Thoreau Farm

John Mitchell and I conclude our exchange on Thoreau, wildness, climate, and “conservation in the Anthropocene”

(Read part one of the exchange.)

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From: Wen Stephenson
To: John Mitchell

Hi John,

I’d like to pick up on a couple of ideas in your first response, which I very much enjoyed. (Poor Kareiva, he’s got Thoreauvians ganging up on him now…)

First, it has to be noted that time and place, human and wild, have been preoccupations of yours for quite a while.  And I want to ask you about time — both geologic and human-scale — and the concept of the “Anthropocene,” which collapses the two.

In Ceremonial Time, you wrote the natural and human history of (as the subtitle puts it) “15,000 Years on One Square Mile.” That square mile being Scratch Flat, as it used to be called, in Littleton. (Confession: after reading that book for the first time just a couple of years ago, I drove up to Littleton and poked around your neighborhood, book and map in hand, because you’d brought the landscape to life so vividly I had to see it for myself. I hope you’ll take that as the compliment it is.) Now, that book was published in 1984. I wonder, would you write it — or frame it — differently now, given what we know about climate change, the Anthropocene, and the deep uncertainty of our too-near human future on this planet? Continue reading →