| Summary: | Few writers of any era or discipline have exerted so great and lasting an influence on American culture's configuration of the man-nature relationship as did Henry David Thoreau, whose writings on the subject defined both a literary form--the nature essay--and a seminal philosophical understanding. This celebrated collection of essays, published posthumously, contains two of particular importance for conservation history. "The Succession of Forest Trees" explores the dynamic ecology of the woodlands, especially the role of birds and animals in seed dispersal, and recommends that man be guided by the patterns of nature in effecting forest management; this essay "has been generally considered the most important contribution to conservation, agriculture, and ecological science he [Thoreau] made in his lifetime," in the words of historian Donald Worster (Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas [2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], p. 71). "Walking" is a prophetic evocation of the value of wildness and wilderness: "in Wildness," Thoreau proclaims, "is the preservation of the World" (p. 185); and he creates here a veritable seedbed of conservationist themes: the notion that man may properly be seen as "part and parcel of Nature, rather than [as] a member of society" (p. 161); that "when I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place" (p. 190); that American society will itself be saved by contact with "this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature" (p. 201)
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