The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan

Thoreau in Wisconsin

A lot of people don't realize that Thoreau went to Minnesota and Wisconsin on his one and only trip west, in June 1861, described, by the Western newspapers, as the celebrated abolitionist, due in large part to his treatise on non-violent resistance. He would died within the year. I was recently reading his journals, and noticed that when a friend was being sought by federal marshalls, given a revolver and sent into hiding by local abolitionists, Thoreau stayed at his friend's sister's house, to protect her. "Lodged at Sanborn's last night, after his rescue..." (Tweet via the Awl.)

More Animals in Urban Forests

Scientists investigating an increase in fishers in upstate New York forests wondered whether or not there were enough mammals for a fisher population to survive. Camera traps set up in the forests in the Albany area showed that there were more animals in urban forests than in non-urban forests.

We found higher diversity and overall higher activity of animals in our camera traps set in urban forests than in those out in the wild areas. The objective of this study was to compare the potential prey communities that fishers might encounter in these two environments. Could fishers be lured into these areas by abundant prey? Now we know that, yes, this could be part of the explanation (i.e. hypothesis not rejected).

Urban forests strike again, as agents of diversity, as reservoirs for species that we had not imagined were reservoirs for species. (In this case, the survey found 14 species in suburban forests, including dogs and snowmobilers, but only six in the so-called wild forests.) But another great this about this investigation is that it involved a high school study participating in "project-based study." A high school student, in other words, monitored the cameras and collected the data. High schools are a little like urban forests these days, especially given the emphasis on intellect-stomping standardized tests and now budget cuts everywhere: they are places where we have resources we probably don't know about, resources we are mostly not taking advantage of, resources we are likely hindering.
via the NY Times.

Fireball

The American Meteor Society confirmed a meteor spotted today over New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A photographer in the Lehigh Valley saw it, according to the Express-Times:

Express-Times contributing photographer Tim Wynkoop reported seeing the meteor shortly before 1 o'clock as he was driving on South Main Street in Phillipsburg, traveling west to east across the southern sky, though it was gone before he could snap a picture. "In the sky straight ahead, I saw this huge ball of fire coming down out of the sky, probably at a very sharp angle," Wynkoop said. "It left a very long trail of fire. I didn't see any smoke. As soon as you saw it, it was gone."

Said Robert Lunsford, the AMS's operations manager: "This was indeed a meteor."

They're Back

As noted today in the Daily News, the whales are back.

Human Settlements

Something that Thoreau does well is help you think about cities as human settlements, places that are as natural as any place else, sometimes more natural than other places. Here, via a cool place somewhere in Oregon, are these photos by Michael Wolf.

via The Best Time of Day

Maps are Cool

Hey Ralph!

It's the bus, stupid!
As mentioned here:
INFRASTRUCTURIST!
It's the fastest growing transportation mode in the U.S., and it is a relatively cheap way of (a) getting people places where they can be productive or happy or both; and (b) give them some jobs doing (a).

Snow

Snow, somewhere in New York, and yet as if by magic, here. Courtesy of A Jeremiad.

A Tree House Story

by Andre Dubus II

I WAS 9, my brother, Jeb, was 8, and maybe if we’d been born in a city we would not have started building treehouses and forts, igloos and tepees, even digging a hole in the ground that we covered with thick branches of pine, oak and maple. Or maybe if our mother and father did not fight most every night, their yelling rising up the stairwell like some poisonous vapor to us and our two sisters, Jeb and I would not have gone looking for the scrap lumber we found under the closed summer camps near our rented house in southern New Hampshire — two-by-fours and two-by-sixes, warped plywood and long planks of rough spruce....

in the Times here

The White Oaks

Brooklyn's Prospect Park, as seen in a photo by Joseph O. Holmes.
via http://pictureyear.blogspot.com/

The Concrete Jungle

Yes, Thoreau Laughed

Brooklyn Bridge Biking

Just for the record, Brooklyn Bridge biking can be done--calmly, genteel-ly, sensibly even, as this Thoreau You Don't Know-related biker shows...

But Seriously...

From the Opionator:

The Dow crossed 10,000 Wednesday (and held that level Thursday, closing at 10,062). Thursday morning, Goldman Sachs announced a quarterly profit of $3.19 billion. Neither number would have seemed believable a year ago, but now that these results are in, what do they say about the state of the economy? Also, who should get the credit, and what on-going academic feuds can Dow 10,000 be a datapoint for?...

Robert Reich doesn’t think there’s much wisdom, collective or otherwise, behind the Dow: “This is all temporary fluff, folks. Anyone who hasn’t learned by now that there’s almost no relationship between the Dow and the real economy deserves to lose his or her shirt in the Wall Street casino.”

PS: H.N.T.G.R.

Why Is This So Fun?

If Thoreau were Carl Sagan.... Ah, forget it!

last seen on the Daily Dish

A Sustainable Cities F.Y.I.

Talking Bikers

The Times has a nice David Byrne on biking video.

Is New York City Really Just a Giant Terrarium?

via Urban Plant Videos

Snobbery!

Q: Is there anything better than Bike Snob?
A: No.

As you may be aware, there is a genteel, non-competitive cycling conspiracy (GNCCC) afoot (or awheel) in New York City, and to a certain extent Robert Sullivan is its literary voice, giving it ready access to media outlets such as the Times. Furthermore, David Byrne is the conspiracy's celebrity spokesperson because his rock star status appeals to the youth (in the context of the GNCCC, the "youth" means people 55 and under), and the Dutch city bike is its de facto symbol and totem. While ostensibly the GNCCC is pro-cycling and works in our favor, there runs beneath it a sinister undercurrent of elitism, strange helmets, and pro-Dutch propaganda.

The Battles on the Brooklyn Bridge

We at the Thoreau You Don't Know propose the following truce...

ONE of the great battlefields in the war between bicyclists and pedestrians in New York City is the Brooklyn Bridge. Pedestrians think all bicyclists are out-of-control maniacs; bicyclists — the majority, anyway — are just trying to avoid cars and not break a sweat. The stripe painted down the center of the elevated Brooklyn Bridge walkway, to separate bicyclists from pedestrians, has become a line in the sand. We need to erase that line once and for all.
via the New York Times

Available now from Robert Sullivan, the New York Times best selling author, and published by Harper. A description from the publisher:

What if Henry David Thoreau—America’s pioneering nature lover, the man who famously lived in a little house of his own construction—was actually pro-city rather than just a monkish introvert who wanted to be left alone in the woods? What if the man we think of as so serious and introspective was really a joker, a bit of clown, a kind of stand-up comic in his day? And what if the fact that he often went home to his family or into town for supper didn’t show him to be a cheater or a fraud as far as self-reliance goes? What if spending time with his friends and family—i.e., community—was his point all along?

Reasons that Thoreau is maybe more applicable to these troubling times than you may imagine

¶ He was living not in a peaceful time where he could just sit there and look at a pond but at a time of financial crisis, panics, even, when unemployment was first being recognized as a crisis, when people began to think that the economic system was broken—to wit, there were unemployed workers often living at Walden Pond.
¶ He was not just writing about butterflies (though he uses one to excellent, redemptive effect at Walden's end) but about how work was taking over our lives, how play was disappearing, how things like conversation were disappearing, along with sympathy, empathy and gratitude.
¶ He was very interested in gadgets, being an engineer himself--no technophobe--and living at a time of intense technological excitement.
¶ He was big on tunes, as in music, as in having a playlist, though in those days it was called a repertoire—he played a mean flute.

A Review

A mischievous reporter on the universe, Sullivan has found beauty in a notorious swamp in The Meadowlands (1998) and wisdom in an alley in Rats (2004). In his latest slyly philosophical inquiry, he endeavors to free Henry David Thoreau from his calcified reputation as a cantankerous hermit and nature worshipper. Sounding like your favorite teacher who manages to make history fun and relevant, Sullivan vibrantly portrays the sage of Walden as a geeky, curious, compassionate fellow of high intelligence and deep feelings who loved company, music, and long walks. An exceptional writer mad for puns, Thoreau
was also a bold social critic and—the crux of Sullivan’s stimulating argument—a brilliant, tongue-incheek
humorist. Sullivan, himself plenty saucy, also elucidates Thoreau’s radical focus on “man’s
interaction with nature.” In command of a great diversity of fascinating material, Sullivan succinctly illuminates the striking parallels between Thoreau’s time and ours—foreclosures, lost jobs, and rapid technological change. Thoreau remains vital and valuable because of his acute observations, wit, and lyricism and his recognition that the “force of life is everywhere,” a perception even more essential now that the consequences of the societal choices Thoreau prophetically critiqued have reached staggering proportions.--Donna Seaman, in Booklist

More from the publisher:
Henry David Thoreau is one of those authors that readers think you know, even if they don’t. He’s the solitary curmudgeon with the shack out in the woods, the mystic worshipping solemnly in the quiet church of nature. He’s our national Natural Man, the prophet of environmentalism. But here Robert Sullivan—who himself has been called an “urban Thoreau” (New York Times Book Review) presents the Thoreau you don’t know: the activist, the organizer, the gregarious adventurer, the guy who likes to go camping with friends (even if they sometimes accidentally burn the woods down). Sullivan argues that Walden was a book intended to revive America, a communal work forever pigeonholed as a reclusive one, and that this misreading is at the heart of our troubled relationship with the environment today. Sullivan shows us not a lonely eccentric but a man in his growing village, a man who danced and sang, who worked throughout his short life at the family pencil-making business, and moved into his parents’ house after leaving Walden Pond, but always paid his father rent. Passionate yet whimsical, The Thoreau You Don’t Know asks us to re-examine our everyday relationship with the natural world, and one another.