The Origins of Environmental Activism, 1840–1889 51
Document 44: Henry David Thoreau on the Value of Living Things (1864)..................
Henry David Thoreau, a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson [see Document 36] and associated with the
transcendentalists, was very much an original thinker. His writings about the importance of leaving nature
undisturbed, the need for all humans to have contact with nature, and the relationship between humans
and other living things were not fully appreciated until the mid-twentieth century, when environmentalists
canonized him as their patron saint. He is best known for his essay “Walden,” a record of the two years he
spent living in a cabin near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. In the following passage, taken from the
section of The Maine Woods (a posthumously published book) based on a journal he kept during his 1853
trip to Maine, Thoreau expresses dismay over the human use of other living things. He also offers a prescient
model for a U.S. national parks system.Strange that so few ever come to the woods
to see how the pine lives and grows and spires,
lifting its evergreen arms to the light,—to see
its perfect success; but most are content to
behold it in the shape of many broad boards
brought to market, and deem that its true suc-
cess! But the pine is no more lumber than man
is, and to be made into boards and houses is
no more its true and highest use than the tru-
est use of a man is to be cut down and made
into manure. There is a higher law affecting our
relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut
down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a
dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has
discovered only some of the values of whale-
bone and whale oil be said to have discovered
the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the
elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the
elephant”? These are petty and accidental uses;
just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order
to make buttons and flageolets of our bones;
for everything may serve a lower as well as a
higher use. Every creature is better alive than
dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he
who understands it aright will rather preserve
its life than destroy it.
* * *
The kings of England formerly had their
forests “to hold the king’s game,” for sport or
food, sometimes destroying villages to create or
extend them; and I think that they were impelled
by a true instinct. Why should not we, who have
renounced the king’s authority, have our national
preserves, where no villages need be destroyed,
in which the bear and panther, and some even of
the hunter race, may still exist, and not be “civi-
lized off the face of the earth,”—our forests, not
to hold the king’s game merely, but to hold and
preserve the king himself also, the lord of crea-
tion,—not for idle sport or food, but for inspira-
tion and our own true recreation? or shall we,
like the villains, grub them all up, poaching on
our own national domains?
Source: Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1893), pp. 163-164, 212-13.