This lecture was published in The Atlantic as an essay titled “Walking” after Thoreau’s death in 1862. “I wish to speak a word for Nature,” he opened boldly, “for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.” Humans, he claimed, were “part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” These prophetic, inclusive statements constitute America’s declaration of interdependence. As a card-carrying geologist who has written two books on Thoreau as a natural scientist and lifelong “river rat,” and the first “ Guide to Walden Pond,” I believe the mature Thoreau lurking beneath distorted cultural motifs has much to tell us. A creative force, willed not by intent but by impulse, accident and contingency. A pervasive condition lurking beneath the surface – especially in the midst of civilization. To the mature Thoreau, wildness was an entanglement of different realities and more of an attitude than an attribute. His mature views, which I stumbled onto when researching my book “The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years,” can more effectively help us cope with a world so changed by people that geologists have proposed a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Unfortunately, the line was cherry-picked from its original context, conflates wildness with wilderness and predates Thoreau’s later, more nuanced insights about wildness.
A century later, however, it had become a guiding mantra for the American environmental movement, adopted by the Sierra Club as an unofficial motto and launched into the cultural stratosphere via bumper stickers, T-shirts and posters. When Americans quote writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, they often reach for his assertion that “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” This phrase elicited little response when Thoreau first read it during a lecture in 1851.
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