literature review

Thoreau and urbanature: from Walden to ecocriticism

Ashton Nichols

Published online: 29 September 2009 � Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2009

Abstract The concept of urbanature is a valuable new idea in ecocritical studies. Urbanature claims that urban life and nature are not as distinct as we have long supposed.

Hawks and owls are nesting throughout Central Park and Manhattan at the same time that

Western environmentalists are flying thousands of miles in jumbo-jets in an effort to ‘‘get

back’’ to a version of nature they claim cannot be found in cities. Thoreau helps us to

understand this conflict in the way he links an understanding of the nonhuman world with a

wider appreciation of the concept of wildness. This essay will examine the hermit of Walden Pond in biographical detail and will also reveal the continuing impact of his works

on students, teachers, and naturalists, especially that group of literary scholars known as

ecocritics. Thoreau’s writings deliver a message of intellectual optimism but also of

environmental warning. He also offers us a framework that can help us to determine the

formal outlines of the ecocriticism we will practice in the coming decades.

Keywords Thoreau � Walden � Ecocriticism � Wilderness � Wildness � Nature � Urbanature

We need a new concept, and we need a new word to describe that concept. The new word we

need is urbanature. The concept this word describes says that nature and urban life are not as distinct as we have long supposed. The life and work of Henry David Thoreau help us to

understand this important idea. As you begin to read this copy of Neohelicon, hawks are roosting on skyscrapers on Central Park East and owls are nesting throughout Manhattan in

the center of New York City. 1

The same is true around the world. Animals, wild and semi-

wild, pervade our urban and suburban spaces, from alligators in Florida retirement homes to

A. Nichols (&) Dickinson College, Creekside, 580 McClures Gap Road, Carlisle, PA 17013, USA e-mail: [email protected]

1 See http://urbanhawks.blogs.com. The full title of the site is ‘‘Urban Hawks and other Wildlife in Central

Park and New York City.’’ Today’s entry (January 30, 2009) reads: ‘‘The oven is a cove on the Lake of Central Park. It attracts a good number of birds during each season, including the winter. Today, there were a number of birds, including a Red-tailed Hawk, a Hermit Thrush, numerous Northern Cardinals, numerous

123

Neohelicon (2009) 36:347–354 DOI 10.1007/s11059-009-0005-5

storks on the parapets of mosques in Marrakesh. Meanwhile, environmentalists all over the

Western hemisphere are flying thousands of miles in jumbo jets carrying tons of synthetic

Gore-Tex in order to ‘‘get back’’ to nature in the Canadian Rockies or the Italian Alps. At the

same time, the World Wide Web tells us that Thoreau wrote, ‘‘In wilderness is the preser-

vation of the world.’’ 2

Six hundred web sites say so. But Thoreau never said, ‘‘In wilderness

is the preservation of the world. He said, ‘‘In Wildness is the preservation of the world’’ (my italics).3 This difference makes all the difference. Let me explain.

‘‘Urbanature’’ (rhymes with furniture) says that human and nonhuman lives are linked in

complex and necessarily interconnected ways. We are not out of nature in the streets of Beijing any more than we are in nature above tree-line in the Himalayas. When nature-lovers say that they long to return to nature, they are making what the philosophers call a category

mistake. As Tyler Stalling has recently noted, when we long to ‘‘return’’ to nature in the

twenty-first century, ‘‘There is no real nature to which to return. Rather, in the face of

burgeoning technologies such as nanotechnology and genetic manipulation, the once defined

border between nature and culture is obsolete.’’ 4

Stallings made this provocative claim in the

catalogue for an environmental art exhibit by Jeremy Kidd entitled ‘‘Fictional Realities.’’ As

Stallings suggests, we are never cut off from wild nature by human culture. This is the central

truth of all ecology. Nothing we can do can take us out of nature. There is nowhere for us to

go. Thoreau knew this fact well in 1845, and it helps to explain Thoreau’s relationship to this

new idea of urbanature and also to the practice of ecocriticism. This essay will examine the

hermit of Walden Pond in biographical detail, but it will also strive to reveal the continuing

impact of his thinking and writing on students, teachers, naturalists and others, especially

that group of literary scholars currently known as ecocritics.

Thoreau’s Walden is the ur-text, the foundational document, of American nature writing. Many earlier explorers, naturalists, and authors had described the natural wonders

of the new American continent, but until Thoreau no author had located ‘‘nature’’ at the

center of one vision of the American psyche. Like William Wordsworth and earlier

European naturalists, however, Thoreau’s nature writing is as much about its author’s own

mind, and his vast reading, as it is about any objective vision of the natural world. Within

the first chapter of Walden, appropriately entitled ‘‘Economy,’’ for example, Thoreau refers to the Sandwich Islanders, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Sir Walter Raleigh, the diarist John

Evelyn, Hippocrates, Confucius, Darwin on Tierra del Fuego, Salem Harbor, Hanno and

the Phoenicians, and St. Petersburg, Russia. So, even early on, Walden reveals itself to be a book about other books, about history, biography, philosophy, farming, and comparative

religion as much as it is a book about ‘‘nature.’’ Just as importantly, Thoreau’s goals in the

Footnote 1 continued Tufted Titmice, and a Cooper’s Hawk that has been roosting in the same location nearby since at least early January.’’ The site also includes numerous high-resolution photographs. 2

See, for example, an essay by Ned Sullivan in the The Daily Green: The Consumer’s Guide to the Green Revolution (http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/blogs/easy-tips/economy-land-conservation-55101603) or ‘‘The Public and Private Interest in Wilderness Protection,’’ by William C. Dennis (Cato Journal, 1:2), published by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. (http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj1n2-3.html), an organization that should have known better. 3

The ‘‘Wildness’’ quotation comes from his essay ‘‘Walking,’’ in Thoreau, H. D. (2008). In W. Rossi (Ed.), Walden, civil disobedience, and other writings (3rd ed., p. 273). New York: Norton. All of my Walden citations will be to this edition. 4

Tyler Stallings, Jeremy Kidd: Fictional Realities, Laguna Beach: Laguna Art Museum, 2006. See http://www.tylerstallings.com/WritingContents/Kidd_catalog_final_6.pdf.

348 A. Nichols

123

book are as much philosophical and ethical as they are naturalistic and environmental.

Walden sets forth a way of thinking—a way of life—that can be practiced in suburban Tokyo or midtown Manhattan as much as it can in a quiet spot of woodland in the

southwest corner of Concord, Massachusetts.

When readers initially imagine Thoreau in his tiny rustic cabin by the shores of Walden

Pond, they can easily create a mistaken impression. Walden Pond was not in the middle of

nowhere. Thoreau could walk into Concord to have supper with his mother or conversa-

tions with Ralph Waldo Emerson. The town is only a mile-and-a-half from the pond. He

could hear the bells in Concord’s steeples from the doorway of his hut. He could hear a

rolling locomotive from the paths that he daily walked. Nor was Thoreau at Walden for a

very long time. He wrote over two-hundred pages about his first year in residence and then

recorded his second year at Walden with the rhetorical flourish of a single sentence: ‘‘Thus

was my first year’s life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it.’’ 5

When he left Walden, he said that he had many other lives to lead. What he meant, clearly,

was that Walden was a state of mind as much as it was a physical place. Thoreau took this

Walden mental state with him wherever he went, from the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

to the deep Maine woods, from the top of Mount Katahdin to the beaches of Cape Cod. It is

also clear that Thoreau wanted ‘‘Walden’’ to become a state of mind in his readers as much

as in himself. This was clearly what he meant when he said—in many ways throughout his

writings—that most people were asleep most of the time and that his goal was to awaken

them, to rouse them to a new form of conscious awareness.

Thoreau was arrested and spent one night in jail during the ‘‘natural’’ years he spent at

Walden. That famous night in jail became the source for his most significant piece of

political writing. Thoreau’s politics are hard to isolate or simplify, but they have been

central to an evolving view of democracy, of the value of human freedom, and of the role

of the individual in the political process. He is best known politically for the essay that

resulted from his single night in jail. Usually called ‘‘Civil Disobedience,’’ the essay’s

original title was ‘‘Resistance to Civil Government.’’ 6

We often see this document today in

terms of the nonviolent resistance movements of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther

King, Jr. Its influence, however, reaches from the women’s rights convention in Seneca

Falls, New York, in 1848—the same year Thoreau first delivered this essay as a speech—to

the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and 1970s, from civil rights marchers in the 1986

People Power Revolution in the Philippines to those in apartheid South Africa from the

1960s until 1990. ‘‘Civil Disobedience’’ has become a rallying cry for all those who would

argue that the law of civil society is never permanent, nor is it superior to the law of one

enlightened individual. At least, so Thoreau says.

Of course, Thoreau’s radical individualism does not appear in only one essay. Evidence

for his politics can be found throughout his Journals and especially in Walden. Ultimately, Thoreau’s politics are about the individual conscience—about the right of each person to

answer to a higher law rather than the law of any social, religious, or political system. His

politics have direct connections to the months he spent on the banks of Walden Pond, in

solitude perhaps, but still close enough to the urbs of Concord that thoughts about slavery, poverty, and the Mexican War were never far from his mind. Even more than narrow

political thinking, Thoreau’s ‘‘life in the woods’’ revealed ethical truths about the way

5 Walden, p. 214. 6

The essay begins with Thoreau’s famous statement, ‘‘I heartily accept the motto—That government is best which governs least,’’ a motto Thoreau takes from a literary and political journal, United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Norton edition, p. 227.

Thoreau and urbanature 349

123

humans should treat one another, truths that extended from human beings to include the

ways we should treat all organic life: ‘‘No humane being, past the thoughtless age of

boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he

does.’’ 7

Thoreau says that he would eat a rat with relish if it were necessary, but he also says that he loses a bit of self-respect every time he goes fishing.

‘‘I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody

calls,’’ Thoreau says in the chapter called ‘‘Solitude.’’ 8

Thoreau favors this kind of con-

tradictory statement that turns out not to be a contradiction once we realize that the

‘‘company’’ he describes is not human. His companions include all the chipmunks,

squirrels, spiders, and wasps, even the plants that are flowering by his doorway or in the

nearby field. Thoreau is our philosopher of being alone without being lonely. How could I

ever be lonely, he argues in a well-known astronomical passage, when I find myself here in

the middle of the Milky Way? A sudden change in the writer’s point of view leaves the

reader almost gasping for breath. His appeal to contemporary environmental thinkers is

evident in all such shifts in point of view. My home is not merely my house and my yard;

my home is the river valley, the mountain range, the continent, the very planet I inhabit.

We should recall that the root of the word ‘‘ecology’’ is oikos, the Greek word for ‘‘house’’: the dwelling, the vicinity, the home-place; the word was not coined until philosopher-

naturalist Ernst Haeckel used it in 1866 to describe the relationship between organisms and

their environments (OED). Insofar as he studies his ‘‘home-place,’’ Thoreau is surely one of our first American ecologists.

‘‘You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its

inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns,’’ Thoreau explains in the chapter

called ‘‘Brute Neighbors.’’ 9

But his brutes are never brutish; rather, they are the com-

panions of his mornings and the conversationalists of his evenings. When he hears a

meadow lark or a wood thrush, he says—recalling Wordsworth—that he learns more from

these bird-songs than he does from the words of local townsfolk, or professors, or poli-

ticians. When he lies down with his face close above the waters of the pond, he can watch

the fish swimming slowly over the gravel just beneath him. He can watch these fish hour

after hour. If it is impossible for Thoreau ever to be lonely, it is likewise impossible for him

ever to be bored. His observational skills are like those of a great scientist. He sees every

detail and reports every connection. He senses the links that bind the organic world into a

unity. Then he reports, not only his observations but also the way his mind can hold the

sensorium into a whole: sky and sand, bird and butterfly, fish and fox, branch and bud. In

every one of Thoreau’s details, a world arrives.

‘‘Wildness’’ more than ‘‘wilderness’’ was the key concept sought by our greatest

‘‘nature’’ writer. His goal was psychological as much as it was ecological. Seen in this

light, the activity of the human mind always has powerful consequences in our treatment of

the nonhuman world. Thoreau’s life in nature, like yours or mine, is entirely a function of

the actions and reactions of his mind. What he chooses to describe has more to do with his

own thinking and the desires of his heart than it does with any objective state of affairs in

the external world. He does not want us to drop our current lives and go and live in a hut in

the wilderness so much as he wants each of us to wild our own minds, to turn away from our emphasis on society toward the wildness that is within us. The result of such ‘‘wilding’’

will be a closer link between the human and the nonhuman worlds. It is clear, however, that

7 Walden, p. 145. 8

Ibid., p. 95. Thoreau here claims that he is ‘‘no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud.’’ 9

Ibid., p. 155.

350 A. Nichols

123

we are not meant to leave the social world so much as we are meant to bring the wild world

back with us. Thoreau wants us to import the sensibility of pond and bean-field back into

our drawing rooms and parlors.

Thoreau created a literary genre (the journal/diary/naturalist’s field book/philosophical

essay/account book) that was not really a genre at all by allying himself with another

tradition of natural history writing, one that goes back to Gilbert White in England and to

William Bartram in America; that is, the idea of the natural historian who remains near one

precise location—the village of Selborne in White’s case (1789), Walden Pond in Tho-

reau’s (1854). Then the naturalist observer describes the flora and fauna of a circumscribed

geographical region as well as the seasonal changes that occur there. This powerful tra-

dition continues in America from writers such as John Muir (redwoods of California,

1894), John Burroughs (the Catskills, 1880s) and Aldo Leopold (Sand County, Wisconsin,

1949) down to Edward Abbey (the desert Southwest, 1949), Annie Dillard (Tinker Creek,

1974), and Rick Bass (Yaak Valley, Montana, 1989) in more recent times. William Zinsser

has written that Thoreau’s Walden is ‘‘probably the best travel book written by an American […] though the hermit of Concord hardly got beyond the town limits.’’10

Thoreau, we should remember, could walk from his cabin hideaway into town to have

dinner or spend a night in jail. Zinsser goes on to note how various and multifarious are the

works we associate with such travel narratives, almost all of which can be applied to

Thoreau’s polyglot document. Zinsser cites ‘‘journeys to dead civilizations,’’ ‘‘vivid

memoirs of earlier life,’’ ‘‘rich personal odysseys,’’ ‘‘journey between points never pre-

viously linked,’’ ‘‘explorers accounts of their own exhilarating trips,’’ and even bio-

graphical accounts ‘‘of earlier explorer’s trips,’’ like Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile.11

Thoreau gets a version of every one of these generic vantage points into his own multi-

valent volume.

Of course, once Thoreau left Walden, his writing took on even more similarities with

the tradition of travel writing, whether he was describing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers or the depths of the Maine Woods. Here we find him on a river in Massachusetts in 1849, making a day-hike to a blueberry patch seem like a journey to

paradise: ‘‘we moored our boat on the west side of a little rising ground which in the spring

forms an island in the river. Here we found huckleberries still hanging upon the bushes,

where they seemed to have slowly ripened for our especial use. Bread and sugar, and cocoa

boiled in river water, made our repast, and as we had drunk in the fluvial prospect all day,

so now we took a draft of the water with our evening meal to propitiate the river gods, and

whet our vision for the sights it was to behold.’’ 12

The powerful image of river-water

saturates this passage: the water rises to ripen the nearby fruit, then it fills up the cocoa

mugs, finally flowing through the very channels of the human body up into the viscous

eyeball where it will provide the fluid that will literally allow Thoreau to see. By this point

in the narrative, Thoreau’s ‘‘vision’’ is much like William Blake’s idea of ‘‘Vision,’’ not a

sight for the vegetable eye but rather a scene beheld only in the landscape of mind.

Next we find our seer high up Mount Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine. At a place

that has since come to be known as Thoreau Springs, Thoreau has one of those rare

experiences that all writers long for, an epiphany that literally changes his view of human

beings and their relationship to the world around them: ‘‘I stand in awe of my body, this

10 Zinsser, W. (Ed.). (1991). The art and craft of travel writing (p. 14). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

11 Ibid., pp. 16–17.

12 Thoreau: A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, Walden; or, life in the woods, the Maine woods,

Cape cod (New York: The Library of America, 1985), Week, p. 33.

Thoreau and urbanature 351

123

matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which

I am one—that my body might—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature—daily to

be shown matter, to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?’’

13 In this often-quoted representation of one of the most powerful experiences he has

had of the nonhuman world, Thoreau’s view of ‘‘nature’’—and the reader’s view—is

literally transformed. Had our literal visionary not left the relative safety of Walden Pond

for the jagged heights of Mount Katahdin, however, we would never have been able to read

his description of these fearful, and awe inspiring, and even terrifying aspects of the

nonhuman world. At this memorable moment, the comfortably domestic world of Walden

is threatened by an existentialist sense of the starkly material reality around us. Our

environment suddenly appears as it is: a vast, titanic, uncaring mass of objects which

render even the most simple questions of identity and awareness (‘‘Who are we?’’ ‘‘where are we?’’) at once moot and almost mute.

A recent article in The New York Times describes the way that this same author has recently been appreciated by climatologists and conservation biologists for his technical

expertise. Earlier writers have noted Thoreau’s skills as a scientific observer, but only

recently have climate researchers begun to use his notebooks and journals as a serious

source for evidence about the precise link between evolution and climate change. Common

flowering species of Massachusetts plants, it turns out, are opening their buds a full week

earlier than they did when Thoreau was recording their emergence in the 1850s. In

addition, a full quarter (27%) of the individual species that Thoreau described and

chronicled have vanished completely from Walden Pond and its environs. Another third

(36%) ‘‘are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long.’’ 14

Thoreau counted 21 species of orchids in his wanderings around Concord; today, only

seven of those species remain. Conservation biologist Richard B. Primack of Boston

University notes that Thoreau kept careful track of approximately 500 species; ‘‘he knew

what he was doing, and he did it really systematically.’’ 15

So however much Thoreau’s

idealistic anti-materialism pervades his philosophical thinking, his skill as a careful

observer, his accurate record keeping, and his systematic approach to nature-study pro-

duced documentary records that are proving useful to serious scientists today.

The interdisciplinary reach of Thoreau’s thinking is also supported in a contemporary

essay by the anthropologist Frederick Turner. Turner describes Thoreau as an ‘‘anthro-

pologist of experience,’’ by which he means, one who set ‘‘out to study the inner being just

as his contemporary Lewis Henry Morgan [the early ethnologist and anthropologist of

North American Indians, one of the first to study kinship systems] set out to study the outer

being.’’ 16

Turner argues, in ‘‘Reflexivity as Evolution in Thoreau’s Walden,’’ that Tho-

reau’s emphasis on experience as the fundamental source of knowledge allows the author

of Walden to be studied as ‘‘an object of anthropological research, as an early anthro- pologist [of the self], and as an explorer of the fundamental myths of anthropology.’’

17

Turner’s analysis concludes by revealing the extent to which Thoreau’s philosophy of

13 Ibid., The Maine woods, ‘‘Ktaadn,’’ p. 646.

14 ‘‘Thoreau is rediscovered as a climatologist,’’ New York Times, 28 October 2008, p. D1.

15 Ibid., D1.

16 Turner, F. (1986). Reflexivity as evolution in Thoreau’s Walden. In V. W. Turner & E. M. Bruner (Eds.),

The anthropology of experience (p. 74). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 17

Ibid., p. 77.

352 A. Nichols

123

experience finds its center ‘‘near the source of pragmatist epistemology,’’ leading toward a

complex reflexive process in which human consciousness is ‘‘separated’’ from nature only

‘‘in order to share in nature’s own creative process of self-transcendence.’’ 18

Readers of

Thoreau since the nineteenth century have recognized the extent to which the hermit of

Walden pond was also a student of human culture.

Charles G. D. Roberts, the famous Canadian man of letters, says that Thoreau did not

end up in nature but rather went through ‘‘Nature’’ to reach his goal. The goal was not nature itself but rather freedom. Robert Louis Stevenson, as Roberts recalls, said that the

cabin on Walden Pond was ‘‘a station on man’s underground railway from slavery to

freedom.’’ 19

This metaphoric link between Thoreau’s cabin and the houses in which

runaway slaves sought refuge on their way across the Maryland–Pennsylvania border—the

Mason–Dixon Line separated South from North—evokes Thoreau’s emphasis on the

enslavement of close-mindedness and the liberation brought about by open-mindedness.

The freedom that Thoreau sought at Walden was freedom of thought but also of action.

This idea of freedom emerged from his abolitionist childhood, perhaps, but expanded as he

became an adult far beyond the pressing need to free American slaves from their literal

bondage. Although Thoreau’s career as an abolitionist extended from childhood to his

defense of John Brown’s failed slave uprising, Thoreau’s mind and writings sought to free

human beings all over the world from political restrictions of every kind and from

enslavement to all narrow-minded ways of thinking.

He thus came to resent organized religions of all kinds because each religion told a

distinct group of human beings that one way of understanding the cosmos was the only

right way. Once Thoreau had read Asian sacred writings in the Bhagavad-Gita and the Vedas—which he had taken from the shelves of Emerson’s library—it became impossible for him ever again to see Judaic or Christian scriptures as the only source of divine

wisdom. In this sense, he resisted the Western dualism that had separated the world into

binary categories: nature/culture, human/animal, living/nonliving, spirit/matter. He like-

wise resented the rampant religion of materialism that surrounded him in Concord and

Boston because of the way it imprisoned its practitioners and devotees rather than liber-

ating them. The townspeople around him carried their possessions on their backs, like

burdens they could not lay down: ‘‘How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh

crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a

barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of

land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!’’; better than all this inheriting of things,

Thoreau suggests, would be to ‘‘subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.’’ 20

Tho-

reau’s response to selfish materialism was likewise explicit: ‘‘Superfluous wealth can buy

superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.’’ 21

More money,

more problems.

Thoreau’s battle cry for this liberating kind of freedom, his anti-materialism, and his

sense of a surging energy at the center of the nonhuman world, all contribute to a sensi-

bility that has resonated throughout America, and beyond, over the past two centuries.

Even today his widespread influence continues. He is quoted by politicians and song-

writers. His wisdom appears from state houses and college classes to t-shirts and bumper

18 Ibid., pp. 78, 93.

19 Charles G. D. Roberts’s introduction is reprinted in Walden, or life in the woods, intro. by Ashton Nichols

(Beckleysville, MD: G. W. Zouck Publishing, 2008), p. 20. 20

Walden, pp. 6–7. 21

Ibid., p. 221.

Thoreau and urbanature 353

123

stickers. In his naturalistic individualism, in his devotion to history and to classical texts, in

his belief in nonviolent resistance to unjust laws, Thoreau put into play central tenets of

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thinking—and of a wider American Transcendentalism—in ways

that continue to shape our politics, our populism, and our popular culture.

At the same time, his effect on the tradition of nature writing, and the wider environ-

mental movement, has been incalculable. Timothy Morton is surely right that, as ecocritics,

we now need to move toward an ecology without nature. 22

We cannot, however, conceive

of an ecological ecocriticism without Thoreau. He is a nineteenth-century thinker for the

twenty-first century. He is a secular high-priest for our time, perhaps for all time. His

message to us now is a message of intellectual optimism but of environmental warning. It

is also a message that can help us to determine the formal outlines of the ecocriticism we

will practice in the coming decades. We must ‘‘wild’’ ourselves at our own Waldens,

perhaps, but then we must bring our wildness back into the world of men and women: into

our classrooms, our conferences, and our wider communities. One version of environ-

mental sustainability begins with Thoreau’s implicit recognition—in the final sentence of

Walden—that the sun outside my window is also a ‘‘morning star,’’ a solar furnace full of ever-renewing energy.

As we consider Thoreau’s importance at the beginning of a new century, and a new

millennium, we should recall that a thundering locomotive ran along the edge of Walden

Pond every day that Thoreau lived there between 1845 and 1847. Thoreau could hear the

rolling wheels against steel rails. He could smell the acrid smoke from the coal-fired

smokestack. He walked into town along this railroad right-of-way. The freight car workers

often nodded to him like old friends. The locomotive’s whistle sounded, to Thoreau, like

the ‘‘scream of a hawk’’; the steam emerging from the engine’s smokestack looked like a

‘‘downy cloud […] high in the heavens.’’23 Thoreau does not even mind the commerce that is associated with the rumbling rail-line. He only complains about the human tendency to

substitute the value of these transported goods for the human values that these goods are

meant to serve: relieving hunger, clothing the needy, warming the cold. Here, in the

metaphoric center of American nature writing—with a rail line running through the pristine

wilderness of Walden—we once again find that interpenetration of human and wild, of

urban and natural, that characterizes Emerson’s foremost disciple. For Thoreau, our

nonhuman, natural house is the same place as our fully human, cultural home: urbanature.

22 Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. My adoption of

the term ‘‘urbanature’’ is, in part, a response to Morton’s call for ecocriticism to adopt a new sense of the nonhuman, one not troubled by the dualistic legacy of post-Enlightenment thinking. See especially Morton’s claim that ‘‘The time should come when we ask of any text, ‘what does this say about the environment’,’’ p. 5. 23

Walden, pp. 81–82.

354 A. Nichols

123