where woods and winds contend: Final Project Proposal: Thoreau and Ecology

Did Thoreau’s nature writings, still maintaining its literary/poetic roots, i.e., “The Succession of Forest Trees,” “The Dispersion of Seeds,” Journal, and “Wild Apples” (not limited to) anticipate and impact the methods and the findings of ecology and environmentalism?
The question is important because it illustrates the interconnections between academic disciplines, specifically literature and ecology. If we are to know how human activities affect Earth and life on Earth, then it becomes vital to study different institutions, beliefs, values, laws, economies, and history in light of what we know about the natural world. Many examples support this claim. First, because human activity contributes to climate change (which requires numerous methods to understand it from atmospheric science and oceanography to chemistry and physics), we need to examine how historical, religious, and philosophical assumptions affect climate change as well. In analyzing Thoreau’s nature writings, I’ll demonstrate how Ecology did not develop in a strictly scientific vacuum. In short, certain scientific disciplines have been influenced by and developed out of literary and philosophical disciplines.
I. Literary Analysis:

Prose: language, sentence structure, imagery and setting, and discourse features.
Characterization
Genre & Tradition

II. Critical Analysis (Science):

Significant Prior Knowledge/Current Ignorance
The Main Hypothesis and Alternatives
Assumptions (Explicit and Implicit)
Elements of Support or Non-Support.
Change in Reality?

It is quite simple to view Thoreau as an early environmentalist and ecologist in his essays “Wild Apples,” “The Succession of Forest Trees,” and “The Dispersion of Seeds.” Here’s the definition of an environmentalist: “any person who advocates or works to protect the air, water, animals, plants, and other natural resources from pollution or its effects. Or: a person who believes that differences between individuals or groups, esp. in moral and intellectual attributes, are predominantly determined by environmental factors, as surroundings, upbringing, or experience (OED).” In “Wild Apples,” while describing the apple tree’s flower/fruit and stages of the apple’s growth, Thoreau bemoaned humanity’s destruction of indigenous and wild apples species. His preference for the wild to the cultivated apple and, symbolically, his belief that man himself will fulfill his destiny not by exploiting the American landscape but by allowing it to naturalize him epitomizes modern environmental sentiments. In “The Succession of Forest Trees (important ecological essay as well given its place in the Bibliography of North American Forestry),” Thoreau used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals. In Walden, Thoreau, despite his attacks on the farmers’ misuse of their resources, recognized the potential of the farm as a means of economic self-sufficiency. Ecologically, Thoreau hoped to find more securely the vision of cosmic harmony that he had received from Emerson, and from Emerson’s Romantic sources, locating and knowing by experience the sublimity of life. During his time, Thoreau was capable of analyzing plant migration in terms that contain no teleological implication, so that the later Thoreau sometimes approached the most modern ecological thought in this respect. Next, Thoreau entered the realm of the ecologist proper by adding to his phenological data his lists of habitat groups. Also, like a modern ecologist, Thoreau was as much interested in the plants characteristics and certain locations of rare atypical plants; and it was these characteristic plants that were usually distinguished and noted on his walks. However, the chief difference in his approach to such abundant lists and that of a modern ecologist is that Thoreau’s is subjective; one true composition count in Conantum Swamp and one quadrat count of Houstonia are his closest approaches to the objective method. In his journal entries, Thoreau had made an independent discovery of the stratification of water, and made the correct deduction that such stratification would affect the distribution of fish. “The Succession of Forest Trees” reports some of the early American writing on spontaneous generation. The idea of “succession,” now a major paradigm in ecology, was phrased as a shift in forest tree species, following cutting and/or burning that illustrated spontaneous generation since the new species had apparently not been on the sites prior to the disturbance. Thoreau scotched this notion with numerous observations in and around Concord.

Moving to Thoreau’s “The Dispersion of Seeds,” the critical role of seed dispersal in forest dynamics is still an important concept in ecology, and the observations that Thoreau made to build his case are as valuable as any made since. Thoreau’s descriptions of the means of dispersal and some observed distances, in rods, can still be useful data. His observations that are still of current interest include the following: multiple dispersal modes, especially the importance of water transport of seeds with specialized adaptations for dispersal by wind or animals; the spread of seeds across snow surfaces; the importance of dispersal for pioneers in succession and the strategy of producing many small seeds for this purpose; the relations between seed banks and fire; a competitive hierarchy of niche relations; the dependence on spatial patterns, specifically the shape of forest stands on the spatial process of dispersal; and, plant-animal interactions as integral to system functioning.