![]() ![]() His posthumous essay, “Walking,” denounced the tackiness of new construction, the cutting down of the old trees, and protested, “Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!”Īlthough Thoreau is most closely associated with the movement, other New Englanders played crucial roles in the evolution of this idea. In 1859 he recommended that each township in Massachusetts set aside 500 or 1,000 acres of primeval forest. And he urged that local governments put land off limits to developers, to protect what was left of the old wild. He read carefully the old Puritan accounts of New England, noting species of plants and birds that were no longer in evidence. He celebrated a fundamental wildness that he saw disappearing, even 170 years ago, as civilization continued its relentless advance. It was not just that Thoreau famously lived in the woods. To this day, his ideas about simplicity become ever more popular, in direct proportion to our inability to achieve them. No one drew more from the wilderness than Henry David Thoreau. In the middle decades of the 19th century, as a school of nature writers gathered around Concord, one reader in particular understood that the flora and fauna of New England had been altered by the presence of an invasive species-New Englanders themselves. ![]() T o reckon with the wilderness is one thing to call for its protection is another. To reckon with the wilderness had become a source of national pride, even before the nation was established. It did not hurt George Washington’s career that he had been a surveyor, deep in the hinterland of North America, felling trees, shooting game, and living by his wits. Benjamin Franklin, the ultimate urban sophisticate, was never more cunning than when he donned a beaver hat to impress the French with his lack of sophistication, before coaxing them into support for American independence. As one generation begat another, a proud note of survivalism penetrated American writing, eventually bringing us everything from the Leatherstocking to “Duck Dynasty.” Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century theologian, read books in endless proliferation but he was also given to reading the book of nature, and scrutinized flowers, birds, and even twigs for the tiniest evidence of God’s handiwork. But it held up the wilderness as a central reason to admire the founders, who had fearlessly built their society near to “these wilde Woods and Deserts.” And it even hinted that special rewards awaited those who left cities for “a woody, retired and solitary place.” Suddenly, the wilderness was not the enemy in a complicated way, it had become essential to the identity that these endlessly scribbling proto-Americans were always working out.įrom that point, the settlers’ sense of the redemptive power of nature only deepened. “A Brief Recognition of New-England’s Errand into the Wilderness” was not exactly sweetness and light-it listed a long catalog of New England’s sins. In 1670, a Roxbury minister named Samuel Danforth wrote an election sermon that has lived on. In a way, they needed the wilderness, to explain what they were doing here, and why their parents had come in the first place. Slowly, they developed a sense that divinity was present in the church of nature as well as in the churches they built to keep it out. They appreciated the rivers and shorelines where they gathered sustenance they wandered on trails deep into the interior, and they marveled at America’s seemingly inexhaustible grandeur. The earliest governors-William Bradford in Plymouth and John Winthrop in Boston-gnashed their teeth at the “hideous and desolate” wilderness that enveloped them.Īs the settlements grew, the children and grandchildren of the first arrivals came to feel more at home with “this strange lande,” as Winthrop called it. Having left one degenerating environment-a corrupt England-the point was to regroup and create a perfect society, and the wilderness, so easy to escape into, made it difficult to compel perfection. But they also saw it as a moral wilderness. The immense forests these farmers and barristers found upon their arrival concealed physical danger, from the natives who already lived there and from unfamiliar animals. He first generation of Puritans could never have imagined protecting the wilderness, never mind celebrating it. ![]()
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