Abstract
The concept of urbanature is a valuable new idea in ecocritical studies. Urbanature claims that urban life and nature are not as distinct as we have long supposed. Hawks and owls are nesting throughout Central Park and Manhattan at the same time that Western environmentalists are flying thousands of miles in jumbo-jets in an effort to “get back” to a version of nature they claim cannot be found in cities. Thoreau helps us to understand this conflict in the way he links an understanding of the nonhuman world with a wider appreciation of the concept of wildness. This essay will examine the hermit of Walden Pond in biographical detail and will also reveal the continuing impact of his works on students, teachers, and naturalists, especially that group of literary scholars known as ecocritics. Thoreau’s writings deliver a message of intellectual optimism but also of environmental warning. He also offers us a framework that can help us to determine the formal outlines of the ecocriticism we will practice in the coming decades.
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Notes
See http://urbanhawks.blogs.com. The full title of the site is “Urban Hawks and other Wildlife in Central Park and New York City.” Today’s entry (January 30, 2009) reads: “The oven is a cove on the Lake of Central Park. It attracts a good number of birds during each season, including the winter. Today, there were a number of birds, including a Red-tailed Hawk, a Hermit Thrush, numerous Northern Cardinals, numerous Tufted Titmice, and a Cooper’s Hawk that has been roosting in the same location nearby since at least early January.” The site also includes numerous high-resolution photographs.
See, for example, an essay by Ned Sullivan in the The Daily Green: The Consumer’s Guide to the Green Revolution (http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/blogs/easy-tips/economy-land-conservation-55101603) or “The Public and Private Interest in Wilderness Protection,” by William C. Dennis (Cato Journal, 1:2), published by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. (http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj1n2-3.html), an organization that should have known better.
The “Wildness” quotation comes from his essay “Walking,” in Thoreau, H. D. (2008). In W. Rossi (Ed.), Walden, civil disobedience, and other writings (3rd ed., p. 273). New York: Norton. All of my Walden citations will be to this edition.
Tyler Stallings, Jeremy Kidd: Fictional Realities, Laguna Beach: Laguna Art Museum, 2006. See http://www.tylerstallings.com/WritingContents/Kidd_catalog_final_6.pdf.
Walden, p. 214.
The essay begins with Thoreau’s famous statement, “I heartily accept the motto—That government is best which governs least,” a motto Thoreau takes from a literary and political journal, United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Norton edition, p. 227.
Walden, p. 145.
Ibid., p. 95. Thoreau here claims that he is “no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud.”
Ibid., p. 155.
Zinsser, W. (Ed.). (1991). The art and craft of travel writing (p. 14). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Ibid., pp. 16–17.
Thoreau: A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, Walden; or, life in the woods, the Maine woods, Cape cod (New York: The Library of America, 1985), Week, p. 33.
Ibid., The Maine woods, “Ktaadn,” p. 646.
“Thoreau is rediscovered as a climatologist,” New York Times, 28 October 2008, p. D1.
Ibid., D1.
Turner, F. (1986). Reflexivity as evolution in Thoreau’s Walden. In V. W. Turner & E. M. Bruner (Eds.), The anthropology of experience (p. 74). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., pp. 78, 93.
Charles G. D. Roberts’s introduction is reprinted in Walden, or life in the woods, intro. by Ashton Nichols (Beckleysville, MD: G. W. Zouck Publishing, 2008), p. 20.
Walden, pp. 6–7.
Ibid., p. 221.
Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. My adoption of the term “urbanature” is, in part, a response to Morton’s call for ecocriticism to adopt a new sense of the nonhuman, one not troubled by the dualistic legacy of post-Enlightenment thinking. See especially Morton’s claim that “The time should come when we ask of any text, ‘what does this say about the environment’,” p. 5.
Walden, pp. 81–82.
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Nichols, A. Thoreau and urbanature: from Walden to ecocriticism. Neohelicon 36, 347–354 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-009-0005-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-009-0005-5