Volume 46, Number 12 · July 15, 1999
The Full Thoreau
By Leo Marx
The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture
by Lawrence Buell
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 586 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science
by Laura Dassow Walls
University of Wisconsin Press, 300 pp., $22.95 (paper)
The Puritans of today's environmental movement, the ecocentrists, have recently made Henry Thoreau their patron saint. The defense of the environment, they believe, requires us to adopt a wholly new way of thinking about our relations with nature. First, they argue, we must abandon the delusory notion that humanity's chief reason for protecting the environment is its usefulness to itself; second, we must adopt an ecocentric ethic like that embodied in Thoreau's later work, which calls for a commitment to live lightly on the earth, to restrict the scope of technological innovation and intervention, and to treat all forms of life and all parts of the nonhuman world responsibly, and with reverence and care.
Review, 4575 words
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