No Man’s Garden
NO MAN’S GARDEN:
Thoreau and A New Vision for Civilization and Nature
by Daniel B. Botkin
Island Press; 1ST edition (October 1, 2000)
ISBN: 1559634650
Henry David Thoreau as a practical man
Thoreau was a surveyor and the inventor of the modern pencil. He approached nature in part as an engineer and practical man would, and in part because of the deep meaning that nature had for him, lifting his spirits, so to speak. One of his most famous quotes is “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” This is often misinterpreted — by both pro- and anti-environmentalists — to think that Thoreau meant that most of the world should be turned back into wilderness. Not at all. For Thoreau, wildness was a state of mind, while wilderness was a place. He sought the sense of wildness — of nature — and he could obtain that with an afternoon’s walk in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts or, as he put it, from the swamp by the edge of town. Once he wrote “I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness he represented.” He didn’t mean this literally; he meant that he wanted to feel the sense of wildness within himself.
Excerpt: WINTER FOR THOREAU: During the later part of his life, Thoreau enjoyed wintertime in Concord, MA. He skated and slid on the ice on the Concord river. His notes about what he did on Christmas Day in various years are good illustrations of his sense of fun in the outdoors. On Christmas Day, December 25, 1853, when he was 36, Thoreau went for a walk near to Concord and wrote that “Staked to Fair Haven and above. . . . About 4 P. M. the sun sunk behind a cloud, and the pond began to boom or whoop . . . It is a sort of belching, and, . . . somewhat frog-like. . . . It is a very pleasing phenomenon, so dependent on the altitude of the sun.” A few years later, on December 25, 1857, when he was 40, he wrote that he had “Skate[d] on Goose Pond” and on Christmas Day the next year, he wrote “The ice on the river is about half covered with light snow. . . I go running and sliding from one such snow-patch to another . . . It is so rough that it is but poor sliding withal.” Here was a 41 year-old man spending Christmas day sliding and slipping among the snow patches on the ice-covered river. And so time in the woods near Concord was recreation, fun, joy, for Thoreau. Traveling in the Maine woods, the big woods, was adventurous, exciting and fun.Henry David Thoreau was one of the first people to climb Mt. Katahdin, the highest peak in Maine. He went up that mountain to discover nature as it really was. He was told by his colleagues in Massachusetts that nature was benign and cared about people. But typical of Thoreau, he did not take anybody’s word for granted, and went to find nature himself.
Instead of a benign nature, he found the top of the mountain “a cloud factory . . . Occasionally, when the windy columns broke into me, I caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me.” He felt “more lone than you can imagine.” In the thinner air on the mountaintop “Vast, Titanic, inhuman nature” had him “at a disadvantage, caught him alone.” He felt that he had lost “some of his divine faculty,” one of the very things he had sought to capture and understand on the mountain. He wrote
“This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but an unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land.”
Review: Amazon.com
No Man’s Garden presents a vital challenge to the assumptions and conventional wisdom of environmentalism, and will be must reading for anyone interested in developing a deeper understanding of interactions between humans and nature.