Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 3. Bleeding Earth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle (both reviewed earlier); Bleeding Earth (reviewed here); The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

Robb is an environmentalist who works at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency which is friendly to farmers, not to the environment. Robb meets DoAnna, who owns a large farm and does everything environmentally wrong. But she knows it and asks Robb for advice. He gives her more advice (such as “Get rid of your cows”) than she wants. But he nearly convinces her to be an eco-farmer until she catches him trespassing on her land to get runoff water samples to identify her farm as a major source of pollution. They had just started to be friends…

Robb loses his job even before DoAnna files a complaint about his trespassing. Depressed and sleepy, he parks his car at a rest stop and falls asleep. He awakens during a severe dust storm and finds DoAnna has prepared him a picnic lunch. She is now convinced he is right—our farms are blowing away in the wind—and she hires him as a full-time advisor on how to make her farm into an eco-farm. They soon become lovers.

Running an eco-farm turns out to be nightmarishly difficult, especially the way Robb and DoAnna do it. The project (raising hemp) fails. They have to start over—but how? They blame each other for what has happened. A summer storm brings on a mud-fight, which leaves them laughing and loving once again.

This story is of particular interest to readers interested in science who may not realize how difficult it is to turn a conventional, pesticide-and-herbicide farm into a “green” farm. It also shows the NRCS is caught in a delicate spot: they have to enforce environmental laws without alienating farms whose cooperation with conservation programs is, after all, voluntary. If being “eco-friendly” were easy, all farmers would have done it already. Rice, far from being a raging environmentalist, seems to understand this.

France: The Light Green Society

It is easy, now that I live in France, to feel proud that I am part of a society that has less of a destructive impact on the Earth than I did when I lived in America. For example, in America, by my actual count in Oklahoma, about one-third of the vehicles on the road were pickup trucks, most of them with empty truck beds and not used for work. In contrast, in France, almost nobody drives big pickup trucks around. Instead, they drive small cars. Pickup trucks could simply not fit on most of the roads in cities, though trucks still transport merchandise on highways between cities. In addition, the French have a lot fewer cars. The country that leads the world in car ownership per capita is San Marino, with 1,606 vehicles per 1,000 population. In France, there are only 671 cars per 1,000 people, compared to America’s average of 850.

France has recently moved away from fossil fuels, especially since Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine (which exports much fossil fuel to Europe), but not very far.

In France, fracking for natural gas is illegal. In America, in contrast, fracking is celebrated even by environmental organizations because natural gas is less carbon-intense than coal or oil. But fracking unintentionally (one could say uncontrollably) produces gas leaks, and methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. At least as important a reason is that fracking can destabilize dormant faults and produce earthquakes. For a while around 2013, Oklahoma was the most earthquake-prone part of the United States, surpassing even California, a fact noted by numerous scientific articles. When I was growing up in Cushing, Oklahoma, we worried about earthquakes in California, to which we were moving, not imagining that Cushing would be an earthquake epicenter a half century later. By the time I left Oklahoma, when I drove between Durant and Tulsa on rural highways, I saw dozens of new fracking facilities.

But France is not as good as it looks, though much greener than America. And although in France there are more small cars (and fuel-efficient work vans) and fewer trucks than in America, a lot of these small cars smell strongly of fumes.

France gets 64.8 percent of its power from nuclear energy, and is building new nuclear plants. France leads the world in the percentage of nuclear power. The principal reason for this is energy security. France considered decommissioning many of its nuclear plants, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, threatening fossil fuel supplies, France decided to keep its nuclear plants open. It uses more nuclear energy per capita than America (18.6 percent). In this way also, France does not appear to be as green as one might think. France gets more of its energy from hydropower (10.4 percent) than America (5.5 percent), but not a lot. In America, though not as much as in China, much of the hydropower comes from big dam projects. In France, a lot of the electricity comes from small-scale projects, such as the Fessenheim facility on the Rhine River, which has not require the construction of a huge dam or expensive maintenance. I have even seen tiny micro-power stations along creeks in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace in France, from which just a single cable conveyed electricity.

Is France doing enough to be environmentally responsible? Is it a light-green society, as Michael Bess referred to it in his 2003 book? But that’s better than being, like America and China, superstars of environmental degradation. When I go walking in France, I can breathe a little easier than I could in America, knowing that I am in a society that is preparing seriously, if imperfectly, for a future of environmental constraints.

Yet Another Earth Day

Every April 22 since 1970, we have had a worldwide Earth Day celebration. Back in the early days, there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for it, but today it goes almost unnoticed in most places.

To a certain extent my view is influenced by the fact that back in 1970 I was just having my environmental awakening. I began to learn about nature, its details and its big picture, and about environmental problems such as pollution and the population explosion. In 1971, I gave the junior high graduation speech, “The Overcrowded Spaceship Earth.” It was actually not a cliché back then. Today, after a career as a scientific and environmental educator, author, and scientist, I have lost much of my enthusiasm, largely because I am now old and tired.

I was also enthusiastic about ecological issues when I was younger because I was a passionate Christian. God made the world, and He expected me to help take care of it. One way to show Him respect was to respect and love His creation.

But there seems to be less enthusiasm even in the younger people around me for environmental issues. This has occurred for bad reasons, but also for a good one.

• Bad reason: People have become overwhelmed by how many challenges there are just to get by from one day to the next. If you expect people to “get involved” with something other than mere survival, they may not have much time and energy left, especially if they have to work two jobs just to pay rent. On most days, here in Tulsa, there is a fatal shooting. At the end of the day, I breathe a sigh of relief: I didn’t get shot today.
• Bad reason: People today are overwhelmed with currents of selfishness. Marketers have convinced them that every moment of every day they should experience intense pleasure and that no task should be difficult. To a greater extent now than in the past people don’t care—sometimes because they are overwhelmed, and sometimes because they don’t want to.
• Good reason: Some of our problems are ecological being solved. The average fuel efficiency of vehicles is improving, because people aren’t stupid: most of them don’t want to waste gasoline. People actually want electric and other zero-emission vehicles. People are using less water per activity because they want to save water. People don’t want to live in toxic environments, and they will buy goods and services that are less toxic. Even the population explosion is cooling off a bit because people, especially women, don’t want to have a huge number of kids who are all sick and starving. A lot of people want to recycle.

Another change that has occurred is that the most common conservative Christian view now is not to take care of God’s good green Earth but to help destroy it. The more Christian you are, the more likely you are to have a big pickup truck, for example. True Christians, from the conservative view, means people who have guns, not people who recycle. Hiking in the woods is for wimps, they think. And why not? God is going to destroy it all anyway, and take His True Followers to a Heaven filled with endless barbecue roasts and truck racing. What about the Christians who do care about God’s Earth? You cannot see or hear them in the blasting din of Televangelist Churches. The answer to the question below, should Christians go green, is usually no.

The general attitude of people—a little bit more openness to environmental responsibility—probably would not have occurred without the environmental activism of earlier decades. I am glad to see these changes. Even in my extremely right-wing neighborhood, I see that most houses have a blue recycling bin in addition to the gray trash bin. But will these changes, which are sometimes minimal, be enough to save Earth from catastrophe?

Each year, most of us produce less carbon than we did in the past for similar activities. But each year we fall short of the carbon reduction targets that we know are absolutely necessary to avoid ecological crisis. If the Earth survives long enough for a history of Earth Day to be written, it might be entitled, One Step Forward and Two Steps Back.

Get Out the Monkey Wrenches?

I spent three years teaching at a Christian college near New York City. I wish I could get that time back, but it is gone forever. (Then I went off and taught another three years at a different Christian college. I finally learned my lesson and went secular for the rest of my career.) The college in New York claimed to be Christian but it was at least at that time just a front for the Republican Party. While I was there, it was quietly Republican. Years after I left, it projected an image of extreme right-wing doctrine.

While on the biology faculty at the small college near New York, I taught environmentalism. I did this partly because it was the only honest thing to do, especially among people who supposedly believed that God created the Earth and everything that is in it. Also, I was not the only faculty member doing so. Of us four biologists, none of us taught that God wanted humans to grab whatever they desire from the natural world and leave it bleeding, battered, and gasping as it awaited the Second Coming.

But most of the students at that college were not at all receptive to environmentalism. I think it was because they had never been allowed to think about it as they grew up. Imagine my surprise when, one day, I was in the computer lab writing something (few faculty had office computers), when the student assistant was telling the Learning Resources director all about this wonderful group he had just found out about, and which he admired greatly: Greenpeace. He admired their strong defense of the Earth and their willingness to take decisive, some might say extreme, actions. If Greenpeace is right about human abuse of God’s Earth, then mildness is not an appropriate response. Despite the repressive fundamentalism of that college, the students occasionally thought for themselves.

Another group besides Greenpeace that takes actions that some consider extreme is Earth First!

What I used to think about extremist environmental actions was that they were doomed to failure. The civil authorities would just sweep the protestors away and everything would go back to business as usual. Indeed, it was possible that their antics would turn people otherwise receptive to environmental views against the entire movement.

And this is exactly what Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, used to believe, as he describes in his book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. He worked with and for conservation organizations that took what they considered a more practical approach to environmental issues. Groups such as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and many others would meet with leaders of government and industry and try to convince them that sound environmental policy was profitable for everyone. This seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

Only it didn’t work out that way very often. Foreman describes his experiences with the extreme right wing Sagebrush Rebellion ranchers who wanted to take federal grazing land away from the taxpayers and keep it for themselves. The Sagebrush people created violent confrontations, and they considered mainstream environmental organizations to be their enemies.

The conciliatory approach wasn’t working very well. If you are part of a conciliatory environmentalist group, the right-wing extremists hate you as much as if you were a radical. So, for all the difference it makes, you might as well be part of a radical environmentalist group. They will hate you, but they would hate you no matter what. And this is still the case today.

This is why Foreman and others started Earth First! Back when he worked with mainstream organizations, he “was told to be rational, not emotional…I would lose credibility if I let my emotions show…But, damn it, I am an animal. A living being of flesh and blood, storm and fury. The oceans of the Earth course through my veins, the winds of the sky fill my lungs…I am alive! I am not…a cog in the industrial world…When a chainsaw slices into the heartwood of a two-thousand-year-old Coast Redwood, it’s slicing into my guts…” He and a few others decided, let the rage flow.

It seemed hopeless that anyone would pay attention to them. But when they staged a protest on Glen Canyon Dam, not destructive but very, very visible, they got in trouble but also got worldwide attention. Today, Earth First! associate organizations are found in many countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic (which did not even exist when Earth First! was founded), France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia (which also did not yet exist), Spain, the UK, as well as the US.

One of the inspirations of the group was Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. This was a fictional organization that carried out pranks against corporations and governments. The name comes from “throwing a monkey wrench into the works,” a wrench useful in manual labor but which, when thrown into the workings of a machine, can cause the whole mechanism to lock up. Nobody gets killed, but a lot of damage results. Foreman writes on page 23, “A monkey wrench thrown into the gears of the machine may not stop it. But it might delay it, make it cost more. And if feels good to put it there.”

Yes, I have to keep my emotions in their proper place when I do scientific research. But I am not just a scientist. I am also a passionate lover of the Earth. My role is not to stage protests, but to write, mostly books, but also blog essays like this one. I have retired from the academic world and feel too tired to participate in monkey wrench protests. But I am glad Earth First! is still at work, a counterbalance to the greenwashing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing] of corporations that just pretend to be environmentally sound.

I suppose it is appropriate that I post this essay on midterm election day. In this election, environmental issues are mostly ignored.

An Earth Day Science March in Tulsa

Around the country, scientists and citizens celebrated Earth Day by joining in a March for Science. There were hundreds of such events. In Oklahoma, one of the most anti-environmental state (especially on the government level, but also on the citizen level), there were two, and one of them was in Tulsa today.

It was exactly the kind of Earth Day that one of our senators, Jim Inhofe, one of the world’s most famous climate deniers, would have considered to be a sign from God. After months of record-breaking high temperatures in Oklahoma, including January temperatures in the 90s, the weather suddenly became chilly. Yesterday brought heavy rains and today it reached a high of 52. Inhofe would have said that God meant this as a message to us that Inhofe’s anti-global-warming message is divinely-inspired. Where is global warming now, he would ask. He would, however, look around in vain for a snowball to throw as he once did on the Senate floor the way he did a few years ago.

But despite the chill, hundreds of, maybe a thousand, people came out for the march at Fred Johnson Park, at 61^st St. and Peoria Ave. First we all gathered in a large circle and held hands around Johnson Park. A drone photographed us from overhead. (It was not a government surveillance drone.) A musician sang This Land is Your Land, which as a biodiversity ecologist I always found puzzling: the land belongs to all the species, not just to humans. Some of the verses of this song are borderline socialism, and were sung originally by Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoma native of whom this extreme right-wing state pretends to be proud. Then we crossed Riverside Dr. (legally) as passing vehicles honked in support (I think; at least some of them waved) and walked in a loop.

For me the best part (aside from seeing many old friends and making new ones) was the placards that people made for themselves. Such creativity! The independent thinking that went into them contrasts sharply with the mindless uniformity of Trump posters. The only element of uniformity was that many Planned Parenthood supporters carried the same posters. But here are some of the placards that I saw:

“Got plague? Yeah, me neither. Thank a scientist.”

“There is no Planet B.”

“Science already made America great.”

“You are the result of 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it.”

“Patriots love science.”

There was even a dog with a cardboard poster that said Bark Bark Bark.

Here are some photos of placards.

Another important theme was that women should be encouraged to be science leaders. One young woman carried a placard with a quote from Rosalind Franklin. And another carried this poster:

Environmental protection is a big issue in Tulsa. Terry Young, who was Tulsa Mayor from 1984 to 1986, told the story of Helmerich Park, at the corner of Riverside Dr. and 71^st Street, a place that my wife and I pass often on the walking trail. We always see a lot of people using the park, including a lot of volleyball players in the sand court. It is one of the places Tulsa can be proud of. But apparently, according to one speaker, the city council met one night and simply declared that the park was not being used and that it should be sold to a developer. The publicity for this sale claimed that the land would be used for an REI outdoor recreation store. As it turns out, the developer planned a mall—one of many new malls in Tulsa—including five acres of asphalt parking. Former Mayor Terry Young is involved in two lawsuits against this development. He decried the ascendancy of ignorance in our national thinking. And yet, ignorance can be a good thing. Scientists admit ignorance but then set out to make discoveries to counteract the ignorance. As Alan Alda, an actor turned science activist, said, “Ignorance is a wonderful thing with curiosity attached to it.” Young pointed out the problems with this decision included the following:

• The rationale for the sale—that the park was not being used—was patently false.
• The taxpayers, whose money bought the park in the first place, were not consulted about this sale. Even though the city is the owner and the city can do whatever it wants with its money and the taxpayers have no right to complain, the taxpayers feel tricked by this decision. The city can do whatever it wants but the citizens can also vote however they want. And the voters do not want a “we’ll do whatever the hell we want with city land” government.
• Private donations were used to purchase the park land. The donations were for the park, not for the city’s general fund.

There have been successes. The Carrie Dickerson family led a campaign to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant at Inola, northeast of Tulsa. The reasons were not just the usual concerns about nuclear waste, but also about how the reactor would have required immense amounts of water, a resource of which Oklahoma periodically runs short. They won! But we cannot assume that successes will continue.

I want to thank the organizer, Nancy Moran, who must have worked tirelessly on almost nothing else except this event. And she is organizing another event, the Climate March, next week, also here in Tulsa. It feels good, really good, to know that there are so many of us, even though we are a minority, who care about what we are doing to the Earth, which conservatives pretend to believe is God’s Creation.

An Environmental Theme in American Literature: The Awakening Land

I recently finished reading Conrad Richter’s trilogy, The Awakening Land, which he finished in 1950. The three novels are about the settlement of Ohio: The Trees, about how pioneers carved out survival in a thick forest; The Fields, about how the pioneer settlements evolved into a little village; and The Town, how the little village became a major city in Ohio. The trilogy followed the life of a woman named Sayward (Saird) Luckett, later Wheeler, who grew up in a cabin but by the end of her life lived in a rich mansion. See a more detailed summary here.

At first, I was disaffected by what seemed to be the author’s approach. Sayward loved to cut trees down and to see others cut them down, for they represented a fearful primordial forest. (The primordial forest at the beginning of the trilogy, with leaves so dense that hardly any light penetrated throughout the forest, never actually existed. There were disturbances before the arrival of pioneers, especially fires set by nature or by the Natives.) Even into the second novel, she was glad to see the trees out of the way. But I should have known to expect something different before the end. Richter lived at a time when conservation awareness was beginning to grow in America. And sure enough, when Sayward was old, she realized that she missed the trees and the peaceful shade that they brought. She planted some trees by her mansion, some of the few trees in the city, and when she was dying she had her bed turned toward the window to see them. She regretted taking the land away from the trees: “Sometimes she wished she could give them back their land, for it was she who had taken it from them.”

Even the choice of the title, The Awakening Land, implied that nature is asleep until humans roust it into usefulness. But perhaps Richter intended this to be irony.

Although beautifully written, the novels seemed primarily episodic. Some of these episodes were funny, and some were beautiful: the chapter “Rosa’s Rainbow” was one of the best short pieces I have read. The only overarching plot of the trilogy was that the forest gave way to human progress. There was no structural conflict to be resolved.

The third novel did have a major plot: the romance that developed over many years between Chancey Wheeler, Sayward’s youngest and sickly son, and the frail, quiet, and thoughtful Rosa Tench. Everybody but them knew that they were half-siblings. Rosa was born from an affair that Portius Wheeler, the father, had with a schoolteacher when he was the master. But the two young people knew only that the adults, for reasons not explained to them, condemned their romance. I found myself hoping that this would reach a satisfactory resolution. Rosa had to live with a poor family and never received recognition or even a single word from the rich Wheeler family. I was hoping they would invite her into their home. This did not happen. The resolution of this plot was gruesome and occurred well before the end of the novel, which, as a direct result of this, I did not want to read. Had I known what would happen, I might not have read it. But it remains a beautiful piece of literature and a testament to the development of the American attitude toward the land, which everyone except, at the end, the main character, assumed was progress.

Something We May Never See Again

I discovered a surprising book in my vast library recently: My Wilderness, East to Katahdin, by a certain William O. Douglas. Many of us think of the modern era of environmental awareness as having begun with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. But My Wilderness, published in 1961, has some of the same ideas, though in a less organized form. Rachel Carson organized the concepts into a powerful argument and provided all of the scientific references, but William O. Douglas and probably many others had thought of them earlier.

One of these concepts was the interconnectedness of nature and how modern industrial society can mess everything up by ignoring these connections. One example about which Douglas wrote was the federal government practice, in the 1950s, of dropping poison bait from airplanes to kill off the wolves. But the result was to kill off many other kinds of animals, some of which had kept populations of agricultural pests such as grasshoppers in check. The result was population explosions of insect pests. The answer to this was, of course, more spraying. Another example was the attempt to destroy the sagebrush by herbicides, to encourage the grass to grow for the ranchers to graze their livestock. But wildlife that depended on the sagebrush began to die as a result.

Another concept was the government practice of renting out federal land very, very cheaply to ranchers to graze their livestock. At that point, the ranchers began to act as if the federal land was actually their private land that the government should just let them keep. This continues to happen today, such as the takeover of federal land by the armed Bundy family militia in late 2015. But it is nothing new. Douglas quotes an acquaintance who worked for the federal government (I presume the Bureau of Land Management) who said, “…a permittee who has the right to run sheep on public land pretty soon begins to think he owns the range. Take it away from him, or cut down on the number of sheep or cattle he can graze, or increase the rental, and he hollers as if his property has been confiscated” (page 41). Then as now, ranchers who pretend to be wild west cowboys want to take land that belongs to the taxpayers—that is, as much as to me as to them—and keep it for themselves. This is a practice that they refuse to call socialism.

Douglas was a man who hiked all over the continent. He writes of backpacking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming; Zion National Park in Utah; Maroon Bells in Colorado; Baboquivari along the Arizona-Sonora border; Quetico Provincial Park in Canada; The Smoky Mountains; the Everglades; the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Washington, D. C.; and the White Mountains, Allagash, and Mt. Katahdin in the northeast United States. He was no stranger to the challenges of survival in the wild. The descriptions in this book are sometimes evocative and help you to feel like you are actually present in a place you will probably never visit. But, although I have no doubt that he saw all of these organisms, his descriptions were usually lists of plants and animals that sound like he copied them out of a guidebook. There were quite a few books of this sort published about the same time, such as The Singing Wilderness by Sigurd Olson, The Near Woods by Millard Davis, and One Day at Teton Marsh by Sally Carrighar. Douglas’s book is highly disorganized, except for each chapter being about his experience in one particular place.

What makes this book unique is the person who wrote it. Who was he? Do the black robes in this portrait give you a hint?

William O. Douglas was, throughout nearly all of the time during which he took the hikes he describes, a Supreme Court justice. He still holds the record of serving the longest on the Supreme Court, almost 37 years, from 1939 to 1975. Aside from Teddy Roosevelt shooting big animals and mistaking it for a love of nature, we have never had—and almost certainly will never again have—a prominent politician who had or will have such a passionate and thorough knowledge of the natural world. Today, with the new “conservative” (vs. conservationist) takeover, it seems that the less you know about science and nature, the more qualified you are for any office, particularly positions in which you are supervising government conservation and scientific activities. But even the few remaining liberals in government seem to think that the Earth is just a stage on which the human drama takes place. Douglas was most famous for writing the “Rights of Rocks” statement. In the Sierra Club v. Morton suit regarding the commercial development of Mineral King, just south of Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, Douglas wrote, “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” That is, trees should be able to sue for their own preservation. Can you imagine any Supreme Court justice, or any other prominent politician, saying anything like this today?

Douglas considered Nature to be a holy place. Thousands of books are published with such a theme, and millions of people believe it, but none of them in such a prominent position as the one Douglas held. Just read these words: “If we make conservation a national cause we can raise generations who will learn that the earth itself is sacred. Once a person breaks through to the level where love of beauty is the ideal, he will worship the rocks and plains that are America. Then he will look on a tuft of grass with awe. For it has the secret of chlorophyll that man hardly comprehends” (page 32).

The survival of human life as we know it on Earth depends on our leaders having this kind of insight. And it will never happen.

Henry David Thoreau, the man

I begin a series of three posts about Henry David Thoreau, adapted from my two encyclopedias. The first is a general biography of this remarkable person, who was an inconvenient man in both his academic and cultural surroundings.  In the second essay, I describe his contributions to modern science (something that is often overlooked). In the third, I share thoughts from a recent biography about him.

Henry David Thoreau is widely revered as a “prophet of environmentalism” because the ideas he wrote and put them into action appear to have been at least a century ahead of their time. He is less often mentioned as one of the leading scientists of early 19th century America. He was an amateur scientist, but laid the groundwork for the ecological study of seed dispersal and ecological succession. He collected data that constitute one of the earliest studies of the adjustment of organisms to changing seasons. His data sets have been used by modern scientists to document climate change that has occurred since his time.

Thoreau went out into a woodlot owned by Emerson (one of the few forest tracts near Concord that had not been cut down) and built a cabin near Walden Pond. The woodlot was not wilderness, but was a second-growth forest, and was less than two miles (a little over two km) from Concord. He started his work on July 4 of that year, intending it as a statement of independence from the pursuit of wealth (which, he said, led most people into “lives of quiet desperation”) just as July 4 marked American independence and just as Concord was the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War. But he also intended his cabin as an experiment. He kept a journal the rest of his life, some of which he published in the book Walden, or Life in the Woods, which has become the environmental classic of the 19th century. In the journal, and book, he wrote detailed records of how much it cost him to build the cabin, and how he raised or caught much of his own food, going to town only for a few staple food items. He even built the cabin from wood and nails left over from a laborer family’s shanty. He spent only a couple of years in the cabin. He did not intend it as a permanent change in lifestyle, but to demonstrate that it could be done.

Thoreau was also famous for his essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” later known as “On Civil Disobedience,” which was based upon an experience he had in 1846. For six years, he had refused to pay poll taxes because of his opposition to slavery and to the Mexican-American war. Massachusetts had no slaves but profited from goods produced by slaves, and the federal Fugitive Slave Act required all citizens to aid in the capture of slaves who had escaped from the South. He also considered the war to be nothing more than aggression. The Concord tax collector liked Thoreau but was obligated to arrest him. Thoreau was ready to spend a long period of time in jail as a protest, but his aunt paid his taxes and he was released after one night.

Thoreau’s civil disobedience inspired generations of social reformers, such as Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, Indian leader Mahatma Ghandi, and American reformer Martin Luther King, Jr. But his insistence that frugal living (what today would be called “having a small ecological footprint”) is not only possible but enjoyable contributed to his modern reputation as the prophet of environmentalism. Since the most ancient times, prophets have predicted disastrous outcomes to the way most people in their society lived; called for repentance from that way; and themselves lived in a way that was a constant reminder of the way of repentance. This is exactly what Henry David Thoreau did. Like all prophets, Thoreau was an inconvenient man. Though by no means a hermit (he went to town every couple of days even during his cabin phase), he was always separated from the normal crowd: when in town, he observed people as might an anthropologist from another planet. His presence was a prophetic denouncement of materialistic society. Thoreau was particularly vivid (and virtually alone) in his criticism of people who did not take care of their land. Thoreau wrote that Flint’s Pond (also near Concord) was named after an “unclean and stupid” farmer who laid its shores bare, loved a shiny dollar more than a shiny pond, reflecting “his own brazen face,” “regarded even the wild ducks…as trespassers…” “…who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it…who exhausted the land around it…he would carry his God to market…whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.” Thoreau defended biodiversity against an agricultural mindset that, then as now, reduced a farm or a woodlot to its economic value, and evaluated every plot of land on Earth, however different each was from the other, according to just one scale of value.

The most famous Thoreau quote, which reflects his important insights into the environment and science, was “…in wildness is the preservation of the world,” often misquoted as “wilderness.” To Thoreau, wildness could be found in a well-managed woodlot as easily as in the Maine woods that he visited as a young man.

Thoreau was inspired by the writings of scientists who closely observed the world during their travels, particularly American botanist William Bartram who traveled among the Cherokees of the Appalachians in the late 18th century, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Thoreau strongly believed in the complete connectedness of humans and nature (“Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself?”) but did not fully understand it until he read Darwin’s Origin of Species shortly before his death. Previous to this, he had believed, as a transcendentalist, that all of nature reflected spiritual patterns. He was very serious when he observed leaf-like patterns in thawing clay and said that it was the same natural law that produced the shapes of real leaves and also of human internal organs. The Earth had a body, but its organs were on the outside: “What is man but a mass of thawing clay?” When he saw a mouse girdling a pine tree (chewing a ring of bark), he thought it was the Earth’s way of thinning out the pines. Darwin’s Origin of Species undermined Thoreau’s faith, and Thoreau spent his last years making scientific observations with few transcendentalist insights.

Without Ralph Waldo Emerson, there would have been no remembrance of Thoreau. It was Emerson’s woodlot in which Thoreau briefly lived. Emerson popularized Thoreau after the latter’s death. But they were very different. Emerson would write long flowery-tongued passages about things, whether about the world of nature or the breathlessness of love, which he had not closely observed. To Thoreau, nature was a living world from which to learn; to Emerson, it was a canvas upon which to paint his grand ideas. For example, Emerson said that “savage” languages were simple and consisted mostly of nouns. Had he even bothered to ask anyone who had learned Native American languages—and there were plenty in his scholarly circle—he would have known this was wrong. But Thoreau was fascinated by what he could learn from Native Americans. (His last words were “moose” and “Indian.”)

Thoreau caught pneumonia when he was in the woods counting tree rings. He was only 44 years old when he died on May 6, 1862.