Exploring the wilds near his hometown, Henry David Thoreau made this note in his journal: "What shall we do with a man who is afraid of the woods — their solitude & darkness — What salvation is there for him?" The question was rare in 1850. Some 200 years after the region that included Concord, Mass., was first settled by God-fearing Puritans, the "wilderness" beyond the edges of town, including the woodlots, the pastures, the ponds and the marshes, was still seen as inherently evil, a separate world to be tamed and put to good use, that is to say, human use.

But Thoreau was ahead of his time. While his neighbors persisted in pushing the forest back, clear-cutting the woodlots, turning the trees first into fuel, then into railroad ties, Thoreau was reconstructing it in his journal: The trees, and the squirrels and the people, he concluded, were interconnected. The squirrels helped propagate the trees. In turn, farmers chose to chop down the trees and plow the land where it profited them, and kill the squirrels and birds, for profit or no. Each species played an interdependent part in the whole. And God was in each.

Environmental historian Robert Kuhn McGregor argues that was a radical idea for Thoreau's time. It may yet be for ours.

McGregor, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Springfield, believes Thoreau, without models or guidance, managed to develop a wider view of the universe by making a close study of his little neighborhood. Over the last decade of his life, Thoreau moved from nature writer to naturalist, evolving into a conservationist with this strikingly modern ecological vision: In wildness is the preservation of the world.

"There may have been," McGregor writes, "scientists more precise in their identifications [of species] than Henry; there may have been visionaries who envisioned a natural whole as he did, but there was no one who combined the two very different intellectual achievements so powerfully. America took more than a century to evolve the same environmental concepts that Thoreau thought out in one lifetime."

McGregor has written neither a biography nor an academic analysis. Rather, he has gathered the scattered evidence of a writer's transformation, and the transformation of an idea.

Sadly, Thoreau's most valuable legacy may be his unfinished pioneering works on ecology, which remained uninterpreted until recently. They hold relevance more than a century later for the continuing debate on species, forest and wetlands preservation.

Thoreau argued for legislation to provide each town some control over which woods would be cut for winter fuel. He dreamed of reforestation and town parks. And he lived just long enough to teach some of his Concord neighbors the principles of seed dispersal and conservation. McGregor believes Thoreau can teach us, too.

Catherine O'Connor, a UIS graduate history student, works for the state library.

36 ¦ July/August 1998 Illinois Issues