without worrying about emails and deadlines? However, Thoreau’s ideas are not only idyllic, but elitist, and in today’s society, this would be a difficult argument to debate against those who don’t have the luxury to escape.

In Thoreau’s “Reading” section, he also appears elitist in his ideas on the comprehension of the written word as the “perfect knowledge.” He argues that reading is a noble intellectual exercise that should not be done to merely pass the time. “The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind,” he says, “for only great poets can read them.” Therefore, Thoreau argues that we should become literate in these great texts in order to build wiser, more cultivated villages of noble men. “It is time that villages were universities,” he says, and that the inhabitants of these universities can pursue, with leisure, liberal studies for the rest of their lives. It seems too obvious to point out Thoreau’s idealistic thinking, but it is important to note that sense of elitist ideology. To whom is Thoreau writing? Men, of course. But his argument is meant to be understood universally. If that is the case, his ideas fail to connect with certain socioeconomic groups, and the unfortunate implication is that these individuals are inferior, for they are not wise, worldly, and they have yet to experience God. 

Self-awareness and Self-criticism: Paths to Humility and Respect

     William Cronon’s “The Trouble with the Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” provides practical solutions to the troubling notions the cultural construction of the wilderness has taught us. The notion of needing to protect a wilderness that is “pristine” and out there, rather than the nature that surrounds us in our neighborhoods and cities, is a serious impediment to the host of environmental issues we face. In this respect, Cronon’s argument echoes the concerns articulated by Price. We need to be more self-conscious about the spaces we inhabit for ourselves and future generations. However, most people cannot think, or do not care to think, of life on Earth beyond their own moment in the sun. Peter Guther’s observation that man has a linear relationship to time is what inhibits man from taking environmental issues seriously (Byerly 54). As Cronon notes, the idea of the wilderness allows us to think of it as our “real home,” as opposed to the homes we live in, and “evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead” (81). Unfortunately, I think the Christian doctrine of apocalypse and afterlife erroneously contributes to a laissez-faire attitude regarding the environment in which people are comforted by the idea of rapture and Heaven or the afterlife as their “real home.” The idea of separate states of being, life on Earth and life in Heaven, is analogues to the notion of life in and outside of nature and “reinforce[s] environmentally irresponsible behavior” (89). Thus, Cronon notes that “[o]ur challenge is to stop thinking […] according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world” (89). Instead, we must resist the urge to be “dismissive and contemptuous of humbler places and experiences” and through “self-awareness and criticism” allow the wilderness and the natural world to “teach profound feelings of humility and respect” (87).
Cronon’s introduction of the wilderness as being constructed in our image, which he acknowledges is the image of the “elite tourist and wealthy sportsman” really drew me in as a reader (79). I am very interested in Milton’s use of images and reflections in Paradise Lost, especially in discerning “good” images and reflections from “evil” ones. Cronon acknowledges the difficulty of seeing the wilderness as unnatural and a construction since it “hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural” (69). The wilderness, according to Cronon, holds up a mirror in which we “too easily imagine we behold Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longing and desire” (69). The call of the Romantics seems to advocate the importance of self-consciousness and being able to recognize “the Other within” as well as “the Other next door” (89). We are called not to separate ourselves from nature but rather to recognize “the autonomy of the nonhuman world” and how our perceptions and understanding shape our relationship with ourselves, the natural world, and others (87).    

Cronon and Nature

         Our relationship with nature has always been complicated to say the least. It seems rather impossible for us to figure out how we relate to the natural environment.  What I enjoyed most about Cronon’s article is that he was able to find common ground between what is nature and what we want it to be. 

I think Cronon is right in that the problem lies with how society defines nature and/or the wilderness. If we see it as something wild, then we immediately take ourselves out of the equation. If nature is at its purest when it is not inhabited by humans, then how are we supposed to interact with it?  More often than not, it is easy for us to forget that nature is not something “over there,” but in fact, it is all around us. 

I appreciated Cronon’s article because it provided a more balanced approach to nature. If we only focus our attention to the wild, then we run the risk of losing ourselves in the process. Cronon argues that “idealizing the distant wilderness too often means not dealing with the environment in which we actually live” (85). I think sometimes it might be easier for us to focus on protecting the latest endangered animal instead of dealing with more controversial issues such as, “the toxic waste exposure to the ‘unnatural’ urban and agricultural sites” because the solutions to toxic waste may more difficult to grapple with. Cronon is correct in that if we do not pay more attention to the environmental issues at home, “then too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their fate” (85). 

By examining and processing our urban world, not only can we work toward confronting some of the environmental issues at hand, but as Cronon explains we can also experience nature without going “over there.” Before I signed up for this class, I never really tried to define nature; I just thought that it was anything nonhuman and not man made. When I heard birds chirping on my balcony, or if I saw my dog running outside chasing a squirrel, I considered it apart of nature. I Never thought of nature as something far removed from me, I only thought that there was less of it my daily life. I also don’t think it is very realistic to preserve nature in its “purest form” because that would mean we couldn’t be apart of it. What we need to do is figure out how we can live with nature in a way that is environmentally responsible. No matter what we do, we will always have some kind of impact on the natural world. Regardless of how much we try to protect nature, it will always be affected by us. The truth is, we can’t just stop progressing as a society for the sake of nature, instead we should take Cronon’s advice and “set responsible limits to human mastery” (87). Now, we just need to figure out what those limits are...

Reflections on William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness: or,Getting Back to the Wrong Nature"

   William Cronon’s, “The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” is the most impressive theoretical reading assignment to date, as deftly unpacked is society’s evolving meaning of the word “wilderness” to reveal a tangled web of contradictions that Cronon argues if not somehow reconciled will lead to the failure of the environmentalist movement. In an eye-opening introduction Cronon explains why there has never in fact been a wilderness to speak of in human history––at least, not if what we mean by the wilderness is a place standing wholly apart from civilization in some ineffable way. Yes, there have been (and surprisingly) still are places on earth untouched by human contact. But the brilliance of the article is how Cronon shows that despite this fact, inextricably there always is an all-to-human element to its significance that demands critical attention: 

Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [the wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation––indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but sill transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. (Cronon 69, italics mine)

Now, upon first reading the above, I found myself anticipating a sweeping post-structuralist claim about the material world, that is, that Cronon would argue that literally the existence of everything depends on language, a la Barthes, including the wilderness itself. However, much to my relief, Cronon is in fact not arguing from this perspective. What he very much is referring to is the concept of the wilderness. And of course, he is right. Any concept is inevitably the product of the human mind, and therefore has much about it that has a basis in language. His deeper point, then, is that often people, including earnest ecologists and environmentalists, unknowingly conflate the biological reality we know as the wilderness, with a problematic understanding of the concept of the wilderness itself, leading to a profound misunderstanding about how the two are distinct and should remain so. 

What I particularly appreciated about the reading is Cronon’s destabilizing of the meaning of the wilderness by offering an informative and revealing historical analysis of the word's changing denotation, but especially its varying connotations across cultures. A great deal of the meaning of the wilderness, in fact, is taken for granted. For instance, most famously, the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century give a particularly high importance to the respect and sanctity of the natural world, as indicated in their preoccupation with the doctrine of the sublime, which argues there are certain locations in nature or features of the environment that are capable of bringing one into contact with the divine. Whether it be Wordsworth’s Prelude or later John Muir’s raptures over the beauties of the Sierras, the Romantic writers’ ideology represents a positive attitude toward the environment that continues to be influential. 

Cronon sets the stage early of his discussion of the Romantic writers by explaining how early in European history, the physical wilderness had been perceived as a place of darkness, danger, and corruption, that one would be wise to avoid. Religion was particularly significant in shaping the discourses about the natural world. The King James Bible is replete with pejorative references to nature, profoundly impacting the ideologies of the era’s Christian communities: 

The wilderness was where Moses had wandered with his people for forty years, and where they had nearly abandoned their God to worship a golden idol. For Pharaoh will say of the Children of Israel,” we read in Exodus, “They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.” The wilderness was where Christ had struggled with the devil and endured his temptations: “And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness for forty days tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.” (Cronon 70-71)

As Cronon makes clear, for the Romantic meaning of the concept of the wilderness to be adequately understood, there needs be a familiarity first with the word's historical, pre-nineteenth century context. What Cronon does with great skill is exploit the word's semantic mutability to warn of society's remaining ignorant to the fact that a problematic ideology belonging to one group or another is often substituted for a truer understanding of both the concept of and the material reality that defines the wilderness. Precisely because Cronon, as most of us do, wants both himself and his descendants to live in a world that is unimpaired by pollution, he does not hesitate to identify the most contradictory and just plain nonsensical beliefs about the wilderness that pervade both the ecological and environmental discourse communities. The best example is his deconstruction of the paradox lying at the heart of what is known as the "Deep Ecology" movement, which essentially argues that nature’s salvation depends on what amounts to human kind’s exit from the planet. Or, to sum it up in Cronon’s words: “[I]f nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves” (Cronon 83). Expressing a sentiment that many people can sympathize with, including those who would consider themselves to be fervent advocates for the environment, Cronon calls the Deep Ecologist position here an “absurdity,” arguing that any proposition that would essentially have all of humankind commit suicide is, to say in the least, unlikely to attract very many followers or be helpful in environmental discourses. 

As a reader, what I most took away from Cronon’s article was how important it is to be aware of the shifting semantic changes that take place in our language when we attempt to make profound decisions about our collective treatment of the environment. Few if any would argue for the goodness of a polluted, filthy planet. Such a view, to the extent there may actually be one, is not worth taking seriously. One can also be certain that virtually nobody would be anxious to participate in a global suicide either as a way to solve our problems. Cronon seems to want to appropriate sentiments such as these into productive starting points from which to proceed in our professional and public discourses. Lastly, Cronon's penetrating analysis of the various parties belonging to the environmentalist movement, specifically their peculiar and often contradictory definitions of “the wilderness," represents what seems to me to be just the kind of clear-minded thinking that the environmentalist movement requires to win the hearts—and perhaps more importantly the minds—of those like myself who are only beginning to familiarize themselves with the movement's ideologies.

Reflecting on “The Trouble With the Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”

            Cronon goes to great lengths in questioning Thoreau’s famous notion that “In wildness is the preservation of the World” (69). Cronon’s argument is summed up well when he states, “as we gaze into the mirror [nature] holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires” (70). The concept of the wilderness, for Cronon, is ultimately defined and instituted by human beings. It seems Cronon points to the tendencies many individuals have to simultaneously exoticize and classify the natural world. It is indeed laughable to think that the collection of gentle streams and calming trees, otherwise known as protected natural spaces today, were the vast, desolate, and creepy territories of earlier periods.

Yet it seems Cronon is unduly harsh in arguing “[nature is] entirely a creation of the culture it holds dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny” (79). Undoubtedly, the few open spaces we have carved out in the US would certainly suggest the natural environment is a creation of the state. But this assumes that the natural world may only be appreciated within the confines of designated grounds or the places people identify as exotic. It seems Cronon takes a huge leap in suggesting that this desire to classify nature is a means to deny our history of modernization simply because the word deny implies an active and conscious refusal to believe or recognize. In a certain sense, a denial might encompass a complete neglect and lack of concern for the wilderness after a weekend jaunt to the woods. It seems absurd to assume that enjoying the benefits of an undeveloped area is tantamount to an escape from all of humanity that we might never remember or return. I would imagine, and at least hope, that forests and protected lands remain preserved because the population seeks to maintain part of their past rather than for purposes of escape or denial.

            Cronon’s argument changes slightly near his conclusion and he seems to recant his original statements regarding the denial of nature by society. His argument ultimately culminates with the idea that when society regards nature with a certain distance, perhaps embodied in the notion of the Other, there is a loss of appreciation or perhaps an undue exoticism taking place in our perception of nature (84). He argues nature can be experienced in the subtly of weeds growing out of miles of concrete or a few trees amongst a cluster of buildings. Although he takes a different angle on the same argument, his indictment of society on the whole is misplaced. The early developments in business and industry forced the government and fledging forest service to respond by both demarcating and commoditizing natural spaces that demanded preservation. It seems practically impossible to avoid the commoditized aspects of nature in society, but especially considering the motto of the National Forest Service: “Land of Many Uses.” The kneejerk reaction of government to protect natural spaces, in light of societal developments that continue to blight the environment, seems justified and necessary for their time and the current day. In so doing, it is plausible to suggest that nature has been marginalized or othered, but it seems illogical to place blame upon those who might want to experience wooded acres and vast hills rather than a few weeds emerging from a seldom-used concrete path.     

Cronon’s Conundrum

Our concept of wilderness is not natural because it presumes a “virginity,” an untouched quality that precludes Native Americans and which assumes that wherever man isn’t, nature is.  How homocentric!  If man has a religious or near-religious experience in the nature encounter, is his own nature as city-dweller wholly divorced from any personal redemptive qualities?  In other words, cannot man summon a sense of humility for his fellow beings without running to the wilderness and drinking in the sublimity?  Cronon grounds his discussion of wilderness in Scripture, wherein the wanderings of the ancient Israelites and the temptation of Christ occur in desert-like surroundings, not woods, teeming with life.  This is an important distinction.  Wilderness up to the late eighteenth century had been considered apart from creation and abysmal.  The use, then, of the term “wilderness” in the context of the nature encounter represented by the mid-nineteenth century a radical co-opting of religion to approximate, ironically enough, religious experience.

As the frontier became increasingly settled, the myth of wilderness as bestower of “rugged individualism” rose in prominence and embellished—burnished even—the extant American mythos as a land of opportunity for those willing to rise to the occasion.  Wordsworth’s sublimity less than fifty years on was supplanted by the economic opportunity immanent in farming, ranching, and owning large swaths of “wilderness.”  The secularization of the scriptural ideal of wilderness saw the transformation from wilderness as the place where God met the pilgrim on his spiritual journey to the place where God is made fully manifest in the life of the blessed citizen.  For those with money who could travel, going to the wilderness was a luxury, the benefits of which could not be experienced, understood, and enjoyed by the lower classes.  Analogously, for those with money, buying wilderness for the purpose of economic benefit was a privilege equally not to be enjoyed by the lower classes.

Wilderness is a myth because we assume that what isn’t owned by the federal government, a state, or a private individual is untouched.  This fallacy allows us to pursue a course of unimpeded annexation, whereby lands that are already owned or falling into ownership are purposed, re-purposed, and plundered yet again beyond all possibility of sustainability.  I prefer Cronon’s essay because it sticks a finger in the eye of boutique environmentalism, the idea that only by driving hundreds of miles out of the way—to Joshua Tree for instance—can the city-dweller wake up to his God-given, innate qualities of humility and start treating his fellow beings with more respect and compassion.  What hogwash.  Why do I need to go the forest to have a near-religious experience when we have religion available in the sunset at Venice Beach or the sunrise from my apartment stoop?

Why has a near-religious experience supplanted a religious one?  I don’t understand this.  As someone who is religious, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that a devolved form of Wordsworth’s sublimity is environmentalist grandeur run amok.

Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism

Wilderness, Sacrality, Nationalism

            In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon examines the complex nexus of values and beliefs centered on the concept of wilderness in the United States.  Rather than a pure, natural given, the wilderness is an “unntural” cultural creation.   In the idea of wilderness are intertwined two American obsessions: religion and nationalism.  The signifiers of these cultural categories are not always obviously apparent, as they undergo revalutation and take on disguises.

            Cronon organizes his analysis by exploring the influence of the concepts of the sublime and the fontier on the creation of “wilderness.”  We find religion interacting with both these concepts while nationalism primarily relates to the second.  Previous to the reinterpretation of the sublime in the Romantic period, wilderness generally had negative connotations.  It caused one to feel terror or “bewilderment.” In antiquity, the wilderness was also a place of temptation and spiritual purification.  This trandformative possibility of the wilderness was valued and developed so that by the late 18^th century the wilderness was where one could encounter the divine.  In the United States, due to the influence of writers like Muir, the transformation of wilderness was complete: “Satan’s home had become God’s own temple” (72).  Wild nature became sacred.

            Related to this revaluation, the wilderness also became a place where one could return to certain core human experiences.  In the wilderness, human beings experienced some primitive essence that had been covered over by corrupting and artificial layers of “civilization.”  This primitivism was given a nationalist tinge by writers like Frederick Jackson Turner, who saw American democracy emerging from the encounter bewteen primitive human nature and the wilderness.  This American democratic spirit could be reinvigorated by returning to the wilderness.  The wilderness must be protected because it is “the last bastion of rugged individualism,” which can ensure the renewal of an essential Americanness (77).  Wilderness as frontier also connotes a place of authenticity.  The wilderness is the irreducible “real” – the place where we can experience the “truth” of the world and ourselves.  The real and the authentic, according to historian of religions Mircea Eliade, are preeminently qualities of the sacred.  Thus, as Cronon observes, modern environmentalism is replete with “quasi-relgious values” founded upon such a conception of the wilderness (80).  The assumption of wilderness as sacred and authentic represents a structure of belief homologous to what is usually undertood by the word “religious.”

            Within this complex of “religious” belief and national identity, certain problems and contradictions emerge.  One of these involves class.  The wilderness as an artificial place of authenticity and Americianness can only be enjoyed and benefited from by the middle and upper classes who have the money and leisure to travel.  It is a place of recreation and of internal renewal separate from the urban centers where these visitors live and work.  The wilderness allows them to purify themselves of the corruption of a greedy, ugly, industrial-capitalist world, thus absolving them of any complicity in its injustices.  Poet and farmer Wendell Berry has often drawn attention to the need to live responsibly in a place where we both make a home and work.  When we preserve the wilderness because we expect it to purify us of our corruption and sins, we accept more easily the faults of the “profane” world we inhabit.  This mentality can tacitly accept political and economic structures that cause injustice and destruction, thus devaluing most of the earth and many of our fellow human beings.

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.”

Rejecting Adam's Curse: Thoreau's Call to a Better Life

 There is a popular notion, that Americans associate with our Puritan roots, that a man must work hard in order to earn their daily bread, an idea known as Adam's curse. Thoreau wholeheartedly rejects this notion in Walden when he denies the biblical curse that resulted in man's fall from grace: "It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do" (64). There is a related idea that idle hands do the devil's work, a cliche that suggests that a man with leisure time is likely to sin, so keeping busy is a way to stay on the path of righteousness.  Thoreau argues contrariwise that men should work less so that they can spend more leisure time contemplating the lessons to be found in nature, thereby improving their souls.

The problem that Thoreau finds in those that are chained to their labor is not that they labor, but that they "labor under a mistake" (7); the mistake being that men waste their efforts pursuing unnecessary material good to the neglect of their own personal inner-development. Thoreau is concerned that in a mad attempt to keep up with the Jones's, to use the parlance of our day, people are starving their souls. People are so concerned with purchasing material comforts that they forget to take care of their spiritual needs.
 
Thoreau forces readers to consider whether or not they can truly afford the material goods that they purchase. Is exotic food necessary or will simpler fare suffice? If your old coat is still intact, why do you need a new one? Most importantly, can you afford the things that you buy? Or are you living, as Thoreau puts it, on "another's brass" (8) -- living on credit and establishing debt that condemns man to toil in conditions that perhaps would be best avoided. Thoreau specifically addresses his neighbors in Concord but his message is universal and applicable to all. Furthermore, Thoreau puts his money - or lack thereof - where his mouth is by demonstrating that it was viable to work less and live more; Walden is a call for men to "live deliberately" - a call for people to contemplate life as they experience it.

The experiment of living solely by the efforts of his own hands (aside from the help he hires for farming and the occasional dinner party he attends) is the basis for Walden. Thoreau offers detailed accounting of all his expenses, crowing over how little money and time sustainability costs. He was able to purchase enough food for eight months with a mere $8.74, equivalent to $185.61 today (that's a couple of weeks for me and I know I could eat cheaper but convenience and freshness counts). He even estimates he could have lived on three dollars less if he not indulged on luxuries such as dried apples and a pumpkin. Thoreau elsewhere gives the average rate of a day laborer as one dollar per day, which means that a person could earn his food for eight months - even with the luxury items - in nine days.

The Irish laborer John Field is offered as an example of someone who's inefficient labor practices condemn his family to perpetual poverty. Field is "an honest, hard-working, but shiftless man" (184), an oxymoronic description that exemplifies Thoreau's point perfectly. Field works hard to scrape together a living for his family but is unable to get ahead, which is why he is shiftless.  Thoreau tries to teach Field about economy and suggests that the Irishman could escape the bonds of wage-slavery if he would forgo luxuries such as tea, coffee, butter, and fresh meat. Thoreau further illustrates Field's lack of economy when they go fishing . Field uses worms to catch shiners, small fish that he uses as bait to catch larger perch; Thoreau uses worms to catch perch. When the two fish together, Field "disturbed only a couple of fins while I [Thoreau] was catching a fair string" (187). The message is clear: Field works twice as hard for less reward.