Environment: Why Read the Classics

Sofia Vaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351277662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Environment: Why Read the Classics? presents six important essays by some of the world's leading environmental thinkers on six of the most emblematic books ever written on the environment. The books – Walden; A Sand County Almanac; Small is Beautiful; Silent Spring; The Limits to Growth; and Our Common Future – taken together have been hugely important in the development of global environmental awareness, activism and policy.

The essayists – Viriato Soromenho-Marques, J. Baird Callicott, José Lima Santos, Tim O'Riordan, Satish Kumar and Marina Silva – invite readers to reflect on these ground-breaking works and examine their historical importance, as well as what they should mean to us today and what relevance they will have to future generations.

More than just books about the environment, these are also philosophical treatises, in that they increase our understanding of the natural world and of ourselves, calling us "to weigh and consider", as Bacon put it. In particular, they make us reflect on the need to constantly redefine the purposes of progress, the economy and society. How we relate to nature is a crucial aspect in the plans we make as a species, and as individuals; and every one of these books inspires a more respectful relationship, both with nature and humanity, and consequently with ourselves.

The six essays in this book are the result of a series of conferences organised in Lisbon by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation with the support of the American Embassy in Portugal. Its *raison d'être* was to revisit the ideas that have shaped the environmental movement, seeking inspiration to deal with what looks like a very challenging future. The significance of such timeless concepts is now more apparent than ever; and these evergreen books are full of ideas that retain their spark even in our difficult times. This is what makes them classics.

Environment: Why Read the Classics? is a provocative book and will be essential reading for all those concerned about the state of the world.

1
Walden

A tale on the ‘art of living’

Viriato Soromenko-Marques

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) and his masterpiece, Walden, are both ingrained in our lives. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to undertake a candid analysis of the book named after a beautiful lake, near Concord, Massachusetts, without hearing a contemporary echo of the constellation of fears that haunts us. We are the fragile inhabitants of the grim and probably desperate 'Anthropocene era'.⁷ How can we accompany the thoughts and steps of Emerson's solitary friend and disciple without seeing him as a forefather of our anguish regarding the future, seemingly held prisoner by the shadows of economic doom and environmental collapse?

The author and the book

Thoreau is both a writer and a cultural legend, a giant of American literature and a hero for those who praise typical American individualism, albeit of the milder, more elaborate and intellectually oriented New England type. During his lifetime, Thoreau lived within the sphere of attraction of the great founder of the so-called American transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He shared the ideas and ideals of that spiritual stream that boasted an alien German, or even Prussian resonance, and which stemmed from the philosophical works of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). However, the gulf between Emerson and Kant is much wider than the apparent identity derived from the 'transcendental' concept. Thoreau was just one of Emerson's followers and companions, much like Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, George Ripley and Theodore Parker. Nevertheless, we can clearly see that he was too intensively engaged in the process of personal knowledge and self-transformation to worry about fame or economic and social rewards, or even his place in American literary history.

Thoreau was neither a prolific writer nor a bestselling author; even his masterpiece was far from being a literary success. The basis for Walden's lasting influence lies deep in the collective American psyche. In a sense, Thoreau, alongside Whitman, constructed the two forms of 19th-century American soul. The latter was able to listen to the songs and aspirations of millions of men and women, struggling to achieve their dreams in a new, vibrant and labouring nation, while the former was a walking philosophical manifesto for the courage of trying to explore the maze of the inner conscience, and the hidden grounds of moral judgement.⁸ Walden is the testimony of a life seeking the unity of idea and action, of values and deeds. The reason why we consider this book a pioneering classic within the already vast canon of environmental literature is related to the fact that, for Thoreau, as well for Emerson, there is no truly ontological barrier between humankind and nature. They are both modalities of thought. Becoming a true moral human being is the path that leads us to the understanding that ultimately, instead of a chasm between things and ideas, it is the unity of natural beauty and moral good that will prevail. For Thoreau, humans are the creatures that are able to find themselves while looking for nature; or the beings that, when in silent meditation, achieve the clear notion that trees, birds, sunlight, running water, the shifting seasons, nature as a whole is a core element of our own identity. Nature is not only our home, but also the best part of ourselves.⁹

Walden was published in 1854, in Boston, by Ticknor & Fields. It was not Thoreau's first literary outing and he already had a few titles to his name. His first attempt at the contemplation of nature and philosophical appraisal appeared in 1849: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. In the same year, he published the short essay that would put him on the shortlist of major Western political philosophers: Civil Disobedience. Walden saw the light of day in the same year as an essay on the contentious topic that would force the USA onto the bloody battlefields of civil war: Slavery in Massachusetts (1854). This would be followed by an essay on the controversy surrounding a hero who was executed as a criminal: A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859).

The world of Walden

On 4 July 1845, when Thoreau left Concord on the way to his new dwelling, a wood cabin by one of the finest natural relics of the last Ice Age in Massachusetts, the Walden Pond, he was not overly distressed, but probably looking forward hopefully to the outcome of a rather difficult decision. For him, going to live in the wild meant doing away with the ancient institution that enslaves the human race in a kind of ethical minor age: the gap between values and deeds:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived ... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.¹⁰

The young and practical philosopher was ready to live according to his own beliefs. He was very much aware of the rapidly shifting world around him. America was already at the centre of this movement. He could not know that world population growth, which constituted an increasing threat to nature, anticipated by Robert Malthus in 1798, would reach the staggering figure of about 1,260 million by the end of the 1840s. However, he probably knew about the exponential increase in the American population, which leapt 35.9%, from 17,069,453 inhabitants in 1840 to 23,191,876 in 1850.¹¹ He knew from experience the harm humans were capable of doing to beautiful landscapes. The waves of immigrants coming from Europe in search of a dream came close to the shores of Walden. From the woodchoppers to the expanding railroad, from the Irish raising pigs by the water to the ice-men in winter, the outcome of the meeting between newcomers and the pond was far from ideal.¹²

Long before his journey to Walden Pond, Thoreau underwent a kind of profound and silent academic and literary preparation. Modern readers cannot help being struck by the encyclopaedic knowledge that jumps from the pages of his literary masterpiece. Modern-day universities do not provide students with anywhere near the bountiful information and wisdom that Thoreau received during his school years at Harvard University, between 1833 and 1837. Reading Thoreau, we encounter a vivid example of the blending of humanities and natural sciences, before the definitive arrival of the great 'two cultures' divide.¹³ Having mastered both classical languages and quantitative methodology, he was able to combine Homer with empirical data from natural sciences, as well as acute quantitative remarks with elaborate moral reflection, drawing upon classical moral philosophers.

En route to his calm and pleasant destination, Thoreau was well aware that the world he was living in was in the throes of a rapid and breath-taking shift. The huge impact of an industrial revolution was quickly spreading from its small British source. Huge urban areas were swallowing up millions of peasants and large areas of forest and farmland. Acid smog was taking the place of mild fog in the vicinity of cities. Speed was everywhere, demanding more tasks in less time, and in the way people talked, thought, or moved from one place to another. Nevertheless, reading Thoreau, we can confirm that the world where Walden Pond was located was less important to the writer than the world he wanted to build in his inner house by the lake—a house that was not the humble cabin where he slept at night, but rather his deeper moral self. The sounds and shades of the forest gave him the space he needed for the personal pursuit of his own identity. As such, Walden was not the final destination, but a geographical condition for a deeper psychological journey. Thoreau was entirely in agreement with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, when the latter critically targeted the urban condition for its major spiritual shortcomings: 'Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.'¹⁴

The world in Walden

The cornerstone of Thoreau's worldview is personal autonomy: to be what we are, or what we may become, regardless of what other people say about us. Worse still, we need to shed prejudices about ourselves, formulated when we assimilate an estranged view about our own personal endeavours: 'Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.'¹⁵ Self-inflicted tyranny is just part of the riddle in which personal autonomy becomes just a hollow phrase. Another crucial issue that affects the clarity of our moral vision is the wrong hierarchy of values: 'I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. . . Who made them serfs of the soil?'¹⁶ Instead of being, we chose having. It is so easy to neglect the duties towards our own self when it seems possible to find an easier nest in the glamour of material wealth and in the approval of a shallow public mind. Nevertheless, the bottom line lies in the hardship of the path toward actual ethical grandeur. Thoreau reminds his readers, bluntly: 'While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.'¹⁷

It is no wonder that, alongside the founder of American tran-scendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau is considered as a kind of New World pioneer of 20th-century continental European existential philosophy, which has its roots in 19th-century thinkers such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. For Thoreau, much like Nietzsche, the nature of philosophical truth is not a matter of logical coherence and linguistic order, but rather a question of practical courage. In his sober and imperative style, Nietzsche asked himself and his readers: 'How much truth can a spirit carry upon its shoulders, how much truth can a spirit dare to bear? For me, those have been more and more the real measure of value.'¹⁸ Thoreau could be considered a living example of the courage involved in the pursuit of truth against all odds. The great challenge is the ability to live at the same level as such praised and chosen ideals:

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers . . . To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.¹⁹

The road to becoming an authentic person is hard and painful. The modern world created a huge maze of noisy objects that disturb our capacity to remain faithful to the basic principles of personal integrity. Without knowing, Thoreau was challenging the Protestant work ethic, much as a young contemporary called Karl Marx did in 1844. They both wrote about a kind of work that deprives the labourer of his own psychological identity:

Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine.²⁰

Thoreau was also keen to show the process by which technology was able to dominate our lives, instead of serving human ends: 'We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.'²¹ However, contrary to Marx, Thoreau did not believe that salvation from the 'factory system' would be a social and political revolution, grounded on a global theory of history and on a systemic understanding of capitalism as a 'mode of production'. Still in the domain of work and production, Thoreau asked his permanent fundamental question: what can I do? Once more, ethics was the key to liberation. Social emancipation should start with the individual's capacity to set his own agenda, his mastering of time and occupation:

I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living ... In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial.²²

Pristine nature is the place where the roots of ethical judgement can best find their way to the human soul. However, the issue of ethics leads us to the need to make decisions regarding others in a shared and noisy world, the basis of which goes deep into the silent realm of personal identity. The society of landscapes and natural creatures is the most suitable nourishment for self-knowledge. Solitude is a pre-condition for virtue:

I love to be alone. I never found the Companion that was so companionable as solitude . . . Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.²³

Thoreau has a good understanding of how humans can have a negative impact on nature. However, he tends to emphasise nature's resilience, bringing together the regenerative strength of natural cycles and the remembrance of his youthful reverence towards a world in the never-ending process of revelation.

Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.²⁴

Nature works for Thoreau as a kind of ethical topos. From nature flows the power that is able to enhance personal development, and moral autonomy. Humans are, therefore, very interested in nature. However, Thoreau strictly follows Emerson's teachings regarding the need to distinguish sheer pragmatic and material interest from the involvement in nature for spiritual and ontological reasons.²⁵ Walking along the shores of Walden, feeling the languid texture of time, using the lenses of leisure for sharp natural observations, Thoreau revered the diversity and plenty of nature, and used it as a blueprint for a human commonwealth, vibrant with people, eager t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Walden: A tale on the 'art of living'
• 2 A Sand County Almanac: An evolutionary-ecological worldview
• 3 Rachel Carson's Silent Spring: A legacy for sustainable development
• 4 The Limits to Growth revisited
• 5 Small is still beautiful
• 6 An essay on Our Common Future
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index