Thoreau, Henry David

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, and died there of tuberculosis on May 6, two months shy of his forty-fifth birthday. He is best known as the author of Walden (1854), an account of the two years (1845–1847) he spent living in a cabin he built on the shores of Walden Pond (outside Concord), and "Civil Disobedience" (originally delivered as a lecture entitled "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government"), a polemical political essay describing the events surrounding, reasons for, and consequences of his arrest for nonpayment of taxes.

Thoreau is often portrayed as an anti-modern romantic, placing him in strong opposition to the modernizing forces of science and technology. There is good evidence for this portrait scattered throughout his work. He wrote as an advocate of nature, and frequently suggested that the artifacts of civilization violated the goods and principles found in nature. For example, in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), he claimed that he would prefer to destroy the dams on the rivers and free the fishes; in a late essay, "Walking" he famously declared that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World" (Thoreau 1893, p. 275). He wrote in Walden of the need for people to simplify their lives ("Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" [Thoreau 1985, p. 395]), and many have interpreted this as an injunction to turn away from the world of modern science and technology in order to restore a more independent, even primitive lifestyle.

Despite the occasional evidence in support of this understanding of Thoreau's teaching, however, there is good reason to believe it is not a true picture of either his life or his intentions as an author. Any reader of Thoreau's books, essays, or fourteen volume Journal will be struck by his preoccupation with observing the natural world. He was a skilled, committed, and lifelong naturalist, and he provided field reports and specimens to the foremost biologist in the United States at the time, Louis Agassiz of Harvard University. He was also something of an archaeologist, gathering one of the most extensive collections of American Indian artifacts of his generation. Equally important Walden can be read as a philosophical commentary on modern economics, suggesting Thoreau's interest in social science. Thoreau was skilled as a surveyor and a carpenter, and proved his genius as a technologist by developing a new formula and manufacturing process for the graphite in the pencils manufactured by his family's business, which made these the highest quality pencils produced in the United States at the time. Thoreau's biography and writings reveal a man with a much more sophisticated view and knowledge of modern science and technology than is often acknowledged. While it is true that Thoreau often juxtaposed modern science and technology with what he took to be the wisdom or laws of nature, this does not preclude his being a serious natural and social scientist.

In fact Thoreau's complaint was not with science or technology in themselves, both of which he admired (and tried successfully to practice) in their proper place, but with the uncritical exercise and use of both. Although he was a skilled naturalist and technologist, he was most importantly a literary artist and a moralist. The message of Walden is not that modern science and technology are bad, but rather that they are bad as human beings currently practice them. This complaint is inspired by a concern for liberty, and is built on the fear that people are using science and technology to build wealth even if it costs them their freedom. He complained that people "have become the tools of their tools" (Thoreau 1985, p. 352) and that they would be more likely to learn "beautiful housekeeping" and "beautiful living" (p. 353) if they were willing to cultivate a more thoughtful poverty and independence. Ultimately Thoreau was a critic not of science and technology, but of the modern political economy and the way it employed these tools. His fear was that people were becoming morally ignorant about the cultivation of a good human life even as they were becoming scientifically and technically proficient.

As a social critic Thoreau has inspired many in the modern environmental movement who share his fear that society uses science and technology to war against nature rather than to learn to live in peace and harmony with it. Thoreau continues to be one of the most powerful literary voices in America. He is a reminder of the need to continually probe the purposes and ends to which science and technology are employed.

Environmental Ethics;; Environmentalism;; Freedom;; Nature;; Science, Technology, and Literature.

Buell, Lawrence. (1995). The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harding, Walter. (1966). The Days of Henry Thoreau. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Neufeldt, Leonard N. (1989). The Economist: Henry Thoreau and Enterprise. New York: Oxford University Press.

Richardson, Robert D. (1986). Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Taylor, Bob Pepperman. (1996). America's Bachelor Uncle: Henry Thoreau and the American Polity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Thoreau, Henry David. (1893). Excursions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Thoreau, Henry David. (1985). A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden, or Life in the Woods; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod. New York: Library of America.

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