Bill McKibben, from Walden: Living Deliberately (2008)

from Walden

Living Deliberately

Bill Mckibben

Most well-known for The End of Nature, published in 1989 and one of the first books to address global warming and climate change, environmentalist and essayist Bill McKibben is the editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing since Thoreau, published by the Library of America in 2008. The passage below, written as an introduction to an edition of Walden, also appeared in the Summer 2012 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Understanding the whole of Walden is a hopeless task. Its writing resembles nothing so much as Scripture; ideas are condensed to epigrams, four or five to a paragraph. Its magic density yields dozens of different readings: psychological, spiritual, literary, political, cultural. To my mind though, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is most crucial to read Walden as a practical environmentalist’s volume and to search for Thoreau’s heirs among those trying to change our relation to the planet. We need to understand that when Thoreau sat in the dooryard of his cabin “from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house,” he was offering counsel and example exactly suited for our critical moment in time.

Born in 1817, Thoreau studied at Harvard and then eventually returned to his native Concord in 1837. It was here that he fell in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott—and through them with the whole Transcendental world, including Margaret Fuller, editor of The Dial, the start-up Transcendentalist periodical that first put the young Thoreau in print. He worked odd jobs as a surveyor, a tutor, and in his family’s pencil business until the spring of 1845, when he built the small cabin a mile and a half from his boyhood home on the shore of Walden Pond. Save for frequent trips back to town for dinner, a night in the Concord jail for nonpayment of taxes—the inspiration for his famous essay, “Civil Disobedience”—and a trip to the Maine woods to climb Mount Katahdin, he stayed in the cabin for two years, two months, and two days. But when he came to write his great book, he collapsed this stretch of time into a single year, resulting in one of the great American books, a volume that launched what would become the environmental idea. In it he tackled questions that had previously seemed obvious: How much do we need? How should we live? What were we built for? He was not an organizer, not an environmentalist—it is unlikely he would have joined the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society—but he sensed a century early the questions that would one day define the counterculture and the environmental era… .

And it is here that Thoreau comes to the rescue. He posed two intensely practical questions that must come to dominate this age if we’re to make real change: How much is enough? How do I know what I want? For him, I repeat, those were not environmental questions; they were not even practical questions, exactly. If you could answer them you might improve your own life, but that was the extent of his concern. Simplicity, calmness, quiet—these were the preconditions for a moral life, a true life, a philosophic life. “He will live with the license of a higher order of beings in proportion as he simplifies his life.” Thoreau believed in the same intense self-examination as any lotus-positioned wispy-bearded ascetic. Happily, though, he went about it in very American ways—he was Buddha with a receipt from the hardware store. And it is that prosaic streak that makes him indispensable now… .

If “How much is enough?” is the subversive question for the consumer society, “How do I know what I want?” is the key assault on the Information Age. How can I hear my own heart? What is my true desire?

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To understand Thoreau’s genius, remember that he raised this question in a time and place that would seem to us almost unbelievably silent. The communications revolution had barely begun. Advertising was not yet a business, but the few shop signs in Concord, which we now preserve as quaint markers of a vanished age, appeared already to Thoreau as eyesores “hung out on all sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller’s; and others by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker, or the tailor.” No Internet, no television, no radio, no telephone, no phonograph; and yet somehow he sensed all that this would one day mean to us. He did not need to see someone babbling into a hands-free cell phone to sense that we’d gone too far. He was so hypersensitive, such an alert antenna, that he was worried before Alexander Graham Bell was eight years old. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he writes. “But Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” While in the Adirondack woods, Emerson wrote a laudatory poem upon the occasion of hearing the great news that the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable had at last been laid. Thoreau dryly quipped, “perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”…

“Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails,” writes Thoreau. “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance…till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, ‘This is, and no mistake.’” Only when we have some of that granite to stand on—that firm identity rooted in the reality of the natural world—only then can we distinguish between the things we’re supposed to want and the things we actually do want. Only then can we say how much is enough and have some hope of really knowing.

In the 154 years since Walden, Thoreau has become ever more celebrated in theory and ever more ignored in practice. “Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,” he writes. How sleepy that protest sounds to an age that thinks we must travel supersonically, communicate instantaneously, and trade globally. Then again, how sound it seems to an age when we are distracted, depressed, alienated, and over-rushed. He would have understood the jail sentence imposed hourly by the cascade of emails into the inbox or the backlog of messages on the voicemail.

He is the American incarnation in a line of crackpots and gurus from Buddha on. Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, and the holy men and women of every branch of the ethical religious tradition share the same outlook: simplicity is good for the soul, good for the right relationship with God. In the Christian formulation: do not lay up treasure here on earth; you can’t serve both God and money; give away all that you have and follow me. These are not injunctions we’ve tried very hard to put into practice. We’ve adopted the competing religious worldview, the one that worships an ever-growing economy. But such spiritual notions have not disappeared; they’ve flowed like a small but steady river through world history, never completely drying up.

Thoreau helped add a new tributary to that stream. His nature writing is raw, wild, and haunting. He comes to the marsh at night to hear the hooting owls: “All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chicadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and the rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.” In his wildness he harks back to the ancient pantheistic traditions, older by far than the Buddha and still alive in remnant form among some native peoples, traditions that might have understood his eagerness to eat a woodchuck raw. He presaged the twentieth-century American-led boom in his affection for nature, for its ability to provide a solid bottom. When he wrote, most of the civilized world still regarded the forest and the mountain with fear and trepidation. In his wake came Walt Whitman, John Burroughs, John Muir. Right behind them came a million people toting backpacks. If lakeshore cottages and the backcountry subdivision can be numbered among his legacies, so can the national parks and wildernesses. This stream grew even larger as the concern for the right relationship with God joined with a love for the physical world. It was still not large enough to jump its banks and flood the city where Economy sat enthroned, but more and more people could hear the roar of its rapids.

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Now, quite suddenly, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a whole new waterway of thought swells that countercultural river. The saints in their robes and the nature lovers in their Gore-Tex jackets are suddenly joined by men and women in lab coats clutching computer printouts. The students of the largest environmental changes taking place around us come with a message eerily similar to those we’ve heard before. When the International Panel on Climate Change reported in 2001 that humans were likely to raise the earth’s surface temperature five degrees Fahrenheit this century, and that they had begun to alter the most basic forces of the planet’s surface, the implication of their graphs and charts and data sets was: simplify, simplify, simplify. Not because it’s good for your relationship with God, but because if you don’t, the temperature of the planet will be higher by 2100 than it’s been for hundreds of millions of years, which means crop-withering heat waves, daunting hurricanes, rising seas, and dying forests. They were calling for community—not because it’s good for the soul but because without it there’s little chance we’ll become efficient enough in our use of energy or materials. The math is hard to argue with; business as usual and growth as usual spell an end to the world as usual. This is the one overwhelming fact of our lifetimes—Thoreau knew nothing of it, and yet he knew it all.

(2008)