MAN OF THE TREES

Many describe him as one of the fathers of early environmentalism; others suggest that, to Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the whole of nature was a sort of religion, a welcoming place where he could learn what he saw as the essential facts of life. But he was also, like Benjamin Franklin, a bit of a polymath - poet, author, essayist, philosopher, naturalist, tax resister, surveyor, historian, transcendentalist, slavery abolitionist - and was thus difficult to label. Perhaps 'man of the natural world' is one way of trying to do it.
A number of his writings are now seen a classical works, including Walking, published in 1861, originally a lecture which subsequently became one of the seminal works of the American environmental movement, in which he sets out his case for individual freedom and natural wildness, and his desire to see people as inhabitants of nature rather than members of a society.
Walking is a tricky read nowadays because the bulk of the essay is not actually about walking, or sauntering as he defines it - from the Saint-Terre, the wanderer heading for the Holy Land, living on charity and the kindness of others. But he was honest about it. Thoreau said he spent at least four hours a day wandering in the woods and the countryside, the wilder the better, observing, enjoying his surroundings, and learning from the most basic sources. Unlike one group of friends who once lost themselves in the woods for a few minutes, frightened themselves, and thereafter kept to the safety and certainty of the highways.
Thoreau was an acquaintance of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorn and those famous fruitarians, the Alcott family, and it was because of Emerson he was able to create his best known work, Walden: or Life in the Woods, published in 1854, when in the spring of 1845 he built a wooden cabin on the shores of Walden Pool on land belonging to his friend and located just outside the town of Concord. There he lived a sort of Tolstoyan-like 'Good Life' existence for two years, observing nature, building fences, walking, and writing his journal.
At Walden he lived alone, but he was not lonely, walking almost daily into Concord, or receiving visitors. He reckoned that one of life's biggest bugbears was the financial burden introduced by the purchase of property, which meant the purchaser then had to spend the rest of his working life paying for it. Build your own home, he urged. Cheaply. Work only for yourself. He claimed he worked only six weeks a year and still found he could meet his living expenses. This in turn meant he had his winters and most of his summers free for study. And writing and walking.
And why this insatiable craving for news, he asked. And why not do away with post offices? He himself, he wrote, had never in his life received more than two letters worth the cost of postage. So get back to basics.
Then, while weeding, mostly his hoe rattled against stones and sometimes against shards of pottery, the remains of long-dead fires, and bits and pieces left behind by earlier, long-dead Indian folk who had lived there before him. He reflected long on this.
When they both left the area, Indian, and Thoreau himself, there was little to show that either had ever been there, and that pleased him greatly. On the other hand he did leave a mark. He had not lived a week beside Walden Pool before his feet had trodden a path from his cabin door to the pond side, and when he visited the site again some six years later the path was still visible. An early indication, perhaps, that Thoreau had in fact left behind something very important.
(Walking, by Henry David Thoreau, reprint, ARC Manor, 2007; Walden; or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau, reprint, Dover Publications, 1995).