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‘‘Climate Does Thus React on Man’’ Wildness and Geographic Determinism in Thoreau’s ‘‘Walking’’ r i c h a r d j . s c h n e i d e r  In his essay ‘‘Walking,’’ Henry David Thoreau begins by stating his intention to ‘‘speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness’’ and to make ‘‘an extreme statement . . . an emphatic one,’’ because, he asserts, ‘‘there are enough champions of civilization.’’1 This opening is so rhetorically forceful that readers are immediately inclined to assume that he will carry out this intention in the essay that follows. The opening alone serves to establish Thoreau as a champion of nature against civilization. However, I would like to make ‘‘an extreme statement’’ of my own in this essay by questioning both how much Thoreau really champions nature rather than civilization in ‘‘Walking’’ and how extreme a statement he really makes. I will do so by reading ‘‘Walking’’ in the context of Thoreau’s own reading of one of the most popular scientific documents of his time. ‘‘Walking’’ has often been read as a defense of nature, an ecological manifesto. Roderick Nash says, for instance, that Thoreau’s comments on wildness in ‘‘Walking’’ ‘‘cut the channels in which a large portion of thought about wilderness subsequently flowed.’’2 James McIntosh takes Thoreau’s famous pronouncement in ‘‘Walking’’ that ‘‘in Wildness is the preservation of the World’’ (224), the same passage that interests Nash, to be the ‘‘obvious and central message’’ of Thoreau’s essay.3 More recently H. Daniel Peck has argued that ‘‘Walking’’ is an implicit call to modern humanity ‘‘to develop a cosmology, to perform a ‘worlding,’ that would fundamentally alter our relation to nature.’’4 This focus on Thoreau’s interest in wildness and on changing our relation to nature is 44 one of the main reasons why Thoreau has become, as Lawrence Buell dubs him, ‘‘the patron saint of American environmental writing.’’5 Other critics, however, have noticed another theme in ‘‘Walking’’ that might be seen as undercutting Thoreau’s apparent defense of the wild and of wilderness. As early as 1961, Walter Harding noticed that ‘‘Walking ’’ ‘‘becomes almost chauvinistic in boasting the superiority of the American landscape.’’6 In 1977, Frederick Garber observed that in ‘‘Walking ’’ ‘‘Thoreau follows current patterns of chauvinistic myth’’ about the westward movement.7 A contrast between Thoreau’s comments on Indians in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and in ‘‘Walking’’ suggests to Garber ‘‘the basic tensions between Thoreau’s twin desires — one for radical wildness and another for reclamation — and the paradoxes and contradictions to which the tensions will lead him.’’8 More recently David Robinson has emphasized this paradoxical element in ‘‘Walking’’ in suggesting that Thoreau’s concept of wildness ‘‘is inextricably bound up with the historical tragedy of the American West and the continuing ecological tension, particularly acute in the West, between the desire to preserve the wild and the desire to make use of it.’’9 Robert D. Richardson, on the other hand, deemphasizes this ecological tension and argues that in ‘‘Walking’’ Thoreau is not following contemporary myths about the West and wildness but is instead undercutting them. ‘‘Thoreau’s idea of the West,’’ Richardson says, ‘‘is not an affirmation of the westward march of civilization’’ but instead a recognition of ‘‘what is wild within us.’’10 In this essay, I will argue that in ‘‘Walking’’ Thoreau attempts to affirm both what is wild within us and the westward march of civilization, and that this attempt leads to the ecological tension noted by Garber and Robinson. This tension can best be understood by reading ‘‘Walking’’ in the context of the geographical determinism popular in Thoreau’s time. In 1851, Thoreau was reading a book by the Swiss geographer Arnold Guyot entitled The Earth and Man.11 Guyot’s book contained his 1849 series of lectures on geography and history, which was so popular in book form that the 1851 edition that Thoreau borrowed from Emerson was already the fourth edition. The Earth and Man quickly became the main scientific underpinning for the political idea of Manifest Destiny, the idea that the westward movement was part of a divine plan which Americans were obligated to implement by settling and plowing America’s forests and prairies. This heroic process of settling the wilderness would create a new civilization, said Guyot. By 1890, historian Frederick Jackson Turner Wildness and Geographic Determinism 45 seemed to prove...

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