Henry David Thoreau, born two hundred years ago today, is known for his stay on Walden Pond but at heart was really one for rivers. So argues Robert Thorson in The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, which shows just how deeply Thoreau’s thinking and writing were connected to paddling and sailing. Thorson’s presentation of Thoreau as a data-driven environmental scientist also gives us a Thoreau for the Anthropocene, an outdoorsman deeply attuned to the ways in which mankind was reshaping the natural world. Perhaps surprisingly, from today’s vantage, Thoreau regarded that reshaping not as pure debasement, but as the unavoidable entwining of human actions with natural processes, a snarl that heightened conditions for his beloved boating, among many other effects. In the passage below, adapted from The Boatman’s Conclusion, Thorson gives us a Thoreau determined to both appreciate the benefits and diminish the detriment of that hopeless entangling.
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Concord’s makeover began when English colonials arrived to create a religiously based communal village on the banks of this lush river meadow. Historian Brian Donahue proved that theirs was a largely sustainable agrarian culture. Yet within a decade they were trying to reengineer their “Great River” landscape by ditching its bedrock outlet. When that failed for lack of technology, they explored the possibility of diverting floodwaters eastward through the meadows of Thoreau’s birthplace, over the watershed divide, and into the Shawsheen Valley. Their pioneering efforts inaugurated more than two centuries of human “improvements” driven by an exponentially rising American population and improved technologies. Maximum development—agricultural land conversions and industrial hydropower development—occurred in Thoreau’s generation. By the time of his death, virtually every square inch of the land had been transformed in some way: rock to quarry, river to canal, brook to millstream, wood to fuel, land to pasture, and field to cropland. The entire valley had become a network of dams, canals, turnpikes, railroads, factories, town streets, and country roads.
John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.”
Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Since the dawn of antiquity, rivers, even more so than coasts, have been the primary battlefields in this war. The U.S. Geological Survey, acting through the U.S. National Research Council, summarized the situation in 2007: “Deforestation, industrialization, urbanization, floodplain cultivation, dams and levee construction, and channelization have altered dramatically natural flow regimes.” Thoreau, by the end of his life, had encountered all of these disruptions and disconnections in his own field studies.
His pioneering river science of 1859–1860 did not position humans as masters and commanders of their watersheds, as did the engineers of his day. Instead, he saw human actions as hopelessly entangled with natural ones. Attempts to “civilize” the landscape became perturbations, from which the wildness of nature emerged automatically elsewhere. The clearest example of his thinking involves Barrett’s Bar, where sawdust and sand were interstratified. By definition, that sawdust is granular organic sediment of complex origin. To make it requires soil creation, forest ecology, deforestation, the building of sawmills, and the cutting of wood into the stuff of Main Street life: its houses, furniture, vehicles, containers, and so on. By definition, the mineral sand on Barrett’s Bar is also granular sediment. To make it requires crystalline rock, glacial crushing, diluvial deposition, human exposure, a pulse of bank erosion, and sand redeposition in high water backed up by the Billerica dam. Thus, even something as seemingly simple as Barrett’s Bar is an integrated manifestation of geology, ecology, hydrology, and technology at the scales of the whole watershed and of millions of years. And the location of the bar was largely set by the upriver edge of the flood pool backed up by a fordway being controlled by a dam. Thoreau’s insight was not that his rivers were being impacted by human activities, and not even that his rivers were the result of human activities, but that appearances and causes were so entangled that legal finger-pointing was pointless.
To me, the most astonishing thing about Thoreau’s river project is his recognition that the natural world he fell deeply in love with was no longer wild in a traditional sense, but was even wilder with respect to the dynamism and unpredictability of landscape process. Human inventions and interventions were propagating down every available energy gradient toward his future and our present. One of those changes was the return of pastures, woodlots, and cultivated fields to “wild” second-growth forest on upland watersheds. The regional hydrology responded with a decline in net annual runoff because the vigorously growing forests were taking more and more of the annual water budget. This left less water in the summer Concord River during Thoreau’s twentieth century canonization than during his lifetime. Within the last half century, however, the trend for New England is an increase in annual streamflow owing to greenhouse warming. The regrowth of forest since Thoreau’s death also changed the local meteorology. With an increase in turbulence associated with the second-growth canopy, and with more evapotranspiration, the regional winds are now lighter and the air more humid. Both of these changes have decreased the quality of boating relative to that of Thoreau’s lifetime. He was indeed born in the “nick of time” with respect to these atmospheric variables.
None of this is to suggest that we should blithely accept the great harm we are doing to the planet today. Indeed, we are creating severe and irreversible problems, particularly to low-lying nations being submerged by rising sea levels, specialized habitats such as the Arctic pack ice of the polar bear being eliminated, and coral reefs being blanched in acidifying oceans. Thoreau was rightly angered by the wanton extinction that preceded him, by his own complicity in land development, by the gluttony of biofuel consumption causing the last of his woodlots to be cut down, and by the rise of coal consumption in his day. Thoreau specifically criticized Ralph Waldo Emerson’s household for burning as much as “twenty-five cords of wood and fourteen tons of coal” each year during the late 1850s.
Thoreau’s point is that the world we live in was and is being changed in ways and on time scales that we don’t even recognize. Going forward, he would want us to accept and deal with those changes without romanticizing or sanitizing the past; to take advantage of the good and mitigate the bad. We must learn to adjust to each situation on a case-by-case basis with clearly stated positions and goals. For example, a higher dam at Billerica was good for Thoreau as a boatman but bad for his haymaking friends. The mature Thoreau would likely agree that the conservation of land, water, habitat, and species must be done with objective local goals in mind, rather than some dreamy notion of how good things used to be.
Looking back from the late 1850s, Thoreau decided that his three rivers had changed little in his lifetime. At first glance, this seems to contradict the dramatic pulse of change he was experiencing. But keep in mind that he didn’t build his first boat until 1833, when he was only sixteen years old. By then, the big impacts of 1827–1828 caused by raising the Billerica dam and misdesigning the Union Turnpike Bridge were already going strong. Already, his rivers were flowing with greater “impetuosity” than before, thanks to the landscape makeover he was part and parcel of.
