Thoreau's Natural History Essays and His 'Transcendental Ecology'

Thoreau’s “natural history” essays fit well within the context of the entire corpus of his writings, not in isolation from or as exceptions to the rest of it—and, above all because they reflect the general tenets of American Transcendentalism. Except for “The Succession of Forest Trees” and “The Dispersion of Seeds” (treating “Dispersion” as a long essay), the so-called natural history essays are unimpressive as science or even as natural history per se: they don’t “fit.” Again except for “Succession” and “Dispersion,” the natural history essays would have no legitimate place in a course on natural history, ecology, or any other science—nor in a course on the history of science, biology, or ecology. As works of literature, however, they are exemplary.

Thoreau insisted that he was “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher.” We should take him at his word. James Russell Lowell asserts that Thoreau’s “whole life was a search for the doctor. The old mystics had a wiser sense [than he] of what the world was worth.” Lowell also claimed that Thoreau had “discovered nothing.” But Thoreau’s life—which is so vividly recorded and reflected in his writings—cannot be so cavalierly dismissed, and when Thoreau did assume a scientific stance (as in “Succession” and “Dispersion”) he actually did discover facts and did enunciate a scientific theory.

Rather than a failed “search for the doctor,” Thoreau’s life was a perennial quest for the sublime: “[T]o be always on the alert to find God in nature,” he says, “to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, of nature.” Had Thoreau been an “orthodox” Christian and not an “infidel,” he might have said with the Psalmist, “As the hart [sic] panteth after the water brooks, So panteth my soul after thee, O God.” The natural history essays should be read as records of a spiritual quest, as episodic religious pilgrimages, even “Succession” and “The Dispersion of Seeds.”

Thoreau did not describe himself as a social critic or political philosopher (though he was both), but he did say, “The ethical philosopher needs the discipline of the natural philosopher. He approaches the study of mankind with great advantages who is accustomed to the study of nature.”

At first glance the “political” essays do not seem to be part of any religious quest. They can be accommodated, however, if we realize that a quest has three components: the seeker, the sought, and the process of seeking (the search itself). In Thoreau’s case, as with most mystics, the quest is a one-on-one proposition; it is the individual soul that “panteth after [God];” thus, the individual is the inviolable foundation of Thoreau’s ethics. Each individual soul counts in the overall “scheme” of things, spiritual and mundane. An injustice against even one innocent individual is thus an assault on all morality. It is this realization that motivated Thoreau’s political pronouncements, from “Civil Disobedience” to “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”

Thoreau did not resort to chapels or churches, temples, mosques, or cathedrals, but “rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, . . . shrines [he] visited both summer and winter.” Thus, it was of paramount importance that there be pine groves in which to worship and encounter the Deity. It was his realization in 1856, which he eventually pursued with vigor in 1860, that forest succession—the natural rebuilding of the desecrated “temples” and “shrines” that he had visited for spiritual succor—would bring back into being groves and entire forests. It was this realization that drove his efforts to understand forest succession and that gave him hope. It was the solitude granted the individual spiritual seeker that commended wildness to Thoreau—groves and woods and pathless forests—in which to apprehend the Ancient One.