So, who do you think got it right?

Is our conception of nature — as a special, redemptive place apart from human civilization, a space endowed with “spiritual” qualities that restores the individual — now dead? Because man has so fundamentally altered weather patterns even for the most distant mountain peak, has global warming killed the Romantic love affair with this idea of wilderness? (McKibben)

Or, is this kind of plangent lament *exactly* the problem — that our concept of the wild was seriously flawed, even dangerously unenvironmental, to begin with? (Cronon) Do we need to discard the wild, or celebrate its demise, and even move to a different configuration of human-nature relationships?

If you discuss, please ground your discussion in the two essays by the authors, quoting and referring to them as necessary.

There’s an informative discussion of McKibben’s book by an environmental philosopher in Canada here — it features some choice quotes from McKibben where he tries to respond to the Cronon critique.

Hi bloggers / students -

Well, if you were like me, despite rushing out of the seminar early to get to a television that would be broadcasting Obama’s inauguration, I nonetheless missed a large chunk of the speech. Although there is no way to connect to the elecricity of that particular historical moment again, we can easily and readily watch the speech again below (so thank goodness for such “gadgets” like youtube, to think back on what we said about technology in Aldo Leopold’s essay). It’s a rather short speech, and I found it’s emphases surprising and a bit different than I was expecting. Instead of a feel-good, kind of self-acknowledgement about the historicity of a black American becoming president and this bearing out the pragmatic idealism of the American multicultural dream–proving it in essence works–the speech had darker, even plangent tones here and there. The New York Times writes how:

what Mr. Obama did say in his speech must have come as a bit of a shock to Mr. Bush. No stranger to criticism, over the past eight years he had rarely been forced to sit in silence listening to a speech about how America had gone off the rails on his watch.

Mr. Obama’s recitation of how much had gone wrong was particularly striking to anyone who had followed Mr. Bush around the country, especially during the re-election campaign of 2004, when he said it was his job “to confront problems, not to pass them on to future presidents and future generations.”

Yet Mr. Obama blamed America’s economic peril on an era “of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some,” and talked of how “the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.” It was an explicit critique of an administration that went to war in the Middle East but rejected the shared sacrifice of conservation, and reluctantly embraced the scientific evidence around global warming.

So, in fact, there was a slight nod towards the environment in Obama’s speech, perhaps a first in the history of inaugural addresses. It is interesting to note that if Obama had said “globe” instead of “planet,” this sentence would lose its environmental edge: for whatever reason, in English, “planet” has acquired a certain environmental valence in a way that globe has not (except, of course, when you specifically say “global warming”). It remains to be seen if this lofty and often vague rhetoric is met by practical policy changes in the new administration. But, to have these words present at the start is very promising.

With a hat-tip to a former student in New York who brought this to my attention (thanks, Naisa!), below is a fascinating article on Walden Pond and Thoreau that appeared in the New York Times earlier this week: it is another indication of the ways that Thoreau is still pertinent and relevant to contemporary environmental concerns. His methods of recording, reading, and writing about nature were far in advance of his day. Read on…

October 28, 2008

Thoreau Is Rediscovered as a Climatologist

By CORNELIA DEAN

CONCORD, Mass. — 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 résumé: 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.”

Dr. Primack and Dr. Miller-Rushing did their own surveys in 2004, 2005 and 2006. They also consulted notes from Pennie Logemann, a landscape designer who tracked flowering times from 1963 to 1993 as an aid to planning Concord gardens. And they looked at contributions by members of area plant, insect and bird clubs and the work of additional participants in Concord’s long line of passionate amateur naturalists, some of whose records are preserved in the Free Public Library here.

One of them, Richard J. Eaton, is best known to botanists for his 1974 book, “A Flora of Concord.” Dr. Primack recalled that as a graduate student at Harvard, he had worked alongside Mr. Eaton in the university’s natural history collection — curators relegated the two of them to the same obscure table. “He was just this very elderly man,” Dr. Primack recalled. “Not a professor, an enthusiast. But he was a very, very good botanist. He used very good methods.”

Another contributor, Alfred Hosmer, is more obscure, but his contribution is enormous: detailed notes he made in Concord from 1888 through 1902.

“He was a storekeeper,” Dr. Primack told a small group of graduate students as he gathered them around a table in a special collections room in the Concord library one recent morning. He 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.”

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You can read the rest of the article in its entirety here  There’s also a nifty slide show to look at, located at the start of the article at the top of the page