Thoreau Today

Henry David Thoreau in the Literature and Culture of the 21st Century

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

November/December 2008

Research on species loss and climate change in Massachusetts, published in the November 4, 2008, issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on Thoreau's phenological record-keeping. "Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau's woods: are driven by climate change," by Charles G. Willis, et al., PNAS 105, no. 44, was the subject of an October 28, 2008, article in the New York Times and an October 28 story on NPR's Morning Edition.

Thoreau's hard-to-read handwriting is mentioned in the Times article, "Thoreau Is Rediscovered as a Climatologist," by Cornelia Dean. Datelined Concord, Mass, the article begins: "Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in 'Walden.' Now he turns out to have another line in his resume: climate researcher. He did not realize it, of course. Thoreau died in 1862, when the industrial revolution was just beginning to pump climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 1851, when he started recording when and where plants flowered in Concord, he was making notes for a book on the seasons. Now, though, researchers at Boston University and Harvard are using those notes to discern patterns of plant abundance and decline in Concord--and by extension, New England--and to link those patterns to changing climate. Their conclusions are clear. On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau's day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology. Working with Charles C. Davis, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and two of his graduate students, they determined that 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long. Those findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'It's targeting certain branches in the tree of life,' Dr. Davis said. 'They happen to be our most charismatic species--orchids, mints, gentians, lilies, iris.' Of the 21 species of orchids Thoreau observed in Concord, 'we could only find 7,' Dr. Primack said. From 1851 through 1858, Thoreau tracked the first flowerings of perhaps 500 species, Dr. Primack said. 'He knew what he was doing, and he did it really systematically.'"

The Times article notes the significance of a Thoreau contemporary, storekeeper Alfred Hosmer, who some time after Thoreau's death "opened a gray cardboard box, sifted through photocopies of Thoreau's notoriously hard-to-read notes and pulled out what looked like an ancient composition book. He turned to a page where an inventory of orchid species ended and one of irises began. The entries move across the page in tiny but precise script. 'You can imagine this as a storekeeper's ledger,' Dr. Primack said. But Hosmer's plant nomenclature was more accurate than Thoreau's, he said. 'Plus we can read his writing.' According to Dr. Primack, Hosmer spent '15 years walking around Concord for several hours a day several times a week' making notes about plants. 'He never wrote about why he was doing this,' Dr. Primack said, 'but he had known Thoreau when he was a boy. Hosmer was one of the first people who said Thoreau was a genius and not just a nut.' Dr. Primack said he had never heard of Hosmer until his interest in Thoreau led him to search for old journals, diaries and other records. 'I started going to all these funny scientific societies we have,' he said. 'I was getting up in the "new business" and telling people what I was looking for. I got a lot of leads, but most were not very useful. Then Ray Angelo told me about Hosmer.'

The Times article goes on: 'There were a couple of big problems,' Dr. Miller-Rushing, now at the University of Maryland, said in a telephone interview from Colorado, where he was studying mountain plants. 'Thoreau had incredibly messy handwriting. That was a big difficulty.' Also, he said, 'in some cases he and Hosmer called the same species by different names. We had to figure all that out.'"

The NPR Web site has a link to the four-and-a-half-minute audio story by Nell Greenfieldboyce, titled online "Climate Changing Walden Pond's Flowers". NPR's Web page for the story reports, "Scientists are using notes from Henry David Thoreau to discern patterns of plant abundance in New England and to link those patterns to changing climate," and says "Henry David Thoreau is perhaps best known for his book Walden, about living a simple life in harmony with nature. But Thoreau didn't just love nature--he studied it and kept meticulous notes. Now, scientists are using Thoreau's records to look at how the landscape has changed over the last 150 years."

Thanks to Mike Gilleland, Laura Weber, and Jim Danky for pointing out these three sources to me on the same day.

The November/December 2008 issue of Mother Jones contains an omnibus review by Michael Agger of a handful of books by twenty-first-century "sons and daughters of Thoreau," people who write about their year (or so) of not shopping, eating locally, not buying Chinese products, et cetera. The piece, titled "On Walden Books ("Are the new Thoreauvians masters of self-denial or just self-promotion"), is accompanied by a color illustration by Maurice Vellekoop of shoppers at what is clearly a modern farmer's" market--where all four shoppers whose faces are visible (including a woman and a child) look like Henry David Thoreau clones.

The piece begins thus: "When Henry David Thoreau retreated to the woods [actually many years later], he famously told his readers that he wanted 'to front only the essential facts of his life.' What he didn't say was that he also wanted to front the essential facts of his ambition. It was at Walden Pond where Thoreau, an original slacker, finally became a writer. He finished his account of a canoe ride with his brother [a journey in a small boat that was not a canoe], A week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, and wrote the first draft of Walden, the book that made his name."

"After 150 years, Walden endures as a monument to frugality, solitude, and sophomore-year backpacking trips," Agger goes on. "Yet it's Thoreau's ulterior motive that has the most influence today. He was one of the first to use lifestyle experimentation as a means to becoming a published author. Going to live by the pond was a philosophical decision, but it was also something of a gimmick."

From Paul Carbray's September 26, 2008, Montreal Gazette review of Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: "Like his hero, back-to-nature essayist Henry David Thoreau, Theroux is uncomfortable in cities, although he likes Istanbul ('a city with the soul of a village') and is entranced by the Asiatic glamour of Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, which he visits for the first time. But like Thoreau, he yearns for the wilderness. In Tokyo, he writes, 'everyone looks as though they'd all received the same memo: Walk fast and look worried,' while the empty wastes of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido are 'the landscape of my dreams.'"

The October 2008 issue of international anarchist journal Divergences includes an interview with Juan Manuel Roca and Ivan Dario Alvarez, the authors of the Diccionario Anarquista de Emergencia (Claudia Mantilla Duran, "Emergency Anarchist Dictionary"), and Thoreau's name comes up. Ivan Dario Alvarez says, "Deep down the prickly, rebellious character lingers on in many facets of contemporary life. Look at the ecology movements; they all have an anarchist strand and swim against the tide of the hypnotic efforts of the great powers who are the very ones who are poisoning the air we breathe. Their roots may go a way back but they have not been forgotten. Henry David Thoreau was undoubtedly the godfather of an attitude to the environment through his book, Walden, about living in the woods."

The Holiday 2008 catalog of mail-order company Isabella ("Books and Gifts for Reawakening the Spirit") offers, for just $49.95, a "Thoreau Pendant": "Etched onto this sterling silver triangular pendant [a picture shows that it's actually shaped like a guitar pick], Henry David Thoreau's dynamic words 'live the life you have imagined' help to remind us of why we are all here [and I thought it was because of sex]. I can't think of a better symbol to evoke an uncommon response to a common life." Thoreau's actual words in the last chapter of Walden: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

In the October 4, 2008, issue of American Chronicle, David Bresnahan reports on the 178th Semiannual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("Mormon Leaders Give Advice for Economic Stress and Trials"), saying that "Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles" told of how he and his wife "traveled to Walden Pond, made famous in the book of the same name written by Henry David Thoreau. He said that Thoreau learned from his experiences at Walden Pond that there are four basics needs--food, clothing, shelter, and fuel."

In the Provo, Utah, Daily Herald, Caleb Warnock elaborated a bit (October 5, 2008; "LDS General Conference: Five new temples announced"): "Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles talked in depth about Henry David Thoreau's two years living at Walden Pond, encouraging church members to find 'the spiritual benefits of a simplified lifestyle.' Following Thoreau's philosophy that there are only four basic human needs -- food, clothing, shelter and fuel -- Perry encouraged members to live the Word of Wisdom, dress modestly and live modestly. 'We do not want to harm our mortal body, as it is a gift from God,' Perry said. 'Modest dress is a quality of mind and heart. . . . Our housing should be determined by our income, not the house across the street.'"

A blog by Ned Sullivan ("Backyard Matters") in an online publication called The Daily Green not only misquotes Thoreau, it misquotes him in the title of an article: "'In Wilderness Is the Preservation of the World': Why Land Conservation Matters--More than Ever-- In an Economic Crisis"). Sullivan writes, "While the value of stock portfolios may have taken a nosedive, for the sake of our sanity and the health of our planet we cannot let this deter us from making further investments in conserving open space. In 1851, as America's industrial revolution was revving up, Henry David Thoreau wrote that 'In wilderness is the preservation of the world.' His words have only gathered power and momentum in the years that have passed since he wrote them." Thoreau's words in "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."

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