Our Course Description

Engaging with Thoreau

In this course, we’ll explore Henry David Thoreau’s two years, two months at Walden Pond, a period of active engagement -- not escape -- for him.  We’ll read from Thoreau’s Walden as, using only 19th-century hand tools and techniques, we continue construction of a historically accurate, museum-grade replica of Thoreau’s house here on Pingree’s campus.

In his Boston Globe article, “Why Walden Matters Now,” printed on September 22, 2011, Wen Stephenson wrote, “Thoreau’s great subject  -- in Walden and ‘Civil Disobedience’ and just about everything he wrote -- wasn’t the environment... It was our relationship, as human beings -- physically, morally, spiritually, politically -- to the world in which we live.”  In this course, like Thoreau, we’ll contemplate our relationships to our world as we construct Thoreau’s house.

Where Thoreau reflected on slavery, abolitionism, war, government, and citizenship, we’ll explore social, racial, and class inequities and how they factor into addressing the greatest existential threat to humanity today: global warming.  “For Thoreau, to be morally awake and in harmony with nature meant to act on behalf of human freedom...” (Stevenson)  We’ll learn, engage, and strive for our own individual and collective awakenings.  In addition to Walden, possible readings may include excerpts from Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, The Post-Carbon Reader, and Eaarth, Curt Stager’s Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, Mark Hertsgaard’s Hot:Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, selections from Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Van Jones, Paul Kivel, Vandana Shiva, Mei Ng, Wangari Maathai, James Hansen, Todd Gitlin, and others.

Beyond our weekly reading and writing and on-going physical and metaphorical house-building project, our course will likely culminate with students’ own extended personal essays, “Where I Live and What I Live For.”  Finally, as Thoreau conducted a two-year experiment at Walden Pond, so too will we consider this course experimental.  We may find ourselves at crossroads  as we saunter and we’ll agree to respond at times to the weather and other forces.