is the title of this remarkable Boston Globe op ed by Wen Stephenson, a former editor of the paper's Ideas section. He is go to Walden before heading into Boston
to join the Moving Planet rally at Columbus Park and call for the world’s leaders to get serious about moving beyond fossil fuels.
But this is not about environmentalism. Stephenson makes the point that Walden and Thoreau's other writings were about
“Nature,’’ as he wrote in “Walking’’ and “man as an inhabitant, or part and parcel of Nature.’’ It was our relationship, as human beings - physically, morally, spiritually, politically - to the world in which we live, which is to say, to everything, both human and wild.
Or to put it far more simply:
a deeply human, moral, and spiritual writer - and a deeply political one. And he knew that on the most pressing moral questions, the spiritual and political can, and often must, go hand in hand - a conviction shared by one of Thoreau’s 20th-century readers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
This is a brief, but rich column that you should read, although nowadays the paper in Boston requires registration to see much of anything.
I have already pushed the limit of fair use, I know. Stephenson makes the point that Thoreau was actively involved in his world, even when he lived at Walden. He reminds us that Thoreau sheltered an Underground Railroad passenger, an escaped slave, at his cabin, that he went into Boston to give a fiery abolition speech at the time of the famous trial and sending South of Anthony Burns, where he
indicted the Commonwealth for its complicity in human bondage. His sense of serenity in nature was shaken: “I walk toward one of our ponds but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?. . . Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.’’
Those words of Thoreau should resound in our ears today, on so many issues. For Stephenson the issue is perhaps the greatest moral issue of our times, the continued destruction of our planet through anthropogenically caused global climate change.
In 1854, Thoreau spoke out when it seemed almost impossible to believe that slavery could be abolished. Stephenson writes of a parallel between the great issue then, when Thoreau spoke out despite the apparent hopelessness, and this issue of our time:
If slavery was the human, moral crisis of Thoreau’s time, then global warming - and its impact on countless innocent lives - is the human, moral crisis of our own. We know that our burning of fossil fuels is global warming’s major cause, with vast and potentially catastrophic consequences for future generations, including our own children.
Last night I was at a celebration of Howard Zinn, about which I may write later today - I am still mentally processing the event. Zinn spoke out and demonstrated as he taught - because he was a highly moral man who felt an obligation to act upon his sense of moral rightness. Zinn was a man very much in tune with Thoreau's approach, that one cannot remain silent in the face of wrong.
Perhaps as we write and speak and act we may neither have the impact with our words that Thoreau has had on subsequent generations. Perhaps we might not find ourselves arrested. When Emerson, who later paid the tax that had caused the incarceration, asked Thoreau why he was in jail for failing to pay tax that caused him to be arrested and jailed, Thoreau challenged the sage back, inquiring why Emerson was NOT in jail?
Stephenson writes of Thoreau that in the race of a challenge he did not retreat but engaged. Stephenson recognizes that government action is crucial, but to achieve it we will need a new kind of politics, one that goes beyond environmentalism.
Why?
Because the climate crisis is more than an environmental crisis, it’s a human crisis, and we need a new politics to address it on those terms.
I truly believe this is a column worth reading and passing on.
Peace.