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 In 1864, Henry David Thoreau wrote his essay, Walking, celebrating "Nature," wild and free. His sense of Nature, "this vast savage, howling mother of ours," was little challenged by the limited perception of human senses. In 1864, the wild surrounded the village - a word Thoreau notes shares linguistic roots with the words "vile" and "villain."
In 1864, Thoreau could write:
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles...without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all, - I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler thither. If you would go to the political world ... follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it. I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar smoke of a man.
Even as Thoreau wrote these words the path that would lead to the world we inhabit was well-established. The forces of cultivation, of culture, of the cult of humankind had already asserted their inexorable direction. The industrial "revolution" had begun to change the composition of our atmosphere and our methods of production and consumption.
I, too, have a place where I walk, a place that is my heart's home. For miles, there are no inhabitants. I can climb hills and see to the horizon; forest to the east and north, the vastness of Lake Superior to the west and south. The mark of the human cult is scarcely perceptible - a silent contrail of an airplane, an obscure gap in the forest cover marking the cut of a road - and yet it pervades all. Nothing here is unmarked by human activity.Even when the wind sweeps in from the Arctic, and Superior roars its dream of independence, I cannot pretend that "politics is but as the smoke of a man's cigar."
What we call "politics," "the authoritative allocation of values," has long been all-pervasive, and it is the denial of its force that has, in part, led to our assault on Nature. Thoreau could be forgiven his chosen illusion; we cannot. Thoreau could assert, "A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful." For us, ignorance is a voluntary misfortune that leads to the destruction of beauty.
There is wisdom in Thoreau, and fundamental truth in his assertion that "In wildness is the preservation of the world." But there is denial or hypocrisy as well.
Thoreau writes of the "saunterers," whose very name comes from those who, in the Middle Ages, "roved about the country ... seeking charity, under the pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land.... They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds." Those who merely talk about achieving sustainability are mere idlers and vagabonds as well, living off of the bounty of our world, and taking from future generations in ways that only enrich themselves, and impoverishing the "wild" which is our common heritage.
It is ironic, indeed, that those who consider the wild and natural systems of this planet to be "Holy Lands," and our relationship to nature to be a sacred one, must walk intentionally in the political world, perhaps sacrificing purity for purpose. The human cult now surrounds the wild, and presses the borders inward with every market transaction and every breath of the industrial complex. It is in the village that the future of the wild will be decided. It remains to be seen whether we will be content to have those decisions made by villains.
And so my charge to you, and my plea, is this: Change This World.
Do not saunter through this world or through your lives while villains make the decisions that will write the future of humankind on the face of our precious planet.
Live your values; walk in this world with purpose, and change this world into one that you will be proud to leave your descendents.
And as you do, carry with you our love and our respect and our hopes for your happiness and success. Carry with you as well the guidance of Camus: "Do not wait, my friend, for the last judgment; it happens every day."
Live your values, find change within yourselves, change your communities, change your country, change this world; and as you do so you will rediscover the fundamental truths that have always been a source of hope for humankind.
We wish you god speed.
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