Emerson, Thoreau. .and Sustainability
.
.
By Richard W. Franke
This is the latest installment in our
Signs of Sustainability
series,
organized
, by
Sustainable.
Tompkins. Visit them online at
www.sustainabletompkins.org.
The true ancestors' of sustainability in America arethe native people
of the Western Hemisphere. As we
saw in earlier articles, they developed the state-level environmental
policies of the Inca, they managed
subclimax forest successions in the
Eastern Woodlands and used the
Three Sisters method of high-output low-soil-loss agriculture exem~plified in the Finger Lakes area 'by
the Haudenosaunee people.
The European conquerors and
immigrants paid little attention to
the land-management skills of
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"Walden" include detailed descriptions of the geology;the plants, animals, visitors and sunsets supplemented with ruminations about
civilization's impact on the natural
world. He especially loved and studied one of several ponds on the
property. "Walden" is 'considered.
the founding "nature book," now a
literary genre associated especially Ii'
with American writers.
Walden Pond eventually became
famous'
and
is
now
the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Walden Pond State Reservation at
Concord, a few miles outside of
Boston. Emerson and Thoreau are
viewed by many as originators of
"voluntary simplicity;" a concept
now much in vogue among sustainability activists. They saw simplici- '
ty as a rejection 'of excessive accu-
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t1032
time who saw transcendentalism as
an attack on the Bible.
Emerson's chief protege and colleague was Henry David Thoreau
(1817-62).
Thoreau
infused
Emerson's intellectual beliefs into
his daily life, arguing that by simple living and direct contact with
.nature we can discover the transcendental life force otherwise
obscured by materialistic urges.
In 1845,Thoreau moved into the
woods on a piece of property owned
by Emerson. Thoreau lived there
for a little over two years, building
. a 10-foot-by-15-footcabin for about
$28.50.He mostly produced his own
food, heating fuel and other necessities and kept a detailed journal of
his experiment, which he published in 1854 under the title
"Walden; or, Life in the Woods."
The approximately 250pages of
~ ~ ff. s , ~~~~~ 8 ~ [
~
"" e l- to
their victims. It was only in' the
1980s that modern science began
seriously investigating the native
achievements and their relevance
for the wider society.
.
The sustainability movement in
the U.S. found its earliest inspirations in the '19th-century writings
of two intellectuals of European
origin: .Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-82) was a founder of transcendentalism; a philosophy that.
includes the proposition that the
supernatural is revealed -through
nature and that all plants and animals partake in some way of the
supernaturaL
Emerson wrote that, "Nature is a
language ... I wish to learn ... that I
may read the great book that is
written in that tongue." Emerson's
views were considered heretical by
many traditional Christians of the
~