THE ENVIRONMENT:  THOREAU AS TRANSCENDENTALIST PHYSICIAN

1.  “Transcendentalism and the Environment:  An Introduction to Thoreau’s Changing Stance.”  K. P. Van Anglen.

Beginning with “Natural History of Massachusetts,” Thoreau’s encounters with the environment and environmental issues cause him to revise his professional self-conception, his stance (both literal and metaphoric) toward nature, and his intellectual concepts and methods.  Yet his  evolution on all of these levels remained largely consonant with the Transcendentalist project of rescuing nature and human experience from those who would disenchant the world—albeit often, though, by radically redefining the terms of the question itself.  As such his life of environmental encounter is a disciplined sojourn, a deliberate opening of the self to surprise and happenstance, a preparation for the graced moments of “a purely sensuous life.”

K. P. Van Anglen is a member of the Board of Directors of the Thoreau Society and an editor of the Princeton Edition.  He is also a co-editor of Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Yale University Press), and teaches at Boston University.

2.  “A Physician not a Metaphysician:  Thoreau’s Diagnoses of the Heart.”  James Engell

At the end of the conclusion to Varieties of Religious Experience, William James states that nature "interpreted religiously" must not be merely "the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression," but must reveal "over and above that altered expression, a natural constitution different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have.  It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct required. . . .  It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but simply calling it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it divine as it stands.”  Consider how James would take "religiously" in his phrase "interpreted religiously."  In light of this, shall we propose to discuss Thoreau as a transcendentalist physician who calls us to pragmatic healing or insight that interprets (diagnoses) nature in a way that reorientates its natural constitution?

James Engell has just finished his second term as Chair of the Harvard English Department, where he is also a faculty member of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Among many other books, he has most recently co-edited Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Yale University Press).  

3. “The Native American Model: The Civic and Economic Virtues of a Healthy Relationship to Nature.”  Brent Ranalli

Thoreau shares a tendency with the environmental movement to hold up the North American Indian as a model for how to live in harmony with nature (a tendency that is undoubtedly largely valid, though problematic in some ways and capable of being over-romanticized).  Keeping this preoccupation with Native Americans in mind, we can see Thoreau’s interest in healing our relationship to the land not as a distraction from the civic and economic reforms that preoccupied many of his Transcendentalist colleagues, but as prefatory to or integral with them.  Living simply (lightly on the land) gives one the uncompromised independence to see civic matters clearheadedly and the leisure to engage with those issues.  And meeting one’s needs oneself (living close to the land) both makes one’s own labor more meaningful and dignified and reduces the demand for others to perform work that is not.  As a community who lived close to and lightly on the land, who had model civic institutions (e.g., direct democracy and federalism among the Iroquois), and were “whole men” (in Emerson’s metaphor) whose labor was dignified and meaningful, the Indians stood as exemplars of Thoreau’s vision of reform.

Brent Ranalli works at the Cadmus Group, Inc., an employee owned environmental consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. He too is a co-editor of Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Yale University Press).