Walden S Shore

Walden's Shore explores Thoreau's understanding of the "living rock" on which life's complexity depends--not as metaphor but as physical science. Robert Thorson's subject is Thoreau the rock and mineral collector, interpreter of landscapes, and field scientist whose compass and measuring stick were as important to him as his plant press.

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward," Thoreau invites his readers in Walden, "till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality." Walden's Shore explores Thoreau's understanding of that hard reality, not as metaphor but as physical science. Robert M. Thorson is interested in Thoreau the rock and mineral collector, interpreter of landscapes, and field scientist whose compass and measuring stick were as important to him as his plant press. At Walden's climax, Thoreau asks us to imagine a "living earth" upon which all animal and plant life is parasitic. This book examines Thoreau's understanding of the geodynamics of that living earth, and how his understanding informed the writing of Walden. The story unfolds against the ferment of natural science in the nineteenth century, as Natural Theology gave way to modern secular science. That era saw one of the great blunders in the history of American science--the rejection of glacial theory. Thorson demonstrates just how close Thoreau came to discovering a "theory of everything" that could have explained most of the landscape he saw from the doorway of his cabin at Walden. At pivotal moments in his career, Thoreau encountered the work of the geologist Charles Lyell and that of his protégé Charles Darwin. Thorson concludes that the inevitable path of Thoreau's thought was descendental, not transcendental, as he worked his way downward through the complexity of life to its inorganic origin, the living rock.

This book presents a critical history of the intersections between American environmental literature and ecological restoration policy and practice. Through a storying—restorying—restoring framework, this book explores how entanglements between writers and places have produced literary interventions in restoration politics. The book considers the ways literary landscapes are politicized by writers themselves, and by conservationists, activists, policymakers, and others, in defense of U.S. public lands and the idea of wilderness. The book profiles five environmental writers and examines how their writings on nature, wildness, wilderness, conservation, preservation, and restoration have variously inspired and been translated into ecological restoration programs and campaigns by environmental organizations. The featured authors are Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) at Walden Pond, John Muir (1838–1914) in Yosemite National Park, Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) at his family’s Wisconsin sand farm, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890–1998) in the Everglades, and Edward Abbey (1927–1989) in Glen Canyon. This book combines environmental history, literature, biography, philosophy, and politics in a commentary on considering (and developing) environmental literature’s place in conversations on restoration ecology, ecological restoration, and rewilding.

The first guidebook to the landscape and history of the literary shrine to Thoreau, Walden Pond.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, the only works Thoreau conceived and brought to conclusion as books, bear a distinctively important relation to each other and to his Journal, the document whose twenty-four-year composition encompasses their development. In a brilliant new book, H. Daniel Peck shows how these three works engage one another dialectically and how all of them participate in a larger project of imagination. "Morning work," a phrase from Walden, is the name Peck gives to this larger project. by it he means the work done by memory and perception as they act to shape Thoreau's emerging vision of a harmonious universe. Peck argues that the changing balance of memory and perception in the three works defines the unique literary character of each of them. He offers a major reevaluation of Walden, which he sees neither as the epitome of Thoreau's career (the traditional view) nor as an anomaly (the recent, revisionary view). Rather, he sees Walden as a pivotal work, reflecting the issues of loss and remembrance that earlier had found prominent expression in A Week and prefiguring the late Journal's vision of natural order. Focusing on the two-million-word Journal, Peck provides the first critical analysis that defines the essential forces and the imaginative coherence in its vast discursiveness. The consideration of memory and perception in Thoreau also leads peck to the issue of the writer's modernity, and he explores the ways in which Thoreau anticipates twentieth-century thought, especially in the works of such great objectivist philosophers as William James and Alfred North Whitehead.