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Thoreau's Writings
The Thoreau Reader
Iowa State University
Richard Lenat
DVD Special Features:
Profiles in Civil Disobedience:
- Wangari Maathai
- Tsunesaburo Makiguchi
- Nelson Mandela.
Thoreau's Concord/Walden Pond.
World Leaders:
Thoreau's impact through the eyes of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Leo Tolstoy, and Daisaku Ikeda.
The boatmen, Bill and Ben:
An animated short Story. |
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Bill McKibben (http://www.billmckibben.com/index.html) is a literary essayist, outdoorsman-athlete, journalist, teacher activist and prophet. His 1989 book The End of Nature, was an early herald of the dangers of global warming.
The introduction to his edition(Beacon Press, 1997, 2004) treats Thoreau's Walden as a guide to Global Warming Solutions of a personal and spiritual nature. These are some excerpts:
"Understanding the whole of this book is a hopeless task. Its writing resembles nothing so much as Scripture; ideas are condensed to epigrams, four or five to a paragraph. Its magic density yields dozens of different readings—psychological spiritual, literary, political, cultural. To my mind, though, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is most crucial to read Waldenas a practical environmentalist's volume, and to search for Thoreau's heirs among those trying to change our relation to the planet. ...
He had, of course, no idea that he was doing so. Although he wrote often about the natural world, Thoreau lived at the very onset of the industrial age...His world was not used up, suffering... And though he could perhaps see the ruination that greed might cause...he had no inkling that we could damage the ozone or change the very climate with our great consumer flatulence. "Thank God the sky is safe," he wrote.
...To prevent [climate change] from getting worse...will require doing with less, living more lightly....
And it is here that Thoreau comes to the rescue. He posed the two intensely practical questions that must come to dominate this age if we're to make those changes: How much is enough? and How do I know what I want?
In the advanced consumer society in which we live, How much is enough? is...the most deeply subversive question you can currently pose. We've been carefully trained to know that the answer is always: More....
Thoreau begins with the beginning. He starts with Food, Shelter, Clothing and Fuel. ...these have become "...so important to human live that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy ever attempt to do without." But of course each of these can be either simply or expensively maintained. ...In material terms, he was on a par with many of the poorest people around the world today. And he was like them in being a good, if unconscious environmentalist. If you are worried about the largest problems, such as global warming, then to consume only a bit is the best remedy...
Thoreau did not have contempt for money—it intrigued him, as his endless careful accounts suggest. But he realized instinctively the lesson that few of us ever learn, which is that there are two ways to get by in the world. The first is to increase income; the second is to reduce expenses. ...
...The second question that Thoreau raises ...[is] equally well timed for the beginning of this century. If "How much is enough?" is the subversive question for the consumer society, "How can I hear my own heart?" is the key assault on the Information Age. How do I know what I want? What is my true desire?...
...He understood the danger of the big Hum—both the constant barrage of chatter from the world (two, three, four hours of television a day) and its lingering echoes. ...
This is an environmental problem not only because the main function of the Information Revolution is to sell us stuff we don't need, stuff that gives off carbon dioxide or gathers in dumps. It's a problem most of all because it confuses us as to our place in the scheme of things. Without silence, solitude, darkness, how can we come to any sense of our true size, our actual relationship with the rest of the world?...
And yet the battle could still swing; we live at a pivot in history when, quite suddenly, ideas like Thoreau's might suddenly flourish...He is the American incarnation in a line of crackpots and gurus from Buddha on. Jesus, St. Francis, Gandhi and the holy men and women of every branch of the ethical religious tradition share an outlook: Simplicity is good for the soul, for the right relation with God. ...We've adopted the competing religious worldview, the one that worships an ever-growing Economy. But such spiritual notions have not disappeared, either; they flowed like a small but steady river through world history, never drying up.
Thoreau added a new tributary to that stream. ...he presaged the twentieth century American-led boom in his affection for nature. This stream grew larger; the concern for right relation with God joined with love of the physical world...
Now quite suddenly, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a whole new tributary of thought swells that countercultural river. The saints in their robes and the nature lovers in their Gore-Tex jackets are suddenly joined by men and women in lab coats, clutching computer printouts. The students of the largest environmental changes taking place around us come with a message eerily similar to those we've heard before. When the International Panel on Climate Change reported ... that humans were likely to raise the earth's temperature 5 degrees this century, that they had begun to alter the most basic forces of the planet's surface, the implication of their graphs and charts and data sets was, simplify, simplify. Not because it's good for your relationship with God, but because if you don't, the temperature of the planet will be higher by 2100 than it's been for hundreds of millions of years...The math is hard to argue with; business as usual and growth as usual spell an end to the world as usual. This is the one overwhelming fact of our lifetimes. ..."
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Howard Zinn
Daniel Ellsberg
