Abstract
Contemporary environmental discourse emerges from a liberal pastoral topos that naturalizes private property and imagines individual self-interest as the motor of political change. An early example of this discursive formation is George Perkins Marsh’s classic environmental text, Man and Nature, which valorizes a middle landscape of owner-occupied small farms. An alternative topos, the commons, emerges in texts by the working-class writers Henry Thoreau and John Clare. Clare and Thoreau were both dedicated walkers who came to know their home landscapes with extraordinary intimacy. The practice of walking reveals the arbitrariness of private property lines and led both authors to oppose privatization of public lands and advocate for public management of the commons. In contrast to the influential environmental determinist ideas of Arnold Guyot, author of The Earth and Man, Thoreau developed a possibilist way of thinking about the relationships between human societies and their material environments. Walden reminds us that a vibrant life of the mind and spirit requires bodily well-being, which in turn requires a just social order on a healthy planet.
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Notes
- 1.
For general introductions to Marsh and his work, see Dorman and Lowenthal.
- 2.
Marsh, 13.
- 3.
Marsh, 19.
- 4.
Marsh, 36.
- 5.
Marsh, 3.
- 6.
Marsh, 37.
- 7.
Marsh, 38.
- 8.
Marsh, 14.
- 9.
Marsh, 19.
- 10.
Marsh, 35 and 12.
- 11.
Among his many other progressive proposals, Marsh made an early and influential call for the designation of national parks on federal and state land: “It is desirable that some large and easily accessible region of American soil should remain, as far as possible, in its primitive condition, at once a museum for the instruction of the student, a garden for the recreation of the lover of nature, and an asylum where indigenous tree, and humble plant that loves the shade, and fish and fowl and four-footed beast, may dwell and perpetuate their kind, in the enjoyment of such imperfect protection as the laws of a people jealous of restraint can afford them” (203). Of course, Marsh was an enthusiastic manifest destinarian, so there was no room for indigenous people in the parks he imagined, only indigenous trees. His vision of parks as carefully curated spaces where nonhuman beings are protected from human violence relied on a symbolic erasure of Native Americans that would all too often materialize in the years to come. America’s best idea required not only the idea of America but also its violent creation.
- 12.
Marsh, 7.
- 13.
Marsh, 8.
- 14.
Marsh, 9.
- 15.
Marsh, 9.
- 16.
Marsh, 42.
- 17.
Marsh, 188 and 43.
- 18.
Marsh, 11.
- 19.
Marsh, 12.
- 20.
Marsh, 45–46.
- 21.
Marsh, 198.
- 22.
Marsh, 46, my emphasis.
- 23.
Marsh, 51–52n.
- 24.
Marsh, 259 and 202.
- 25.
Marsh, 280 and 202.
- 26.
Marsh, 51n.
- 27.
This section was previously published as Newman, “John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Walking.”
- 28.
I have borrowed this phrase from Peck, who discusses the formal and ideological similarities between Thoreau’s writings and the canvases of Hudson River School painter, Asher Durand.
- 29.
In the first article to explore the parallels between Thoreau and Clare, Markus Poetzsch focuses on their writings about birds and argues that they “not only wrote about nature from a related set of convictions but [also] perceived and moved through their respective environments, their topographies of home, with a kindred attunement to the … otherness of nonhuman life” (92). Only a few others have connected Clare and Thoreau. Rayment’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Empiricism and the Nature Tradition,” compares both writers to Izaak Walton. In Romantic Ecology, Bate refers several times to Clare and briefly mentions Thoreau, but only implies a comparison. McKusick devotes individual chapters to Clare and Thoreau while tracing the literary history of modern ecological understanding from the British Romantic poets to the American Transcendentalists. And Pawelski and Moores offer consecutive chapters on Thoreau and Clare in a book that discusses the role of literature in the pursuit of the good life.
- 30.
Thoreau, Walden, 58. When asked in 1847 to identify his occupation, Thoreau responded, “I am a Schoolmaster – a Private Tutor, a Surveyor – a Gardener, a Farmer – a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster” (Correspondence, 186).
- 31.
Sanborn, 154.
- 32.
Hood, 555.
- 33.
Clare, Oxford Authors, 212.
- 34.
Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 103.
- 35.
Clare, By Himself, 100.
- 36.
For a thoughtful discussion of the multivalent character of Clare’s illness, see Bate, 408–418.
- 37.
Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 227.
- 38.
Barrell, 128 and 134.
- 39.
Clare, Oxford Authors, 2.
- 40.
Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 225.
- 41.
Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 229, 230, and 239.
- 42.
Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 224.
- 43.
Thoreau, Walden, 18. For an extended meditation on the significance of crossing boundaries in Clare’s life and poetry, see Goodridge and Thornton, 87–129.
- 44.
The history of enclosure in the United Kingdom has been studied intensively. Privatization of the commons in the United States is a less familiar topic. For a historical introduction, see Montrie, A People’s History, 13–55.
- 45.
Bate, John Clare: A Biography, 219.
- 46.
Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 209.
- 47.
This chapter does not engage directly with Garret Hardin’s infamous argument in “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which provoked a decades-long debate. For a concise critique, see Nixon.
- 48.
Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, v. II, 347.
- 49.
Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, v. II, 347.
- 50.
Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, v. II, 347.
- 51.
Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, v. II, 348.
- 52.
Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, v. II, 348.
- 53.
Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, v. III, 494.
- 54.
Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, v. III, 495.
- 55.
Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, v. II, 349.
- 56.
Williams, 137.
- 57.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 57–8.
- 58.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 58.
- 59.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 57.
- 60.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 233.
- 61.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 234–5.
- 62.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 235.
- 63.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 236.
- 64.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 238.
- 65.
Thoreau, Wild Fruits, 238.
- 66.
This section was previously published as Newman, “Thoreau’s Materialism and Environmental Justice.”
- 67.
Emerson, Collected Works, v. 1, 201.
- 68.
Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, v. 15, 353. Sherman Paul makes the definitive statement of this position.
- 69.
Petrulionis, Thoreau in His Own Time. One of the first scholars to argue that we should take Thoreau’s images of nature at face value was Joel Porte in Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (1965). Working in part from the evidence of Thoreau’s Journal and correspondence, he argued that Thoreau rejected Emerson’s idealism (and his moralism) in favor of the pure aesthetics of sensory experience (91–130). According to Porte, Thoreau was in reality a passionate materialist whose “dream [was] not of some transcendent reality, but of a natural fact” (135). If Porte overstated his case when he represented Thoreau as a defiantly apolitical connoisseur of the physical textures of nature, Lawrence Buell, in The Environmental Imagination (1995), restored the ethical force of Thoreau’s eye for detail. Buell argued that Thoreau’s gradual self-education in empirical natural history led him to preservationist commitment. He identified Thoreau as the leading exemplar of a tradition of environmental literature in which “human history is implicated in natural history” and human “accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation” (7). At the same moment, Laura Walls demonstrated in Seeing New Worlds (1995) that Thoreau was extremely well versed in the natural philosophy of his day. He should be viewed, she argued, as an “empirical naturalist [who] saw his task to be the joining of poetry, philosophy, and science into a harmonized whole that emerged from the interconnected details of particular natural facts” (4).
- 70.
The best synthetic account of Thoreau’s intellectual development and of the organic connection between his scientific and political ideas comes in Laura Walls’s magisterial new biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life.
- 71.
Emerson, Collected Works, v. 1, 201.
- 72.
Thoreau, Walden, 4, my emphasis.
- 73.
Thoreau, Walden, 5.
- 74.
Thoreau, Walden, 6.
- 75.
Thoreau, Walden, 6.
- 76.
Thoreau, Walden, 7.
- 77.
Thoreau, Walden, 8, 11.
- 78.
Thoreau, Walden, 12. This truism occurs at least as early as the Nichomachean Ethics, where Aristotle observes that “our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of contemplation, but our body also must be healthy and must have food and other attention.” At present, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs enjoys the status of common knowledge.
- 79.
Thoreau, Walden, 21.
- 80.
Thoreau, Walden, 21, 26–7.
- 81.
Thoreau, Walden, 28.
- 82.
Thoreau, Walden, 35.
- 83.
Thoreau, Walden, 91.
- 84.
Thoreau, Walden, 33.
- 85.
Thoreau, Walden, 8.
- 86.
Thoreau, Walden, 12.
- 87.
Thoreau, Walden, 13, emphasis added.
- 88.
Thoreau, Walden, 12.
- 89.
Thoreau, Walden, 14.
- 90.
Schneider, 44–60, argues that Thoreau’s essay uncritically reproduces Guyot’s ideas in what amounts to a celebration of Manifest Destiny. On the other hand, John S. Pipkin maintains that in “Walking,” Thoreau “explicitly distances himself from some aspects of Guyot’s thought” and that he particularly “resists the rigid racial categories found in Guyot” (532–533).
- 91.
Guyot, 239. Guyot mainly restated ideas that had been published two generations earlier by English and colonial American climactic determinists like Adam Ferguson and William Robertson. Thoreau does not appear to have read Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) or Robertson’s History of America (1777), though both were published in multiple U.S. editions during his lifetime.
- 92.
Guyot, 247.
- 93.
Guyot, 247–248.
- 94.
Guyot, 77.
- 95.
Thoreau, Journal, vol. 3, 182–3.
- 96.
Thoreau, Walden, 15.
- 97.
Thoreau, Walden, 13.
- 98.
Thoreau, Walden, 37.
- 99.
Thoreau, Walden, 35, emphasis in original.
- 100.
Thoreau, Walden, 35.
- 101.
Guyot, 246.
- 102.
Thoreau, Walden, 61, emphasis added.
- 103.
Thoreau, Walden, 56.
- 104.
Thoreau, Walden, 10 and 63.
- 105.
Thoreau, Walden, 30.
- 106.
Thoreau, Walden, 40, emphasis added.
- 107.
Thoreau, Walden, 15.
- 108.
Thoreau, Walden, 90.
- 109.
Marx, 242–65.
- 110.
Thoreau, Walden, 35.
- 111.
Thoreau, Walden, 53.
- 112.
Thoreau, Walden, 115.
- 113.
Thoreau, Walden, 116.
- 114.
Thoreau, Walden, 53.
- 115.
Thoreau, Walden, 92. Thoreau is punning on the British word for railroad ties: “sleepers.”
- 116.
Thoreau, Walden, 116.
- 117.
Thoreau, Walden, 92.
- 118.
Thoreau, Walden, 118. Atropos, one of the three fates in Greek mythology, cut the thread of each mortal’s life.
- 119.
Finley, “‘Justice in the Land,’” 5.
- 120.
Neely, 41–55.
- 121.
Petrulionis, To Set This World Right, 92–5.
- 122.
Lemire, 1–14.
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Newman, L. (2019). The Commons. In: The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14572-9_5
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