Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays

Introduction

Introduction william rossi Born on his maternal grandmother’s farm two miles outside the agricultural village of Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817, Henry Thoreau grew up in a family that participated actively in the popular nineteenth-century passion for natural history. Local legend held that one of the children was nearly born during a parental botanizing excursion in the woods and hills surrounding the town. Until he left for Harvard College in September 1833, Thoreau spent an uninterrupted boyhood in this environment, acquiring the knowledge of boatcraft and woodcraft that later so impressed his neighbor and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like other Concord children who attended presentations at the Concord Lyceum after it was established in 1829, young Henry’s interest was further fed by the numerous lectures on natural history offered there. Recent scholarship suggests that the character of Thoreau’s early environmental knowledge, though less utilitarian than that of his contemporaries, was, like theirs, more broad than deep (McGregor 20–31). Nonetheless, his attentive early immersion in the local ecosystems of the Concord and Sudbury River watersheds formed the experiential soil for a rich sense of place to take root. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau returned to his native village never to leave it except for an eight months’ residence vii viii introduction on Staten Island in 1843, periodic excursions to the Maine woods and Cape Cod, and a trip west to Minnesota in May 1861 one year before he died of tuberculosis. But the Concord to which he returned after college was already enmeshed in the social, economic, and ecological changes that had begun to transform the region, changes accelerated with the establishment in 1844 of the Fitchburg railroad in Concord, less than a year before Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. As he noted in 1849, the railroad radically altered the old scale of travel and distance , reducing the twenty-mile journey to Boston from up to three hours by stage to under an hour. The railroad and the pervasive forces of industrialization it represented also brought the metropolis closer in other ways, integrating Concord business and agriculture into regional and national markets, insinuating cosmopolitan values and manners, and raising barriers of class distinctions, as the town more and more assumed a commercializing, middle-class, and increasingly suburban character. These changes had complex effects on the landscape Thoreau inhabited and described during the two decades spanned by the essays collected in this volume. On one hand, the utilitarian attitudes that supported an industrializing economy contributed to severe deforestation and declining wildlife. Because the typical New England household consumed ten to thirty cords of wood every winter, by 1850 land around Concord was little more than ten percent forested, with meadows and swamps, like the ones Thoreau celebrates in “Walking,” rapidly disappearing as arable acreage increased. While this natural habitat was being irreparably altered and destroyed, unregulated hunting , fishing, and trapping was decimating the populations of moose, wolf, deer, beaver, and migrating fish such as salmon, shad, herring, and alewife that Thoreau could remember from boyhood. On the other hand, the same forces that drew Concord farmers into national markets ultimately displaced them. As rural residents migrated west or moved to urban centers, and farms were abandoned or acreage relinquished to specialize in the production of milk, hay, and produce, introduction ix over time the exhausted pastures and abandoned farmland gradually reforested, a process the beginnings of which Thoreau recognized and, against the grain of conventional wisdom, sought to promote in his late natural history essays. Now over sixty percent forested, the Concord landscape is comparatively wilder than the one Thoreau knew, with portions of it preserved in accordance with his vision (Carroll; Donahue; Gross, New Perspectives). If Thoreau’s contemporaries lacked what we might call a coherent “ecological vision,” they were nonetheless keenly aware of the natural knowledge being produced in various areas of natural history that would become separate disciplines in the second half of the century. To a greater extent than presently, areas now the province of geology, botany, zoology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, ornithology, and astronomy were of considerable public as well as professional interest. If from our perspective Thoreau’s contemporaries missed the forest for the trees, they often had a correspondingly greater curiosity about them, and thus, as readers, a greater tolerance for descriptive detail than many of their more environmentally “enlightened” descendants. Consequently, writers of natural history...