What Modern Sustainability Could Learn From a 200-Year-Old American Tradition

This article is excerpted from TIME: SUSTAINABILITY, available at retailers and on Amazon. In his book Walden, the American essayist Henry David Thoreau famously documented his attempts to live simply and “deliberately” on the edge of a lake in the woods of Massachusetts. While many today think of Thoreau’s memoir as a paean to a solitary existence, those who study and teach Thoreau say this is a misconception. “The message of Walden is not about withdrawing from society,” says Aaron Sachs, a professor of history at Cornell University who studies American culture and its engagement with nature and natural resources. “Thoreau was writing at a time when people were making this transformation from being fairly independent in terms of growing their own food and, a lot of the time, making their own clothes to being dependent on wages and industrial production.” This dependence left many feeling powerless and desperate, he says. The Industrial Revolution also ushered in a new era of never before seen consumption and profligacy. In the face of all this, Thoreau was writing about using discarded materials to build his own house, or sometimes even foraging for food in the forest. “He was reminding people that there were alternative ways to live that didn’t rely on the rapacious use of natural resources,” Sachs says. In other words, Thoreau was more humanist than hermit. And he was one of the country’s early advocates o...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news