Walden Pond taught me the brutality of systemic racism. Thirty years ago, my sister and I planned our first walk around the pond. Before heading to Lincoln, we stopped at a nearby market to pick up food for a picnic lunch. Our in front of the store, we divvied up our short grocery list, and I headed to the produce department while she sought out crackers and cheese. When I had apples and grapes in hand, I went to find her. I came upon her walking away from me down an aisle, a store employee apparently following her. I trailed the employe who followed her until we each took a right, in turn, down the next aisle. My sister grabbed the cheese and then turned back toward the employee—who was watching everything she did—and toward me. Incensed, I, the customer and protective older sister, issued an ironic question to the store’s employee: “Can we help you?” He mumbled something and walked away.

I asked my sister what was up, what he was doing tracking her every move. She replied, “Oh, that happens all the time. That’s part of being Black.“ You see, my sister is African American, often subject to the assumption that her colored skin means she is a thief. Adopted at birth by our parents, she is labeled “Black” by our color-fixated society though a recent DNA  test told her that he has a much European as African blood coursing through her veins. And what does it matter anyway? Like many, I’ve learned that race is a construction as much as anything –a convenient way for labeling, and too often subjugating people who look different from oneself or who hail from other lands, “Race” overlooks the fact that we are al the same species of animal.

On that day, my sister and I left the store, picnic in cloth bag, and headed to Walden—to the possibility of peace amid the trees, birdsong, glimpses of Thoreau’s “sky water”, a storied pond reflecting the vaulted heavens. But that afternoon I experienced neither an idyllic encounter with nature nor a trip down literary history’s lane. Only a walk overshadowed by the dehumanization of discrimination.

Sometimes I find it fitting that my memories of that day center on black and white, and not on the green that defines Walden’s legacy. Thoreau knew this tension. Injustice “spoils” his walks, too, as he tells us in “Resistance to Civil Government.” In Walden, he feels it, too. Through the lilac bush, disintegrating lintel, and crumbling stone wall, he excavated the names and lives of people who had resided by the pond before him, sharing the stories of impoverished Black individuals., among others, embedded in the land. Elsewhere, he wrote about his encounters with people fleeing the unjust bonds of enslavement and implored his fellow citizens to consider upon whose racial enslavement their own freedom depended. Like mine, Thoreau’s grasp of racism was far from complete, to be sure. He attempted, though, to disentangle the ways that industrial capitalism is mired not only in nature’s despoliation but also in other people’s subjugation.

We need now more than ever to continue this work. As writer Hop Hopkins explains it, “we will never survive the climate crisis without ending white supremacy. Here’s why: You can’t have climate change without sacrificing zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can’t have disposable people without racism.”1As president of the Thoreau Society, I am honored to work with a Board of Directors and staff committed to exploring how we can better address issues of outreach, diversity, equity, and inclusion. If you’d like to join that effort, please reach out to us. We have important work to do—and a fine model in Thoreau to inspire us.

—Rochelle L. Johnson is the president of the Thoreau Society.
Notes
1) Hop Hopkins, “Racism is killing the planet: The ideology of white supremacy leads the way toward disposable people and a disposable natural world.” The National Magazine of the Sierra Club (8 June 2020); https.ierraclub.org/sierra/racism-killing-planet.

“As Thoreau suggests in his Journal of 3 July 1840, thoughts and lives, as well as “a new growth of wood,” inform landscapes as well as cultures. In the pages that follow, I perform an excavation of these artifacts of the intellectual history of ecological thought in order to explore their potential presence in our world today—here, at the boundaries of environmental resilience and environmental collapse, and at the borders of climate instability and climate catastrophe.

Scholars now widely recognize Henry David Thoreau’s significance as a proto-ecological thinker, one key to the development of environmental thought in the United States. We 134 acknowledge him as a skilled scientific collector, an early describer of the principles of forest succession, and a gifted natural historian whose phenological studies inform our own mapping of both nineteenth-century species distribution and contemporary climate change. We tend, however, to treat Thoreau’s prescient ecological insights as an anomaly in nineteenth-century literary naturalism. Especially in the popular-cultural imagination, but also within our scholarship, we figure Thoreau as a bit of an environmental eccentric, thereby suggesting that his path-breaking ecological insights were isolated or even fortuitous. Yet when we look beyond the boundary of Thoreau’s individual forays into ecological thought, we must reckon with a wider cultural concern over the impacts of nineteenth-century landscape alteration.

Just beyond the western border of Massachusetts, in eastern New York State, a contemporary of Thoreau observed her home landscape closely and also articulated now-recognized concepts in the science of ecology. By examining Thoreau’s ecological expressions in relation to those of his New York contemporary, Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894), we confront the possibility of a more powerful and prevalent environmental consciousness in mid-nineteenth-century America. In Cooper and Thoreau, we encounter largely self-taught (albeit widely read) naturalists who lived 240 miles apart but expressed similar alarm over the increasingly compromised resilience of the American landscape. I argue here that when we figure mid-nineteenth-century literary environmentalism as isolated and anomalous, we distort the wider prevalence of environmental concern in an era largely thought to lack environmental awareness. We also, however, reinforce a troubling history of building boundaries between the humanities and the sciences. Confronting this wider legacy of literary environmentalism not only demands recognizing the emergence of ecological principles through literary naturalism but, further, urges consideration of the effects of silencing this literary-scientific convergence in environmental history.

In the field of archeology, artifacts are understood to reveal what members of a community value, how they engage with the physical world, and how they understand the place of humanity in the cosmos. Following this line of inquiry, I argue that three artifacts of literary culture—a journal fragment, a leaf from a book, and a newspaper advertisement—embody a materiality that informs ideation. They can be understood both as vestiges of the intellectual history of environmental understanding and as the ruins, as it were, of cultural possibility. Thoreau’s and Cooper’s insights into the limits of nature’s resilience might serve as thresholds between the presumed but artificial borders of materiality and intellectual history, of science and literature, and of their historical moment and our own.”