Happy Birthday Henry!

Today we remember Henry David Thoreau, America’s original environmentalist. Born on July 12, 1817, Thoreau came of age in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, as machines transformed the lives of humans – for good or ill.

Just as urbanization began to take off in the US, Thoreau chose to leave the city and live, for a time, on Walden Pond outside of Concord, Massachusetts. “We need the tonic of wildness,” he wrote, “to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”

Above all Thoreau perceived the value of the natural world. He advocated for conservation of natural resources and was an early adopter of the notion that wilderness should be preserved on public lands. Unlike other natural historians at the time, Thoreau immediately embraced Charles Darwin’s revolutionary theory. In particular he was enamored by the idea that nature was not a fixed state but, via natural selection, always changing – a continuous act of creation.

Thoreau is probably cancel-proof. As an ardent abolitionist he lectured and wrote against slavery and participated in the Underground Railroad. Martin Luther King noted Thoreau’s influence on his own thought, in particular the discourse introduced in “On Civil Disobedience.” Emma Goldman called Thoreau “the greatest American anarchist.”

Thoreau died in 1862 at 44 (life expectancy at the time was 39) in the most Thoreauvian way possible: by contracting bronchitis after counting the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm. Toward the very end his aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God, to which Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”

Photo credit: Culture Club / Getty Images