Abstract
Henry David Thoreau was prescient, recognizing in the mid-19th century that our allegiance to industrialization was leading us along a problematic path. His cabin at Walden Pond was only one and a quarter miles from town, and Concord was already a mix of farms and burgeoning industry, a mere 16 miles from the expanding city of Boston. Two-thirds of New England, excluding Maine, was cleared land by 1837. Industrialization was creeping forward, displacing nature’s web with an interconnected web of railroads. Concord was a pleasant place to explore, filled with pastures, meadows, swamps, and woodlands of six to ten acres each, but Thoreau wrote in his journal that it was impossible to walk in the woods during the day without hearing the chopping of an axe. And he could see and hear trains from his cabin, which provided a constant reminder of a world transformed by the dictates of humans (Richardson, 1986).
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Homestead, W. (2014). The Language That All Things Speak: Thoreau and the Voice of Nature. In: Peeples, J., Depoe, S. (eds) Voice and Environmental Communication. Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433749_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433749_10
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