“...Thoreau’s pursuit of nature’s impressions and effects may appear facile and even contemptible for its seeming passivity in our age of climate catastrophe, countless endangered species, unprecedented global pandemic, and world leaders who condone (and even promote) racism, sexism, the suffering of asylum-seekers, rampant gun violence, the loss of precious global allies, and the snubbing of science. In the midst of all this, of what worth is a white, Harvard-educated, nineteenthcentury philosopher who took so seriously the learning of the notes of birds? This essay pursues this question alongside the larger one that inspired this anthology and the international Thoreau symposium that preceded it: What use might we make of Thoreau in our age of political and environmental violence—an age when critics see fit to abuse Thoreau as self-absorbed, “myopic,” and obsolete?

I suggest that Thoreau’s engagement with a single bird, as revealed through his lifetime body of writing, offers a model for finding meaning in a deeply troubled era by becoming “prey,” as Thoreau purportedly put it, to the non-human natural world. That is, we might use his work to better understand how meaning arises from our deep engagement with material realities (e.g., a bird) and their cultural and personal associations (e.g., that bird’s impressions and effects). I arrive at this assertion through an exploration of the “significance, agency, and substance” of the kingfisher as it figures in Thoreau’s days and work. We find that, for Thoreau, kingfisher is sound and sight, fable and reality, clarity and mystery, natural fact and aesthetic experience, biology and art, object and effect. Indeed, kingfisher comes to embody many things to Thoreau—nearly everything, we might say, except that saying so suggests that kingfisher means nothing to him at all, which is not the case. Through mythology, metaphor, frequent observation, fleeting sight, and flitting sound, kingfisher becomes a real presence, a bundle of sensual qualities, and a set of scientific questions; it enables curiosity, sorrow, growth, and potential healing.

Ultimately, I argue, kingfisher circled through Thoreau’s days, providing meaning by helping Thoreau express his grief over the political and environmental abuses of his nation in his own time. In short, kingfisher becomes an integral part of that complex melding of knowledge, emotion, and experience that enfolds an individual in time and gives grounding to his days. This, then, is one use we might make of Thoreau: through him, we uncover the possibility of starting with a single thing—a bird—and weaving a fabric of meaning in the universe. While that meaning is not reducible to a single word, axiom, or principle, it nonetheless unfolds as an available means for swathing our grief within the larger material of the world, thereby recognizing our own suffering as one sign of a need for universal mending. Indeed, we abuse Thoreau if we discount his intimacy with natural life as frivolous, parochial, and irrelevant to our own era. On the contrary, we might use his writings to see how a bird (the “thing-in-itself”) and its cultural history (its impressions and effects) might together inform our prolonged moment of political injustice and climate grief. This is surely what we need: models for retrieving and uniting the natural and human histories of species, entwining their existences with our own such that their harm is also our injury, and such that we cannot conceive of ourselves or the planet without them. For beyond the bewilderment of grief is connection, and then, in time, healing...”