The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture

The best writing about nature, literary scholar Lawrence Buell suggests, has at its root an argument that humans are accountable to the environment. In the American literary canon, the work that best demonstrates this thesis is Henry David Thoreau's classic Walden, a memoir celebrating at once the virtues of voluntary simplicity and the quest for political liberty. It is from Walden that much contemporary writing about nature derives, from the poems of the Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry to the back-to-the-land exhortations of Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard. In this study, Buell charts the growth of Thoreau's own environmental ethic and his lasting influence on writers of many kinds, among them Theodore Roethke, Gary Snyder, James Lovelock, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold. He also examines Thoreau's life, reminding his readers that although Thoreau will always be identified with that little Massachusetts pond, he was a wide-ranging traveler and thinker who was never quite comfortable at rest. Neither, Buell reminds us, is Thoreau always to be taken as a strictly reliable narrator; parts of Walden are fictionalized and embellished, and the book should not be reduced to "the autobiographical narrative alone," but instead should be seen as something of a parable. Buell's discussions will be of interest to any serious student of Thoreau's writings. --Gregory McNamee