Henry David Thoreau’s Environmental Humanism

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 30 (2009): 31-42 Henry David Thoreau’s Environmental Humanism François Specq While Thoreau’s early call for nature preservation in The Maine Woods is well-known and has been a cornerstone of the environmental movement, paradoxically less attention has been paid to the companion call that is introduced in the penultimate chapter of Walden: Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic and 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. 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. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. (317-18) This call appears as the conclusion of the last two chapters of the book before the “Conclusion,” and I would like to show how it is the logical outcome of Thoreau’s thinking in these last two chapters (“The Pond in Winter” and “Spring”), which foreground three different modes of environmental consciousness or awareness. These chapters have often been seen as less “ambitious,” because they seem to adhere to the conventions of seasonal literature. But, as Lawrence Buell warns us, “from now until spring, seasonality dominates. To some extent this change makes the latter third of Walden a more conventional logbook. In other ways, François Specq the appearance of straightforwardness increases the opportunities for deviance” (The Environmental Imagination 244). And I would like to suggest that they actually offer a sustained, if not systematic, exploration of three competing modes of environmental awareness. By this notion, I mean three different ways of approaching, if not bridging, the gap between matter and consciousness.1 These three different modes correspond to the three highlights of these chapters: Thoreau’s charting of Walden Pond (“sequence 1”), the ice-cutters’ harvest of the Walden ice (“sequence 2”), both from “The Pond in Winter,” and the famous flowing sandbank passage from the “Spring” chapter (“sequence 3”). My contention is that these passages should be read in conjunction—not as merely seasonal narrative, but as rhetorical argument—and that, to put things in a nutshell, they exemplify a move from a denial of materiality in the name of commonly conceived humanism, through misguided, all-too-human materialism, to true materialism. The latter, which may ultimately matter more than idealism, is premised on a double awareness of the concreteness of one’s environment and of the materiality of language, thus amounting to a more fully realized form of humanism. I would also like to propose that the three passages correspond to three different rhetorical modes—allegorical, literal, symbolic— and that Thoreau’s environmental awareness, in Walden, is eventually grounded in symbolism: although emphasizing Walden’s reliance on the symbolic mode is hardly news, this has usually been understood through the New Critical focus on purely formal features. 1. Nature and the Ethical Translation: The Rhetoric of the Ideal In January 1846, Thoreau, who was a professional surveyor, carried his surveyor’s tools—“compass and chain and sounding line” (Walden 285)—to the ice-locked pond and drew a careful map of its shoreline, with more than a hundred soundings of its depths, an experience he reported in Walden’s antepenultimate chapter, “The Pond in Winter,” which also includes a copy of the map itself (286). Thoreau’s extended passage on drawing a map of Walden Pond is fundamentally divided into two parts: the cartography of the lake, on the one hand, and its translation into an ethical lesson, on the other. This two-part structure reflects the tension between two contradictory approaches to transcendence: put briefly, cartography is meant to de-transcendentalize, as 1 This exploration of varieties of awareness in Walden will thus extend Scott Slovic’s foundational discussion of the notion of “awareness” in Seeking Awareness, whose chapter on Thoreau is devoted to the Journal. 32 Henry David Thoreau’s Environmental Humanism Thoreau’s purpose is to disprove legends about the lake’s bottomlessness; then the ethical translation appears as a way of re-transcendentalizing. Mapmaking appears as a Humboldtian activity—answering Humboldt’s call for the “delineation” of “nature’s physiognomy” (Cosmos I:81). As Laura Dassow Walls notes, “Thoreau’s local would always speak to the cosmic: Walden, like Eureka, was a response to Humboldt’s Cosmos” (Passage to Cosmos 264).2 And we will here remember that the opening page of Walden (evoking Thoreau’s desire to write as if “from a distant land” [3]), echoed Humboldt’s notion of the equivalence between experiment and the infinity of the world: “The study of a science that promises to lead us through the vast range of creation may be compared to a journey in a far-distant land” (Cosmos I:50). Within that tradition, the map represents the synthesizing power of knowledge. The most central aspect of the mapmaking process, in the rhetorical economy of Thoreau’s text, is that the lake is objectified: it becomes an object of rational knowledge, undergoing an ontological transformation by being experienced as a site of measurement rather than imagination, which is here dismissed as fancy: “The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes” (288). Through this process of imaging—as distinct from and opposed to imagining—the otherness of nature is denied, or rather reduced, as it is bent to our frames or to our reason (as advocated by Humboldt : “the traveler . . . is guided by reason in his researches” [Cosmos I:51]), if not to our will. Mapmaking relies on a disjunction between matter and consciousness, and on the simultaneous belief in the possibility of bridging the gap intellectually: although the mapmaking process is not entirely devoid of sensory perception, the otherness of nature is eventually subsumed. The map is a spatial construct intent on communicating meaning in a “linear” fashion, drawing on such principles as logical progression, deduction, progress—hence its possible enrolment in the banner of expansion, as suggested by Humboldt: … so ought we likewise, in our pursuit of science, to strive after a knowledge (...truncated)