Against Thoreau

Physical landscapes are the stage on which we perform our own beliefs and values. Destroying and creating wilderness is a ritual of cultural reification, a way to define who we are and who we want to be. Thoreau, projecting his own racialized worldview on the ecological reality of North America, wrote; "What does Africa - what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered."(1) Ecosystem as metaphor is common throughout Western philosophy and literature, from the trial of Jesus in the wilderness to the building blocks of Minecraft. Western philosophers, rather than understanding animals, plants, and mountains as independent beings, sees them as mannequins on which to hang ideas. It is as if Thoreau were playing with lifeless dolls, giving each names and identities, rather than interacting with a group of relatives.

The use of the real, physical world as a spiritual or philosophical metaphor distracts from ecological realities and forces that, while they respond to our actions, are not driven by our ideas. The physical and biological forces of Earth are in motion, beyond the prescription of our beliefs. Maple trees don't change their motives if American culture is in a period of nature appreciation or economic boom. Glaciers only melt all the faster due to the fearful denial many people feel towards climate change. Interrogating how our beliefs and philosophies can distance us from the realities of the physical world is a crucial step to identifying different modes of productive cooperation.

Created landscapes have long been a way of asserting philosophical ideals. Wilderness historian Roderick Nash writes; "In early and medieval Christianity, wilderness kept its significance as the earthly realm of the powers of evil that the Church had to overcome. This was literally the case in the missionary efforts to the tribes of northern Europe, Christians judged their work to be successful when they cleared away the wild forests and cut down the sacred groves where the pagans held their rites."(2) Like these medieval priests, American landscapers are creating lawn out of forest, desert, or prairie as an expression of their deep beliefs and ideals, eradicating what they see as inferior, subversive, or threatening in favor of something good and proper and beautiful.

Following this medieval period, the age of enlightenment was a period of profound change from the seventeenth to nineteenth century. Industrial machines, scientific discoveries, and political policies from this period continue to have global impacts. Underlying and unifying this cultural epoch was a belief that humanity could progress; that from disciplines as diverse as geology to criminal law, humanity was inexorably moving toward something better, more organized, productive, and refined. This, of course, extended to humanity's relationship to nature. To historians of the time, our increased command over the natural world was just as inevitable as our increased understanding of chemistry. (3)

Medieval Christian attitudes about good and bad, civilized and savage, formed the basis for much Enlightenment thinking about the natural world. The path to the improvement of nature, reasoned Enlightenment philosophers, was paved with categorization and hierarchy. After all, in order to progress, we must know what is good and bad and what steps we must take to move from bad to good. The idea of a "great chain of being" that ranked all living species hierarchically, was complemented with hierarchies of humanity from savage to civilized. Of course, the philosophers placed themselves atop this ladder, whether they believed it stretched to God or to reason. Lawns and gardens were and continue to be the botanical epitome of civilization, the opposite of savage wilderness.

Cultivation of nature was viewed as unequivocally positive progress, and was the sign of moral superiority. Increasingly powerful technologies were allowing European countries to build sea walls, dam rivers, and farm more land. Many prominent philosophers and historians of the time believed that increased control over nature would always result in benefits to society. (4) This devotion to a narrow definition of progress was expansive in its aspirations.

To Enlightenment philosophers, the inner world of human nature was, like the outer world of ecology and society, something barbarous and savage that needed to be tamed and improved by human reason and effort. The eighteenth-century historian Johann Gottfried von Herder wrote "...so man is placed [on Earth] as a sovereign of the Earth, to alter it by arts. Since he stole fire from Heaven, and rendered steel obedient to his hand; since he has made not only beasts, but his fellow men also, subservient to his will, and trained both them and plants to his purposes; he has contributed to the alteration of climate in various ways. Once Europe was a dark forest; and other regions, at present well cultivated, were the same." (5) Enlightenment proponents wanted to fundamentally change the face of the Earth. They believed, not understanding the mechanism by which they would be proved correct, that this would change the global climate. This path to domination used many tools we may still recognize today.

Enlightenment philosophers, like modern landscapers, understood that control of nature wouldn't happen spontaneously. Francis Bacon, concluding his philosophical treatise Novum Organum, wrote; "For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences." (6) Enlightenment historian Nathaniel Wolloch argues that this belief was adopted into scientific inquiry and rational philosophy from its previously religious roots. He argues that Enlightenment historians believed in a "direct correlation between a society's level of civilization and its degree of mastery of nature, the last comprising the true measure of being human. Humanity was part of the natural order, but the superior part, and the conquest of nature was maintained by force rather than by any divine gift." (7)

American landscapers also have a philosophical heritage from those early voluntary colonists of the United States, the puritans. Puritans viewed wilderness as a trial, and the transformation from wilderness to civilization as symbolic of the journey from damnation to salvation, from an evil, tempting Earth to a safe, beautiful heaven. The wilds were home to perceived supernatural, social, and political enemies: devils, banished witches, Native Americans. Nash writes of the physical as well as philosophical manifestation of America: "Wilderness was the basic ingredient of American culture. From the raw materials of the physical wilderness Americans built a civilization." (8) With the idea of wilderness they sought to give that civilization identity and meaning. Cutting trees and clearing swamps was improvement, progress, cleansing, a demonstration of piety. The ripping out of roots, whether by kidnapping African people, displacing Native American communities, or tearing down forests, was and remains the defining act of the United States. It was the creation of identity and meaning, untethered from the reality of the colonies as pre-existing Native American nations, the reality of the humanity of enslaved African people, and the reality of the ecosystem as fundamentally life-giving.

One of the most common projections onto nature is assigning theological meaning onto the landscape. Imposing the will of civilization was unquestionably imposing the will of God, and puritans took pride in doing God's work. (9) Romanticism brought the idea that wilderness itself was created by God, but these supernatural aesthetics still kept humans and nature separated as if by a one-way mirror of reverence. According to this philosophy, either humans should dominate nature, or appreciate it from afar, but they will never be integrated with it. People must choose between two different worlds - wilderness or civilization, forest or city.

For Thoreau, the Romantic-era philosopher who looms largest in nature writing, the space of just a few miles between his Walden pond cabin and the town of Concord, Massachusetts was a radical chasm. As much as he congratulated himself for his temporary residence outside city limits, he wrote of an inherent conflict and tension between wilderness and civilization, barbaric and enlightened. Wilderness was his trial, as it was to the puritans, and it was something to overcome rather than embrace, especially within his own mind. He wrote; "We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change it's nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure." (10) The untenable concept of purity is the conflict that has driven much of Western philosophy throughout history, and underpins many of our landscape ideals today.

The Romantic movement within American settler culture sought to provide an alternative to the religious reasons for environmental destruction and land seizures. (11) Ultimately, however, the subsequent Transcendentalist movement was unable to avoid the same desire to escape the Earth and become supernatural. Worster writes, "...the transcendentalist movement placed little value on nature in and of herself; indeed the transcendentalist was as often repulsed by this slimy, beastly world as any good Christian. The lower order was not coequal with the higher realm of spirit; it was inferior, blemished, incomplete." (12) It was, of course, up to the wealthy elite to mold this inferior sphere to their enlightened ideals.

The idea that nature can only be saved when people are excluded, and nature is inherently corrupted when people are present is harmful to both people and nature, and relies on philosophical or theological beliefs that humans are super- or extra-natural. The conflict is especially difficult when turned inward, against our own internal nature. Even that supposed nature-lover Thoreau often expressed a longing for a celestial, rather than Earthly, existence. Thoreau wrote, "He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace." (13) This places him firmly in the Western tradition of desperately longing to leave the natural world and enter a supernatural space. Believers in this particular branch of theology, like Thoreau, long for a separation from the natural world. We can see the connection he made between inner and outer nature in his poem; "How happy's he who hath due place assigned/To his beasts and disafforested his mind!" (14)

Christianity proposes a supernatural soul, and a divinely mandated hierarchy which places humans above the rest of the natural world. Our limits are higher, and on a wholly different plane from those of nature. As Native American philosopher Viola Cordova wrote, "We persist in seeing ourselves as a superior life form - as some ethereal creature of pure thought - mind versus matter." (15) The supernatural separation with the Earth, and the apocalyptic wish that we will leave it - either in spaceships or beams of heavenly light - allow us to see our world as disposable, and our bodies along with it. This theology of disdain for the natural world, combined with the imperative to control it and therefore limit its messiness, is turned inward as well as outward. Thoreau wrote, "the wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life." (16)

As for me, I am trying to embrace the slimy, beastly life. The life of cooperation over conquest, imperfection over order. This is a season of senescence, where we remember that we too, will die. Perhaps we are not the choreographer, but merely the dancers.

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) p.529.
2. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001) p.17.
3. Nathaniel Wolloch, History and Nature in the Enlightenment (United Kingdom: Routledge Press, 2011) p.72.
4. Ibid p.132.
5. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (London 1800) p.176.
6. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum p.290. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45988/45988-h/45988-h.htm#Book-II_Aph-21
7. Nathaniel Wolloch, History and Nature in the Enlightenment (United Kingdom: Routledge Press, 2011) p.87.
8. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001) Preface to 5th ed. pp.xix-xx
9. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001) Chapter 2.
10. Henry David Thoreau, Higher Laws. p.364.
11. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p.86.
12. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p.100
13. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) p.366.
14. Ibid p.366.
15. Kathleen Dean Moore, How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova (University of Arizona Press, 2007).
16. Thoreau, Walden Higher Laws p.364.