Henry David Thoreau

Transcendentalist writer, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau remains one of the most studied American thinkers of the nineteenth century. His process of collecting and studying plants was the citizen science of his day, and his impressive collection has been carefully preserved. Thoreau offers contemporary observers—artists, scholars, scientists, the general public—a chance to look back to a recent moment in America’s history at a time when our world is rapidly changing due to climatological alterations that are inherently hostile to certain plants’ ability to survive.

The following words from Walden, which Thoreau published in 1854 after living for over two years in relative isolation and independence near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, provide the intellectual framework for our artistic investigation into Thoreau’s plant specimens and their relationship to change, especially climatological change:

“The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts—from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb—heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board—may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!”

Artwork by Robin Vuchnich leveraging Henry David Thoreau's digitized herbarium collection

Thoreau reflects on man’s impact on the natural world throughout Walden:

“When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape-vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle. […] But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?”

“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. […] Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. [...] It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years—Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me.”

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau reflects on man’s impact on the natural world throughout Walden:

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