Introducing ‘The Roost’

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
–Walden, Ch. 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”

 

I’m sitting here in the office at Thoreau Farm, in the house where Henry David Thoreau was born, in 1817, out on Virginia Road in Concord, Mass. It’s late-morning, quiet inside and out, another unseasonably mild winter day. A few minutes ago I took a brisk walk around the property. The house itself has been moved a few hundred yards from its original site, but I’m glad to say it still has a small working farm out back, a local community food project called Gaining Ground, dedicated to hunger relief in the area. An organic farm with a social conscience – it’s hard to imagine a better neighbor to Henry’s birthplace, or a better image with which to begin this blog.

This is my first post here on The Roost, the blog that Thoreau Farm Trust has invited me to write and edit. I’m not exactly sure who my readers are, or where in the world you may be, but on the brave (or vain?) assumption that there are at least two or three of you, I should probably say a few things at the outset about the kind of blog, and the kind of blogger/editor, you can expect (and not expect), along the way. (If you want, you can skip to my bio before reading on.)

First, the obvious: Nothing fancy here. Just a humble blog. Humble, I should say, but never shy (as I hope the blog’s name and epigraph suggest!). I mean humble as in simple, unadorned, functional. In fact, in media terms, you might even say that a basic blog, in the year 2012, given all the slick technology at our fingertips, is in some ways as simple and humble a structure as any crude, one-room cabin would have been in the year 1845. (OK, maybe the analogy is a stretch, but then, I’m tempted to write my own version of “Economy,” Walden’s opening chapter – call it “Economy of a Blog.” Or chapter two, “Where I Blogged, and What I Blogged For” … “I went to the web because I wished to blog deliberately…” Or, then again, maybe I’ll spare you!)

Second, just to be clear (and in spite of the preceding paragraph), this will not be a blog about Thoreau and his time, or trying to channel Thoreau in any way, but about our own time, the present moment, and our own concerns – especially the inextricably interwoven issues of environmental and social justice that now define our greatest challenges: the crises of climate change, deep inequality, and a profoundly polarized (and paralyzed) political culture.

But I’ll resist the urge to write another Thoreauvian manifesto here (or, for that matter, a jeremiad). We have enough manifestos going around. Besides, if I’m honest, I have to confess that I’ve already kind of written one myself: titled “Walking Home From Walden,” it ran as a five-part essay in Slate magazine last June (and I’ve been invited to present it at the Thoreau Society’s annual gathering in Concord this July.)

If you really want to know where I’m coming from, and why I’m here, it’s best to read that essay. It describes how a 40-something suburban American (that’s me) woke up to what I argue are the human and moral dimensions of climate change, with a little help from Thoreau. As it happens, I live just down the road in Wayland, about six miles south of Concord, and the essay explains why, at a critical juncture, I decided to walk to Walden Pond – and how rediscovering Thoreau helped me come to terms with what I call “the spiritual crisis at the heart of the climate crisis.”

In September, I wrote a related op-ed piece for The Boston Globe, called “Why Walden Matters Now” (a slightly longer version was posted at Grist and The Guardian), explaining why I helped organize another walk from Wayland to Walden as part of the global Moving Planet climate rally on Sept. 24. (I also served as a volunteer organizer of the large Boston rally that day). For me, the bottom line, the reason Walden matters more than ever, is that the central crisis of our time is about far more than “the environment” or “environmentalism,” it’s about our humanity. Or as I tried to distill it:

Henry David Thoreau’s great subject — in Walden and “Civil Disobedience” and just about everything he wrote — wasn’t the environment (a term he wouldn’t recognize) or even nature (though he was a first-rate naturalist). It was “Nature,” as he wrote in his central essay, “Walking,” and “man as an inhabitant, or part and parcel of Nature.” It was our relationship, as human beings — physically, morally, spiritually, politically — to the world in which we live, which is to say, to everything, both human and wild….

There’s also a popular misconception that Thoreau was a hermit or recluse, indulging a utopian fantasy in his refuge in the woods. … And yet Walden isn’t about some solitary back-to-nature trip, it’s about waking up to one’s immediate reality, in the present moment, right where you live, and engaging the world…. Thoreau’s cabin at Walden was no retreat from the world, and his project was not, primarily, about the virtues of solitude. He not only kept up a social life at the pond, more to the point, he remained socially and politically engaged.

In fact if anyone took refuge in that cabin, it was the runaway slave Thoreau sheltered along the Underground Railroad. Thoreau’s antislavery activism, in words and actions, needs to be remembered as central to his legacy. For Thoreau, to be morally awake and in harmony with nature meant to act on behalf of human freedom….

There is no greater threat to human freedom today than climate change. If slavery was the human, moral crisis of Thoreau’s time, then global warming — and its impact on countless innocent lives, starting with the poorest and most vulnerable, far and near — is the human, moral crisis of our own….

There’s still time — if we act — to preserve a livable planet for our children. But it’s going to take more than small gestures of personal green virtue. It’s going to take decisive government action — a rising price on carbon, major investments in clean energy, real global commitments — which means it’s going to take a political movement that transcends environmentalism…. Because the climate crisis is more than an environmental crisis, it’s a human crisis, and we need a new politics to address it on those terms.

Of course, action needs to take many forms, as I acknowledged in the last part of my Slate essay – and not only nationally and globally, but locally. In Wayland, I’ve joined friends and neighbors in launching a nascent Transition initiative. Inspired by the Transition Towns model, pioneered in the UK and now spreading globally, it’s a grassroots effort to raise awareness of our climate and energy challenges, and begin building a resilient local economy and community in the face of what’s ahead. I’ll have much more to say about it on this blog, but in a nutshell, that’s the key: resilience and community, right where we live. It starts from the realization that climate change is upon us, that it’s going to get much worse – that we’re heading into a “perfect storm of ecological and social problems,” as a group of top scientists and development experts warned us just last week – and that we have to live through it even as we work, at all levels, to move beyond fossil fuels and preserve a livable planet for future generations, beginning with our own children and grandchildren.

It was after reading those Slate and Globe pieces that Thoreau Farm’s executive director, Patricia Hohl, reached out to me about doing some writing here, to help bring Thoreau’s legacy into focus for our own moment, for new generations of readers – and to help create, here at Thoreau Farm, not just an historical museum or literary tourist site but a living, breathing “place of ideas,” in the spirit of Thoreau. A place dedicated to exploring and discussing ideas and issues at the intersection of environmental and social justice.

The next thing we knew, we were talking about launching this blog, and about creating a new discussion series here in Concord, Thoreau Farm Forum, to serve the surrounding community and region. A blog and forum rooted in an actual, physical place – one with deep historical, cultural and political-philosophical signficance – and a real community. A blog and forum that are self-consciously local – like Thoreau himself, a local boy if there ever was one – but never (again like Thoreau) merely parochial. As many have noted, Thoreau may have lived his entire life in Concord, but his citizenship was global.

But again, while it’s fair to say that what we’re doing here is inspired – and, in some important ways, informed – by Thoreau, as I said above, this won’t be a blog about Thoreau. Sure, every now and then I might tease out echoes and correspondences between Thoreau’s concerns and ours, but I won’t strain for comparisons. I’ll do my best to follow Henry’s own paramount principle, as he put it in “Walking”:

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present…. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated…. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament – the gospel according to this moment.

 .   .   .

One last note, before getting on with the blog: I’m not a Thoreau scholar. I’m just a journalist, a writer and editor, who lives down the road in Wayland. I studied American history and literature at Harvard and the University of Chicago (where I was a Ph.D. candidate in English), but I ditched academia long ago for a career in the dreaded mainstream media – at The Atlantic, PBS Frontline, The Boston Globe’s Ideas section, and NPR’s On Point. If it’s a Thoreau scholar you want, I’m afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere. This blog isn’t addressed to the ivory tower. It’s for my neighbors, near and far — wherever and whoever you may be.

Wen Stephenson

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