Walden Pond Research Articles

Classics and Complexity in Walden's “Spring”

Classics and Complexity in Walden’s “Spring” M. D. USHER In 1843, two years before Henry Thoreau built his cabin at Walden Pond, the Fitchburg Railroad laid down tracks through the woods near the Pond for its line connecting Boston to Fitchburg. The original Fitchburg Line, at 54 miles long, was, until 2010, the longest run in the present -day MBTA Commuter Rail system. And it is one of the oldest railways in New England. By 1900, fortunes swelled and the Fitchburg’s Hoosac Tunnel Line took passengers and goods westward toward Chicago. The Lake Champlain Route connected Boston to points north like Burlington, Vermont . (See Figure 1.) arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 Figure 1 (left): Advertisement for the Hoosac Tunnel Route in The New England Magazine (Vol. 21, Issue 6, February , 1900). Figure 2 (right): Herbert Wendell Gleason. The Fitchburg Railroad and Walden Pond in winter, Concord, Mass., March 24, 1920. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library. The Railroad was literally a fixture in Thoreau’s landscape . Its tracks pass remarkably close to Walden Pond (Figure 2), and the Fitchburg Line—both its reality and the specter of it—is practically a character in his writing: “I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link,” Thoreau writes in “Sounds,” a chapter of Walden that contains what must be one of the most picturesque odes (or laments) to rail travel and commerce in all of American literature: The engine’s whistle, Thoreau complains, pierces the still silence of his idyllic retreat like a screaming hawk circling a farmer’s field, its billows of steam an ominous harbinger of “this travelling demi-god, this cloud-compeller.”1 Thoreau’s frequent, customary walks into Concord along the railroad tracks took him through a heavily excavated stretch of the line known as the Deep Cut, to which he returned again and again each year in early spring, even after leaving the cabin, to observe and to record his observations. The leaf-shaped sand flows and trickling surface erosion caused by melting frost in the banks of the Deep Cut are elaborately described in Thoreau’s chapter in Walden entitled “Spring,” what Laurence Buell calls the “high point of Thoreau’s epic.”2 And yet, in spite of the universal acclaim of this passage as a literary tour de force, it has not received the full attention it deserves. What warrants fresh consideration first and foremost is “Spring”’s deep-rootedness in classical sources. Many classical influences, allusions, and a good deal of etymological word play have gone so far unnoticed . The chapter is also important because it describes, by intimation, what contemporary scientists now call emergence . Emergent phenomena are properties or behaviors that arise in systems as a result of complex, dynamic interactions amongst constituent parts, including changes to a system brought about by human interventions3—not only, e.g., climate change and wildfires, but also traffic patterns and terrorist networks; kidney function in the body; the rings of Saturn. As he tries to capture the essence of the 114 classics and complexity in WALDEN’s “spring” Deep Cut and interpret its significance, Thoreau adumbrates this concept, but also grapples ingeniously with broader issues of perennial concern—the relationship of Nature to Culture, for example, of Wilderness to Civilization , of Science to the Humanities—making “Spring” not only a probing work of eco-criticism and environmental philosophy, but of scientific reflection and poetic experiment as well. In short, Thoreau’s “Spring” is that rare work of classical reception that transmits both literary and scientific insight. Perhaps at this point, in lieu of accolades, it is best to let Thoreau start speaking for himself. What I offer in the following pages is a commentary on the Deep Cut passage from “Spring.” Classical references and aspects of systems theory will be explained and contextualized as they emerge, as it were, from Thoreau’s text. The whole chapter corresponds to pages 289–308 in Cramer’s edition of Walden—26 paragraphs all told, of which only the relevant ones are printed and annotated here. (Transitions and extraneous material are briefly summarized, as needed, in paraphrase...

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

Meaning-making in the course of action: affordance theory at the pilgrim/tourist nexus

The primary objective of this article is to review the potential of affordance theory for interpreting visitor interactions at sites with multiple and overlapping uses, including pilgrimage and tourism. Research at the nexus of tourism and pilgrimage is often limited by approaches that seek to categorize and differentiate visitors on the basis of intention, ideology, or identity. One implication of this divide is that research on sites of such visitation is also subject to binary interpretation, as sacred or secular. This author proposes an ecological approach to the pilgrim/tourist nexus, taking as its starting point the inter-relationship between site and visitor, drawing on affordance theory to explore visitor action, interaction, and meaning-making. Following a description of previous approaches to the interpretation of sacred space, affordance theory is outlined and applied to a heritage site that attracts pilgrims and tourists, as well as recreational visitors: Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, USA. The theory of affordances is suggested as an opportunity to approach research and interpretation of sacred sites with a focus on the agency of place, the locus of meaning-making and the pilgrim/tourist nexus.

“They Were Talking about Themselves”

Michael Altman’s Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu offers a major contribution to the history of Hinduism in America, as it revises the standard “Transcendentalist-Theosophist-Vivekananda-1965” trajectory with a critical eye toward the nationalist and orientalist discourses of formative episodes from the Colonial era up to Chicago’s World Parliament (xvii). Altman’s genealogical approach presumes no essence or definition of ‘Hinduism,’ which both suits his source materials and serves his interest in classification quite well. Throughout this history, a rich set of examples shows how ‘hazy notions’ of Indian religion variously served as discursive foils and straw-men against white, Protestant American identity¬–from scathing missionary accounts of barbaric ‘Juggernaut’ worship (30), to the racial hierarchies in American geography schoolbooks (59), Thoreau’s Walden Pond as a River Ganges (86), and the Indian-derived, but not Hindu, ‘wisdom religion’ of the Theosophical Society (109). As Altman convincingly argues, when white, Protestant Americans talked about religion in India, “they were not really talking about religion in India. They were talking about themselves” (xxi), and thereby constituting their own racial, national, and religious identities (140).

The Keys of Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism

The Keys of Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism

Climate variability and cultural eutrophication at Walden Pond (Massachusetts, USA) during the last 1800 years.

Recent shifts in the ecological condition of Walden Pond, MA, are of potentially wide interest due to the lake's importance as a cultural, historical, and recreational resource in addition to its scientific value as an indicator of local and global environmental change. Algal microfossils in six sediment cores document changes in hydroclimate and trophic status of the lake during the last 1800 years and extend two previous sediment core records of shorter length. Low percentages of planktonic diatoms in the longest cores (WAL-3, WAL-15) indicate shallowing and/or greater water clarity associated with a relatively arid interval during the Medieval Climate Anomaly, ca. A.D. 1150–1300, Cultural eutrophication of the lake since the A.D. 1920s caused diatoms in the genera Asterionella and Synedra to increase in relative abundance at the expense of Cyclotella, Discostella, and the chrysophyte alga Mallomonas allorgei. Percentages of Asterionella and Synedra have remained fairly stable since A.D. 2000 when a previous sediment core study was conducted, but scaled chrysophytes have become more numerous. These findings suggest that, although mitigation efforts have curtailed anthropogenic nutrient inputs to Walden Pond, the lake has not returned to the pre-impact condition described by Henry David Thoreau and may become increasingly vulnerable to further changes in water quality in a warmer and possibly wetter future.

Henry David Thoreau, Yogi

Thoreau was likely the first American to entertain seriously the possibility of identifying himself as a yogi. “Depend upon it that rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully,” he wrote to his friend Harrison Blake in 1849: “To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin.” But what did he mean in saying so? Thoreau’s understanding of the term yoga derived entirely from ancient Indian texts. In the 1840s, he read avidly and empathetically in key Indic works such as the Laws of Manu and the Bhagavad Gita. Drawing on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of “one mind” as a hermeneutical principle, Thoreau sought to overcome temporal and spatial distance in his reading and to integrate ideas and practices of these Hindu texts from ancient India selectively within his own life. Listening to the voices of Indic sages reinforced Thoreau’s own inclinations toward austerity and equanimity. They gave him a foundation for his life experiments in voluntary simplification and yogic contemplation at Walden Pond. This essay, which is a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, traces Thoreau’s engagement with ancient Indian works during the 1840s and contrasts his way of reading with those of other scholars during the period. The hermeneutic of “one mind” was the foundation of his xenophilic reading.

Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura

Reviewed by: Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip F. Gura Ethan J. Kytle (bio) Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War. By Philip F. Gura. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 328 Cloth, $29.95.) Philip F. Gura's fine new book is a history of the perfectionist impulse that took hold of many Americans in the decades before the Civil War. The author or editor of more than a dozen books, Gura is a sure-handed guide through the complicated, and often convoluted, plans conjured up by [End Page 326] antebellum intellectuals, prophets, and dreamers. Weaving together chapter-length biographies of seven such figures—George Ripley, Horace Greeley, William Batchelder Greene, Orson Squire Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, Henry David Thoreau, and John Brown—Man's Better Angels explores the contours of Romantic reform, paying particular attention to its pitfalls. Gura's most important revelation is that the Panic of 1837 had a profound impact on American reform culture. This economic catastrophe destroyed hundreds of banks and businesses and cost hundreds of thousands of people their savings or livelihoods. Responding to the physical, moral, and spiritual malaise that followed, Romantic reformers promoted "wildly divergent panaceas—some legitimate, others quackery, pure and simple—that promised restoration of the body economic and politic through individual reformation" (12). At the core of these visions and programs, Gura maintains, was an optimistic faith in human potential—the idea that human perfection was possible if only Americans would listen to what Abraham Lincoln later termed the "better angels of our nature" (271n21). Some of the stories that Gura recounts—of George Ripley's Transcendentalist community at Brook Farm, of Henry David Thoreau's two years of solitude at Walden Pond, of John Brown's failed antislavery raid at Harpers Ferry—will be familiar to readers of this journal. Still, Gura is a graceful stylist, and his lively narrative breathes new life into these old tales. But Man's Better Angels is especially engaging when Gura turns to more obscure figures. His chapter on Orson Squire Fowler, for instance, is a fascinating exploration of the bizarre pseudoscience of phrenology as well as the quest of Orson and his brother Lorenzo to turn skull reading into a profitable business. Phrenologists claimed that they could deduce a person's character through an examination of his or her skull. Yet, like therapists today, they also insisted that they could enable patients to better themselves by teaching them how to purge negative tendencies and develop positive ones. In short, phrenologists sold their services as a path to self-improvement and perhaps social transformation. The Fowler brothers, for their part, helped to popularize phrenology, which took off in the wake of the Panic of 1837. Over the next two decades, their New York City office rivaled P. T. Barnum's museum as a tourist destination. There, visitors could gaze at hundreds of casts of famous Americans' heads, buy skull-measurement equipment, and pay for their own phrenological reading. Gura's account of the life of Mary Gove Nichols is equally captivating. Married to an abusive man, Nichols sought solace after the 1837 panic in a burgeoning career as an educator and public speaker on women's health and women's rights. By the mid-1840s, Nichols had left her husband and [End Page 327] embraced the water cure. According to the cure's European progenitor, the ingestion of, and exposure to, large volumes of water accelerated the body's natural healing powers. Like phrenology, hydropathy promised both personal and social transformation, since water-cured individuals were expected to spread the gospel to others. Nichols eventually became a hydropathic physician, but her experimentation did not stop there. She also flirted with spiritualism, embraced radical ideas about sexual relations, and lived for a time at a utopian community that outlawed economic competition. It is clear that Gura admires the idealism that animated Mary Nichols, the Fowler brothers, and the rest of his colorful cast of characters. Nevertheless, he argues that they were fundamentally misguided in their faith that human nature is inherently good, that...

Reading Thoreau in Another’s Voice Reading Thoreau

Reading Thoreau in Another’s Voice Reading Thoreau is an experimental sound work that elucidates the complex network of materialities present in literature. Two sound sources are taken from two public-domain audio readings of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. The two verbatim excerpts — from the chapter “Sounds” where Thoreau expresses his at times ambivalence, at times exuberance, but constant alertness to the soundscape of Walden Pond — are fed into a modular synthesizer. Within the processing domain of the synthesizer, each excerpt is fed into an envelope detector that traces the volume contour of the reading, creating an extractable mimesis of the auditor’s rhythm. These rhythmic envelopes are then applied to the opposite excerpt, forcing the reader to read in the rhythm of the other’s voice. The resulting audio stutters and glitches as one reader opens and closes the mouth of the other. In concert, both readers open up pulsating oscillators that accompany the readings. Sound here is voltage, apart from all semantic content. As the rhythm of the reader’s words is extracted, so too are the extra-semantic components that emerge from the noise of the recording. The network of Walden is broadened thus to include the bodies of its auditors and the noises of its medium.

How science may help us smell the past

When Henry David Thoreau’s pine desk arrived at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan for a special exhibition on the New England writer’s life, curator Christine Nelson couldn’t resist opening one of the drawers and taking a giant whiff. The spicy terpenes from the wood, softened with age, produced an “eau de Walden Pond” that sparked images in Nelson’s mind of Thoreau sitting at the desk and writing in one of his many journals. “When I put my head in the desk and smelled this old pine, I was overcome with emotion and a sense of connection to the past and this person who had such an effect on me,” Nelson says. Studying the smells of history is something Nelson has recently become interested in. She’s part of a team to capture the historic odors in the Morgan library to get a better grasp of the room’s history—from the

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

2017 Entertainment Technology in the Connected Age Looks at the Future of Connected Content

<fig orientation="portrait" position="float" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <graphic orientation="portrait" position="float" xlink:href="cough1-2739044.eps"/> </fig> The SMPTE Entertainment Technology in the Connected Age (ETCA) Conference was held on 8–9 May 2017 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, CA. As stated in the conference abstract: The convergence of connectivity, bandwidth, and technology continues to expand entertainment distribution options to the living room, mobile, and beyond. Broadband, Wi-Fi, and mobile networks are now beginning to leapfrog traditional distribution mechanisms, because of the rapid pace of innovation and performance improvements, the flexibility of consumer options, and the ability to upgrade with a software download. The concept of this conference is to examine the present and explore the future in the context of the emerging technologies and services for delivering a compelling connected entertainment experience. This two-day event at the Microsoft Campus in the heart of Silicon Valley explored how the connected world is changing entertainment and providing actionable understanding of technology and application trends. At the end of the first and second day Wendy Aylsworth, chief executive officer (CEO) of Walden Pond and SMPTE Fellow gave the day’s wrap-up and take-away discussion with the attendees and the moderators from that day’s sessions. Following are some notes on the two-day event.

Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, A Reader's CompanionShelleyFisher Fishkin. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, A Reader's CompanionShelleyFisher Fishkin. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee

Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee

Trails to Walden Pond: Pragmatic Aesthetics and Relational Aesthetics Approach the Examined Life

Trails to Walden Pond: Pragmatic Aesthetics and Relational Aesthetics Approach the Examined Life

Planting Out after &lt;em&gt;Blithedale&lt;/em&gt;: Transcendental Agrarianism and Ecocritical Economy

Planting Out after BlithedaleTranscendental Agrarianism and Ecocritical Economy Sam Horrocks (bio) Toward the end of the first chapter of Emerson's Nature, while "crossing a bare common," his "head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."1 These lines, along with Thoreau's Walden, suggest transcendentalism as a tributary of ecocriticism, an early incubator of biocentric attitudes. For when the "mean egotism" of humanism "vanishes," Emerson receives "the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable," effacing the conceptual divide between nature and culture, body and mind.2 Yet the lines directly following this famous image illustrate one of the central problems of both ecocriticism and transcendentalism. For as that "transparent eye-ball," Emerson relates that "the name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance."3 This unsettling severance encapsulates a key transcendentalist tension between individual ecological vision and responsible social ethic that ecocriticism has inherited as we struggle to transfer the updated ecological ontology for which we advocate to viable socioeconomic recommendations. This paper will explore one transcendentalist solution to this quandary that has yet received little ecocritical attention: socialist agrarian utopianism. The socioeconomic experiments of Brook Farm, Fruit-lands, and Walden Pond were all direct attempts to bridge the troublesome gap between theory and practice by applying a transcendentalist philosophical vision to the actual sociohistorical context of [End Page 44] nineteenth-century New England. This essay will thus turn to Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance—a fictionalized account of Brook Farm, where Hawthorne resided, like his poet-narrator Coverdale, for a single summer season—in an attempt to glean positive directions for eco-criticism from Blithedale's shortcomings. For in the novel's final pages, Coverdale declares that "more and more, I feel that we had struck upon what ought to be a truth. Posterity may dig it up, and profit by it."4 This truth, I argue, is one commonly approached: that agrarian engagement is the mental and physical act in which nature and culture meet. The failure of Blithedale is due not to its georgic preoccupation but to its pervasive social strategy of detachment, a tactic that begins within individual human souls and extends in concentric rings to the settlement's relationship with its wider economic community and ultimately to the vast order of space, time, and nature itself. My reading suggests that ecocritics looking for social applications should train their gaze toward a new sort of agrarianism, one unmoored from utopian prospects of a society of small farms, and that instead places emphasis on evaluating and performing more meaningful and responsible labor within existing ecosocial networks. ________ As yet neither Blithedale nor the general topic of transcendental utopianism has received extended ecocritical attention. This may appear surprising, given the importance of romanticism and bioregionalism to the development of ecocriticism; but the neglect of transcendental utopias corresponds with ecocriticism's wariness of wading into the sticky realms of application. Though ecocriticism was animated early by the promise, indeed the necessity, of a literary-theoretical "return to activism" and a "re-engagement with realism" that would extend its ontological revisions outside the academy to assist the aversion of environmental catastrophe, it has largely elided discussion of the economic changes needed to do so.5 Accordingly, the one extended ecocritical reading of transcendentalist social projects, Lance Newman's Our Common Dwelling, is inspired by the same desire for biting ecocritical application that drives this essay. Writing in 2005, Newman recognizes ecocritical practice to "suffer from the weaknesses of the postmodernist tradition it extends," namely that "it is so willing to see performing radicalism, thinking difference, or renarrating history, not just as necessary but also as sufficient forms of political action."6 This is especially troubling since the [End Page 45] political strategy of consciousness raising that Newman identifies can actually collaborate in the perpetuation of oppressive institutional systems by eliding the economic action required...

The Sword That Cuts Two into One

The Sword That Cuts Two into One Jody Greene In returning to reread the work of Srinivas Aravamudan, I can’t stop thinking about the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī’s unusual (and delightfully perverse) choice of weaponry. Across diverse Buddhist traditions, Mañjuśrī is the Bodhisattva archetype associated with the quality of wisdom, and, in particular, the wisdom of non-duality. In its revelation of binary logics of affirmation and negation as the root of suffering, Mañjuśrī’s wisdom is understood to operate by other means. These means are epitomized and emblematized in iconographic form in the sword Mañjuśrī carries in his right hand in nearly all representations: the sword that cuts two into one. One need only think about Srinivas’s infamous penchant for portmanteau neologisms—Tropicopolitans, Theosophistries, Levantinization, to name only a few—to see the sword of two-into-oneness at work. Srinivas’s monstrous linguistic creations unite concepts that, when brought and thought together, bring into being “new” paradigms we nonetheless can’t imagine how we ever did without. The tongue may trip but the analytical faculties dance in the face of such shocking and yet weirdly familiar, weirdly necessary additions to our philosophical, historical, cultural, and literary critical vocabularies. It is no coincidence that the habit of breaking and remaking conceptual keywords after running up against the limits of the available lexicon is a persistent feature of the work of other celebrated practitioners of non-dualism, from Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253), the founder of the Sōtō Zen school of Buddhism, to one of Srinivas’s most significant teachers and influences, Jacques Derrida. Beyond his justly celebrated coinages, though, Srinivas’s method as a whole is consistent and rigorous in its generous expenditure of the currency of the non-dual. This feature of his work does not surprise, given his intellectual trajectory. His schooling exposed him to the ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who taught that liberation could be attained not through established religion, psychological inquiry, or philosophical analysis, but through direct experience of our own consciousness beyond the workings of the conditioned, thinking, and image-making mind. “Total negation is the essence of the positive” is Kirshnamurti’s kōan-like summation of the pathless path to liberation.1 In subsequent years, Srinivas turned to the study of literature and the practice of rhetorical criticism via the longue durée of the Western non-dual critique of metaphysics that culminates in the work of thinkers like Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. As Srinivas puts it in Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language, the job of literary and cultural critics is “the study of rhetoric, not just as technique of communication, but as subjective disposition.”2 The particular rhetorical mode under study in Guru English is the voluminous and vague deployment in a vast array of non-Asian cultural contexts, over more than two centuries, of the teachings of South Asian religious and philosophical traditions, teachings disseminated in English in sites as diverse as Walden Pond, the novels of Kipling, the Trinity nuclear site, and the contemporary American self-help and yoga industries. In Srinivas’s characteristic brevity of capture, “Guru English derives its paradoxical power precisely from its referential inadequacy. Unable to refer adequately, it can conjure excessively” (267). This purported capacity to “conjure excessively” without referential exactitude might, and should, remind us of poststructuralist understandings of the workings of language and rhetoric, [End Page 107] as well as of definitions of the literary from Plato to Sir Philip Sidney to Georges Bataille. Guru English might thus be seen not as a departure from but as a kind of culmination of Srinivas’s better-known contributions to literary criticism and especially to eighteenth-century studies. Guru English is probably the least familiar of Srinivas’s works to readers of Eighteenth-Century Studies, yet in it we can see concisely revealed the full wealth of his brilliance, wit, rigor, and playfulness, as well as the depth of his ethical, political, and intellectual commitments. A section on “The Bhagavadgītā and the Bomb” exemplifies this reach, while also giving a hint of the sheer capaciousness of his literary...

Nature in “The Jungle”: Ethnic Workers, Environmental Inequalities, and Subaltern Cultures of Nature in Chicago's Packingtown

Nature in “The Jungle”Ethnic Workers, Environmental Inequalities, and Subaltern Cultures of Nature in Chicago’s Packingtown Colin Fisher (bio) Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup. —John Muir, The Yosemite Like Walden Pond, Manhattan’s Central Park, or Yosemite National Park, Chicago’s Packingtown is a common place for US environmental historians. The stockyards figure prominently in dozens of articles and monographs, including Nature’s Metropolis (1992), William Cronon’s seminal urban environmental history. Packingtown, or Back of the Yards as it was better known by residents, appears in environmental history textbooks as an important example of urban environmental inequality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And each semester, professors of US environmental history classes ruin the lunches of thousands of undergraduates by reading passages directly from Upton Sinclair’s 1906 muckraking classic, The Jungle.1 What more can we say about a place that has become a cliché of urban environmental blight and injustice? As I will show in this article, by moving beyond seeing residents as mere environmental victims and exploring how they actually responded to the industrial environment on the South Side of Chicago, we shed new light on the environmental [End Page 330] history of Chicago’s Packingtown and the environmental experience of industrial workers in general. As we will see, workers viewed places of leisure as a crucial antidote to an urban living and working environment that many found profoundly unnatural and alienating. Of particular interest to urban environmental historians is the fact that a surprisingly large number of residents found relief from the industrial milieu by escaping to green spaces: wilderness parks on the urban fringe, city parks, public beaches, commercial groves, riverbanks, and vacant lots. Like more-privileged Anglo Americans, many ethnic workers in Back of the Yards reacted to the urban environment by seeking out nature. But unlike middle-class Anglo Americans, who used the landscapes of “Nature’s Nation” to forge a hegemonic American identity, working-class residents on Chicago’s South Side used green spaces to imagine themselves as old-world villagers, citizens of diasporic nations, representatives of Chicago neighborhoods, and ultimately members of an industrial working class. Environmental Historians and Back of the Yards We know that since the Civil War, Chicago meatpackers profited by industrializing one of the world’s oldest forms of labor: the killing and butchering of animals. Railroads enabled meatpackers to exploit Chicago’s far-reaching hinterland. From short-and long-grass prairies formerly dominated by Native Americans and bison now came millions of domesticated animals that were sent via railcar to Chicago’s Union Stockyard, which at its largest was one square mile. Inside that square mile, meatpackers constructed stock pens that could hold tens of thousands of animals; laid out tracks and rail yards; and built killing floors, fertilizer plants, rendering facilities, glue factories, tanneries, and warehouses. It was a harsh, gray industrial environment designed to transform millions of living animals quickly and efficiently into commodities: steak, hairbrushes, bacon, fertilizer, canned meat, glue, lard, and dozens of other products.2 Environmental historians have also shown us that workers suffered meatpacking’s considerable environmental effects. Back of the Yards was notorious for being smelled before being seen. As Sinclair wrote, the neighborhood had a “strange, fetid odor . . . a ghastly odor, like all the dead things of the universe.”3 And we know that the smell was probably [End Page 331] the least dangerous environmental hazard in Back of the Yards. Flies bred prolifically at the fertilizer plants, in the stinking heaps of trash, and in decaying animal skins drying in “hair fields.” And there was smoke. Small, residential, coal-burning stoves and furnaces produced significant air pollution, but this was nothing compared to adjacent industry. The meatpackers’ furnaces and the coal-burning freight trains that ran on the rails that circled the neighborhood fouled the air. According to labor activist A. M. Simons, great...

Excerpt from &lt;em&gt;Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (A Reader's Companion)&lt;/em&gt;

Author(s): Fishkin, Shelley Fisher | Abstract: Excerpt from Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (A Reader's Companion) (Rutgers University Press, 2015)

Sounding Conscience: Walden ’s Global Bottoms

Abstract: This essay argues for the importance of Henry David Thoreau as a theorist of conscience. Conscience for Thoreau is a faculty that must be constructed through engagements with both the natural world and the diversity of human thought. Thoreau’s position on conscience thus exemplifies a more general theoretical claim in Walden: that political subjectivity in the modern era requires a transformation of self in light of global diversity. Though the fact that conscience arises through global engagement is central to Thoreau’s work, this has frequently been overlooked by the latter’s critics, including Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Cavell, and Hannah Arendt. In restoring this point to Thoreau, I also suggest its broader theoretical importance with regard to Michel Foucault’s claim that the “practices of the self,” or techniques used to make oneself a subject adequate to the truth, have been lost in the modern era. Thoreau’s work demonstrates that, in fact, these practices were not lost; they simply transformed from a concern with a singular truth to an engagement with different ideas about how to live in the world. Focusing on the global connections embedded in Thoreau’s attempt to sound the bottom of Walden Pond, I call this sounding a “practice of the global self.” The essay goes on to look at how, specifically, Thoreau developed his notion of global conscience through his readings of Confucius, Mencius, and the Bhagavad Gita. In a brief coda, I consider how Thoreau’s work has a parallel with the idea of conscience found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.