CONVERSATION The Legacy of Henry David Thoreau

Conversation
The Legacy of Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau is one of the most important and influential writers and thinkers that America—if not the world—has produced. Brilliant, provocative, eccentric, independent, he left a legacy that is immense and might be described as fivefold. First, Thoreau exemplified personal independence and self-reliance. Some go so far as to suggest that what Ralph Waldo Emerson preached, Thoreau practiced. As contemporary historian Jay Parini says in his 2008 book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, “Henry David Thoreau defines American Independence.”

Thoreau also exemplified political independence and integrity. He spoke out against slavery and the Mexican war—in fact he was jailed for refusing to pay taxes supporting those evils. (He had no objection to paying the highway tax, he humorously remarked.) It is this political independence that influenced so profoundly such figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., the counterculture movement of the 1960s, and many of those who speak “truth to power” today.

He was also a transcendentalist, one who, in Emerson’s words, strove to discover “an original relation to the universe.” For Thoreau, the pathway was through nature. “God exhibits himself to the walker in a frosted-bush today, as much as in a burning one to Moses of old,” he wrote in his journal in January of 1853. His ideas and words live on in those who seek spiritual enlightenment in nature.

Thoreau’s legacy is equally strong in the environmental movement. He was a naturalist, a keen observer of the natural world who believed in the renewing power of nature and in the importance of conservation. He wrote in his journal on October 15, 1859: “Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.” It is not surprising that Thoreau’s remark “in wilderness is the preservation of the world” would become a motto of the Sierra Club, one of the most prominent environmentalist groups today. Thoreau influenced the environmentalism of John Muir and Aldo Leopold and lives on today in the works of Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, E. O. Wilson, Annie Dillard, Bill McKibben, Richard Louv, and countless others.

Finally, Thoreau has taken on new relevance as a visionary and a critic of contemporary reliance on technology. In any consideration of the effects of the rapid pace of modern life, it seems almost a requirement to refer to the ideas of and to quote passages from Thoreau. As we find ourselves careening down the information superhighway, plugged in to smartphones, voicemail, text messages, the Internet, video games, IMs, Facebook, Twitter (or the next thing beyond 2013, when this introduction was written) while bouncing between classes, homework, extracurricular activities, sports, clubs, and work, the message of this excerpt from Walden seems more timely than ever: “Simplify, simplify.” While some of us may find Thoreau’s positions extreme, we nonetheless find his attitudes appealing.

Five enduring legacies—not bad for a man who was born nearly two hundred years ago. In this Conversation, you will read excerpts from three essential chapters of Walden (but we recommend that you read the whole book on your own) and a selection of modern and contemporary sources—some by the voices mentioned above—that exemplify and discuss the living legacy of Henry David Thoreau.

Sources

Bill McKibben, from Walden: Living Deliberately (2008)

Henry David Thoreau, from Walden (1854)

E. B. White, from Walden (1939)

Robert Crumb, A Short History of America (1979)

Annie Dillard, Living like Weasels (1982)

E. O. Wilson, from The Future of Life (2002)

Sue Monk Kidd, Doing Nothing (2008)

William Powers, from Hamlet’s BlackBerry (2010)

Crispin Sartwell, My Walden, My Walmart (2012)

Ken Ilgunas, from Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom (2013)