2. Rhetoric and the Real in Mount Ktaadn’s Encounter with Thoreau

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s mentor, is now seen by ecologically inclined critics as the less powerful thinker and writer of the two. Emerson’s early work “Nature” (1836) does offer a general definition of the term that still holds up to our usage: “Strictly speaking [. . .] all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.” He adds, “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf” (8). As Raymond Williams notes in Keywords, since the eighteenth century “nature is what man has not made” (188). So Emerson’s definition seems unexceptional, until we see where he goes with it. Over the course of his essay, Emerson’s ME proceeds to incorporate nature, the NOT ME, into itself, essentially pounding nature into a pulp. It may be true that in Emerson’s nature “all mean egotism vanishes” (10), but what finally displaces mean egotism is grandiose egotism. First we have the National Park view of nature: “To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon” (14–15). This is true enough, as I and a great many others can attest in our experiences of nature.¹ But it leads to a slippery slope—nature as an outdoor museum, “a picturesque commodity” (Byerly 59), which is an idea antithetical to the deep ecology view “that nature possesses the same moral standing and natural rights as human beings” (Byerly 63). Ultimately, down this slippery slope a snowmobile may be sliding, giving tonic as well as possibly gin to the tradesman and corporate lawyer.

Admittedly, Emerson, as always, elsewhere contradicts many of these views, though ultimately, at best, his concept of nature leads to what Arne Naess, the originator of the deep ecology school of thought, termed “shallow ecology, essentially a resource-management approach predicated on the values of efficiency and utility” (Naess in Oelschlager, 208). This is as opposed to “deep ecology, which transcends conservation in favor of preservation and biocentric values” (Oelschlager 208). The writers in this section were in the spirit of deep ecology before the term came into use.

The treacherous aspect of Emerson’s nature is most obvious in his section entitled “Commodity.” Expatiating on the uses of nature, he declares, “The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens” (13). Nature has a “ministry to man [. . .] All parts work incessantly into each other’s hands for the profits of man” (12). This is a thinly disguised version of the Christian providence that Lynn White Jr., in an influential essay, argues is the historical route of our ecological crisis: “Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule; no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes” (9). Emerson’s detestation of the moneymakers of his world was well known, so he hustles through this section with a palpable discomfort, ending with a justification for avoiding (embarrassing) particulars:

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader’s reflection, with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.

(13)

If the reader were a land developer, imagine how easily the endless catalogue...