Thoreau’s Country

In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland, small woodlands, and farmers endlessly working the land. As Foster explored the New England landscape, he discovered ancient ruins of cellar holes, stone walls, and abandoned cartways--all remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How had Thoreau's open countryside, shaped by ax and plough, divided by fences and laneways, become a forested landscape?Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions, human and natural, offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land. Extensive excerpts from the journals show us, through the vividly recorded details of daily life, a Thoreau intimately acquainted with the ways in which he and his neighbors were changing and remaking the New England landscape. Foster adds the perspective of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian, using the journals to trace themes of historical and social change.Thoreau's journals evoke not a wilderness retreat but the emotions and natural history that come from an old and humanized landscape. It is with a new understanding of the human role in shaping that landscape, Foster argues, that we can best prepare ourselves to appreciate and conserve it today.From the journal:"I have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood--rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees--perhaps half or three quarters of a tree...Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it, and, last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while it is burning in the winter evening. That is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge, perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it...Thus one half of the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy."--October 20, 1855

Henry David Thoreau's lifework was his journals, which were approximately two million words in length, and for years editors have quarried various selections from this mass of prose. Here Foster chooses passages that reveal the actual nature of the terrain he inhabited...What emerges from this compilation is both a fresh awareness of Thoreau as a writer and an account, shaped partly by Foster's elegant interpretation, of how landscapes change and change again., The Thoreau revealed or brought forward here is a creature not of primeval wilderness but of broadly husbanded landscape, a fellow not of frontiersmen but of farmers--and a more respectful such fellow than emerges from the pages of Walden...Thoreau's Country makes for good browsing, rich grazing, appreciative ruminating., Foster's book, with its mix of Thoreau himself and thoughts about Thoreau, will repay any visitor who has previously walked a mile in Thoreau's footsteps. Reading it will recall some scenes and it will remind the readers, and perhaps comfort the readers, that we are not alone. We walk behind giants. Not just Henry David, but whoever it was who had the courage even to begin that stone wall that marks the far edge of the field., There is no shortage of editions of and commentaries on Thoreau but what we have here is an ecologist selecting passages from Thoreau and relating them to ecological history, discussing the effects of forest succession on animal populations, the role of fire in the ecology of New England, the history of abandoned farms and the management of forests then and now. This is not simply a piece of ecological commentary using the journal instead of the satellite image but an outworking of (if he will forgive me) the bog in the brain and bowels of David Foster, the director of Harvard Forest. We have interesting and solidly based ecological information here but suffused with the felt flow of the natural world. As such, it is worth its price for both scientist and humanist; furthermore, it is a lovely book to own., Foster--by expertly excerpting from the icon's two million words of journal entries--shows us a thinker who was a brilliant journalist, observant naturalist and eloquent writer. Thoreau's observations alternate with Foster's of the remarkable comeback of the New England forest landscape today. The book's descriptions of 19th-century life and landscape are fascinating. Here is a slowly industrializing New England of dense, intensively managed farms, frequently clear-cut wood lots and vanished wildlife in which Thoreau the nature lover is an eccentric, a minority of one.

David R. Foster is Director of the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, and teaches ecology at Harvard University.