Thoreaus Country: Journey Through
a Transformed Landscape.
1999. David R. Foster. Harvard
University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts. 270 pp.
Concluding
a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in 1851, Henry David Thoreau
is reported to have said: "in wildness is the preservation
of the world." In Wilderness and the American Mind, the
historian Roderick Nash tells us that "Americans had
not heard the like before." With this idea, Thoreau,
"cut through the channels in which a large portion of
thought about wilderness subsequently flowed."
I always thought of Thoreau as a champion of "wild nature" or "wilderness." As many my age did, I had a poster with his quote on my graduate student office wall. However, in Thoreaus Country, ecologist David R. Foster reveals that in limiting our notion of Thoreau by simply associating him with this famous quote, we miss the charm, humor, and observational powers of this deep-thinking man. Foster writes: "Given that Thoreau was an inspirational nature writer whose work helped motivate a modern wilderness and preservation movement, it is often presumed that he lived in a largely natural worldThis nostalgic vision is quite incorrectA major theme in Thoreaus landscape was changeThrough his musing and reflections on everyday scenes and activities, Thoreau provides us with new insights into the New England countryside and new ways of recognizing and appreciating the history of natural change."
"Wildness" for Thoreau was a state of mind, rather than a description of place. He could find wildness just about anyplace he looked for it. Thoreaus most famous wild placeWalden Pondlocated at the edge of Concord, Massachusetts, was about two miles via the railroad tracks from his mothers kitchen. When he wrote Walden; or a Life in the Woods, 60 percent of the New England landscape was in open fields, interspersed with small woodlands and crisscrossed by a dense network of roads. Today, 60 to 90 percent of New England has reverted to forest, and the land has actually become wilder. So, if New England was not all that wild in Thoreaus time, what was the look, the character of the landscape, and how does this impact the New England landscapes we see today?
Thoreaus Country is among several recent books that examine the historical, environmental, and cultural forces that create the landscapes we live in today. An underlying theme in these studies is that our failure to solve environmental problems or resolve conflict between those who would preserve and those who would change, lies, in part, in our failure to comprehend the making of modern landscapes. A father can tell his son that a landscape has been transformed, but unless the son experiences it himself, he doesnt really appreciate the extent of change. Specialists call this ecological amnesia, and stress that it strongly affects how we perceive environmental issues as diverse as sustaining populations of endangered butterflies and maintaining grasslands in the eastern United States to judging the sustainability of Chinas mode of agriculture.
Thoreau was one of the most observant and prolific writers to document the land and natural history and human activity of his time. Over a 40-year period he recorded his observations nearly every day, an effort that resulted in about two million words in 30 volumes, now preserved in New Yorks Morgan Library. But most of his insightful reflections on natural history were not included in the two books published during his lifetime (1817-1862): Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, although various editions of the journals have been published since his death.
Foster selected passages from the journals that illustrate landscape scenes, natural history processes, and land-use activities that offer "new and refined insight into the history and ecology of New England." He also included entries he found amusing. He couples Thoreaus passages with his own introductory essays, which are reader-friendly discussions of current issues in ecology and groups these into sections: "Three Landscapes in New England History," "The Cultural History of New England," "A Natural History of Woodlands," "The Coming of the New Forest," "Losses and Change," and "Stepping Back and Looking Ahead." Foster concludes with a rich "Bibliographic Essay." The essays are accompanied by carefully crafted pen-and-ink drawings based on scenes Thoreau described.
"New England is a cultural landscape, shaped by the interaction of human history and the natural environment. Nearly every acre of the countryside has been directly affected by past land use," Foster writes. Thoreau recorded in great detail many of the processes that would give rise to todays forests and he anticipated and documented the forces behind cultural and ecological changes in New England landscapes. During his years of observation, Thoreau came to have a very complete understanding of "The Succession of Forest Trees." He recorded and interpreted the natural processes occurring in the old fields of Concord. He identified the prevalent phenomenon that helped explain the increasing abundance of pine forests in his lifetime and their gradual decline in ours. Foster notes that "in managing forest areas today, we can use Thoreaus knowledge of succession and landscape history to shape our expectation for their future and condition, or to modify the approach we take." Foster believes that if later forest ecologists had read Thoreaus notes they may have saved themselves decades of research effort.
Thoreau understood how fires shaped forest composition. And, in one delightful passage, we also learn that Thoreau had a talent for spin. "I once set fire to a woods," Thoreau wrote. The fire started when he and a friend were attempting to cook some trout they had caught. "It burned over a hundred acres or more and destroyed much young wood. When I returned home late in the day, with the others of my townsman (after fighting the fire all day) I could not but help noticing that the crowd who were so ready to condemn the individual who had kindled the fire, did not sympathize with the owners of the wood, but were in fact highly elated as if they were thankful of the opportunity which had afforded them so much sport; and it was only half dozen owners, so called, though not all of them, who looked sour or grieved."On a recent trip through New England in search of the "Great North Woods," my wife and I included Thoreaus Country in our travel library. I had just finished reading and was marveling at the insights and the depth of this thoughtful man as we reached Walden Pond. This was a sort of pilgrimage. We arrived at sunset and found Walden Pond to be a jogging and walking traillocal swimming hole sort of place. It was lovely but there were scores of people using this resource in the context of the culture and economy of our time. Before reading Thoreaus Country, I would have thought that Thoreau would have been shocked by such a loss of "wildness." I now suspect he would have been mildly amused because he understood and appreciated that we humans are a central environmental force, shaping landscapes nearly everywhere.
John Seidensticker, Curator of Mammals at the National Zoo, is the author of Tigers and co-editor of Riding the Tiger: Tiger Conservation in Human-dominated Landscapes.
ZooGoer 28(5) 1999. Copyright 1999 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
