Unsettling the Land

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), one of the foremost American writers of the nineteenth century, was both an ardent observer of nature and one of the most searching thinkers regarding the evolving sense of man’s relation to environment. This essay specifically explores Thoreau’s artful staging of competing modes of environmental consciousness in Walden (1854), and shows how this provides the groundwork for his pioneering call for nature preservation. Carefully framing his narrative so as to question standard ways of appropriating the world (scientific inquiry and economic exploitation of natural resources), and propounding a poetics in which the dynamics of writing (trans)figures the processes of nature, Thoreau grounded his environmental advocacy in a broader regard for the indomitable power and enduring secrecy of the physical world. Accepting the existence of nature as exceeding human control and signifying processes shifts the human/nonhuman divide, thus laying the ground for a more complex and balanced humanism.