Monday was birthday of the man who wrote, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." That’s noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.
During his life, Thoreau wrote more than 20 books on a variety of topics, but he is best known for Walden, which he published in 1854. The book chronicles the two years Thoreau spent at his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s cabin near Walden Pond near Concord, Mass.
Many see his experiment at Walden Pond as a radical rejection of society in favor of a natural, wilderness life. In reality, Thoreau’s beliefs were more practical and moderate than extreme. The cabin at Walden wasn’t located deep in the wilderness. It was just on the edge of his hometown, not far from his family.
He didn’t entirely reject human society, nor did he completely embrace the wild. He condemned mankind's destruction of nature, and he sought to find what he felt was a proper balance between the natural world and the needs of man.
Nevertheless, Thoreau’s eloquent descriptions of nature, and his thoughts about conservation, have moved and inspired generations of naturalists and environmentalists, from the more moderate to the most radical.
About the inherently destructive nature of society, Thoreau wrote:
"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth."
And:
"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
He penned some of the most poetic and lyrical passages in the English language about man's attachment to nature:
"We need the tonic of wildness - to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed . . . We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander."
And remarkably, in just seven words, he concisely articulated his philosophy about the world:
"All good things are wild and free."
Happy Birthday Mr. Thoreau. Your spirit lives forever wild and free in the hearts of those you have inspired with your words.
Coal River Mountain is an ancient Appalachian cradle of rolling ridges and nestled hollows, which provide refuge to a variety of delicate wildlife species and a home to a uniquely American mountain culture. But just beneath the surface lays something that calls into question the mountain’s very survival: $4.3 billion worth of coal. Massey Energy holds permits to clear-cut 6,450 acres of hardwood forest on the mountain and to detonate thousands of tons of explosives. The blasts will topple debris into nine miles of streams below, destroying not just the mountain, but also the land and the way of life of those who live there. The people of Raleigh County, West Virginia are the ones who will suffer from the loss of their mountain to strip mining.
The Coal War is the story of a symbol and a struggle: one mountain destined to be destroyed by the coal industry and a courageous effort to bring renewable energy to the heartland of America.
A Thousand Little Cuts
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Coal River Mountain is an ancient Appalachian cradle of rolling ridges and nestled hollows, which provide refuge to a variety of delicate wildlife species and a home to a uniquely American mountain culture. But just beneath the surface lays something that calls into question the mountain’s very survival: $4.3 billion worth of coal. Massey Energy holds permits to clear-cut 6,450 acres of hardwood forest on the mountain and to detonate thousands of tons of explosives. The blasts will topple debris into nine miles of streams below, destroying not just the mountain, but also the land and the way of life of those who live there. The people of Raleigh County, West Virginia are the ones who will suffer from the loss of their mountain to strip mining.
The Coal War is the story of a symbol and a struggle: one mountain destined to be destroyed by the coal industry and a courageous effort to bring renewable energy to the heartland of America.
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