On a different subject of Thoreau’s Walden: I was most fascinated by Thoreau’s opinion about education in the sense of theoretical schooling. He seems to consider the common approach of the educational establishments to be heavily flawed. By training an individual only theoretically, the student would not be able to put the gained knowledge into practice. Spending years at university, learning only from books and teachers, is no comparison to one day in the field. Thoreau’s approach to knowledge is learning by doing, and he considers the theoretical way a waste of time. He says of himself that he was rather surprised when he got to know after finishing his studies that what he had studied was actually navigation. He even contemplates that one day in the harbour with a real ship would have taught him more than his entire academic studies.

This deliberation is, in my opinion, very similar to his defiance of the railroad. He avoids the ‘new’ teaching methods of theory before practise and the gathering of institutionalized knowledge in favour of ‘the old ways’. Just throw the child into the water and it will learn to swim. In this arguement I find an essential question that is still strongly debated between anthropologists, humanists, psychologists, pedagogues and everyone with a slight interest in human development: the question of nature vs. nurture. Thoreau is definitely a supporter of the nature theory, alleging that man is born with innate features to deal with and overcome almost any given problem. He only touches the subject in Walden (although I cannot say that for sure, for I have yet to read the rest of it), but I think it is worth discussing.

I would like to discuss Thoreau’s approach to modern improvements and civilization in the chapter “Economy”. As we discussed in class, Thoreau seems to have a natural resistance against any kind of technological progress. He denounces the idea of faster communication in his statement abut the railroad and the telegraph. In his opinion, an increase in the trafficking of information is not an improvement, but rather a step backwards for mankind. As no-one hast to consider the message s/he wants to transport and the time it would take to do so anymore, communication would become dominated by meaningless chitchat. The fact that someone would have to undertake a journey of several hours, days or even weeks to give the designated recipient his or her message means that the time spent to achieve that aim has to be worth while the message. By taking away the way, the goal becomes meaningless.

I agree with Thoreau to a certain degree, for most of the information exchanged on a daily basis is pointless in deeper meaning, yet necessary for social interaction. But that is not limited to conversations over distance. And Thoreau misses the usefulness of the increase in information technology and speed, whether it enables people to react faster to or be informed about important events. The problem about the technological improvements and the communications revolution is that it makes the world smaller, less mystic. I think that is Thoreau’s main concern, for the greatness and the distance of the American landscape are something that heavily influenced him in his perception of the world and life itself: more than one can grasp or control, yet very intense to experience. It bothers him that such a great area can be “conquered” by some meaningless words, passing through in seconds, without even taking a look at its majesty and accepting it greatness. To me the writing in “Economy” seems to be full of defiance for all that mankind prides itself in, especially technological progress, civilization and a general feeling of superiority towards fauna and flora.

I like the discussions that were beginning to unfold last class when we broke down into smaller groups and started thinking through those four questions. The only problem was not having enough time to adequately work through them, and then discuss the questions at-large with the rest of the class (which I will certainly organize otherwise next time, should we do that again: in fact, I’d appreciate student input here. Do you want more such smaller discussions?).

Thus, I wanted to provide a space on the blog if anyone wanted to take those questions as a lead into a comment or post, or to elaborate more on any other aspect of Thoreau’s essay that we didn’t have time to discuss in the seminar. Here are the questions again:

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1) Analyze the structure of “Walking.” How is the essay put together, what kinds of components make up its whole? What rhetorical strategies does Thoreau use? How are anecdotes employed, alongside the arguments?

2) Describe the numerous ways that Thoreau treats the idea of “civilization” in the essay. Locate passages where “civilization” seems to be a key word.

3) An idea of the frontier and a progression from east to west is extensively treated on pages 217—223. Analyze this directional metaphor—what is Thoreau saying? Where do specific ideas about America and American nationality become invoked, and placed within this east—west continuum?

4) How does Thoreau describe the place of poetry, literature, and mythology in relationship to the “wild”? What does Thoreau mean when he complains that “that English literature… breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain,” (231) and then asks “Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?” (232)

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And a P.S. — as promised, the books by Arthur Versluis that deal with the Transcendentalists’ reading of Eastern religious texts, especially Buddhism in the case of Thoreau, are now on the bibliography. Just so you know!

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