"Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man-- a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit."
Also:
"The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bushwack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field."
"Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure, — as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw."
"Yes; though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain then have been all your labors, citizens, for me!"
"The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs; a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro(13) derives from veho to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence too apparently the Latin word vilis and our vile; alsovillain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are way-worn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves."
When I read passages such as these, my inner environmentalist shudders. This isn't at all my approach to environmentalism-- I've always felt the distinction between "natural" and "unnatural," "nature" and "culture", to be silly to begin with. No one refers to hierarchies within the rest of the animal kingdom (take, for instance, the hierarchical organization of a wolf pack, or the subservience of an ant to her queen) as products of "culture". There is no magical element in our flesh which allows us to ever separate from nature completely-- we will always require resources which must be gathered from nature. If a New Yorker thinks he's any farther from the natural world than someone living in rural Montana, he's only fooling himself-- unless, perhaps, this New Yorker has somehow bypassed the need to eat. Or the biological imperative to age.
This imaginary barrier, beyond which lies "culture", must be abolished. Being an environmentalist does not require one to amble in the woods for hours on end, or have trees growing through one's house. Nature is far more insidious that she is given credit for-- we all live within nature, whether we sequester ourselves within the walls of a teeming city or no. Perhaps I am being too harsh with dear Thoreau-- had I lived over a hundred years ago I am sure I would have been no wiser than he-- but I cannot point to Thoreau, or Emerson, for that matter, as the epitome of environmentalist thought, without first positing some caveat explaining and excusing their comparative ignorance in an an area which, at the time, was not yet a science or formal field of study.
I shall conclude by noting that, according to the New York City Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability, New York City accounts for 1% of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions while housing 2.7% of its population.
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