Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
In the Humanitarian / Innovator category, Strange Things Afoot at the Circle K is proud to select Henry David Thoreau. This guy was completely ahead of his time. His Civil Disobedience was a massively influential work about resistance of government, which sprang out of his objections to the Spanish American war and his refusal to pay taxes as a result. He's been branded an anarchist by some and an impractical libertarian by others, but his ideas were influential to Ghandi and Martin Luther King, among others.
His next book, Walden was at least as influential, for completely different reasons. For two years, he lived in a cabin near Walden Pond, and wrote about his observations both of his environment and himself. This work forms some of the earliest and most important writings about ecology and environmental history, while at the same time spurring an interest in appreciation of nature (particularly through hiking and canoeing) as an important experience for one's spirit. Everything from the national parks movement in the US and Canada to modern lifestyle trends like Slow Food or the One Hundred Mile Diet are heavily influenced by Walden's work. He was arguably the original environmentalist, though it was never really a cause for him; he rarely talked about what society was obligated to do, but moreso about what one had the right and the self-interest to do.
Add to it that he was an outspoken abolitionist and one of the first American advocates of Darwin's theories of evolution, and he was clearly ahead of his time. His simple living ideas are a message that resonates more today than 160 years ago when he wrote it. Writers, artists, architects, politicians, social activists, scientists, and the general public have all been influenced thoreaughly by his work. |
I don't know how old he was when he wrote Walden, or when this picture was taken, but that is not the dude I pictured when I read that book. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of him before.
I gotta admit I found it a bit of a slog after a while, but yeah, he sure was ahead of his time. Good pick.