building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

potential quarter sections, no longer as dedicated to a republican
form of government, but as an inner treasure” 269 .
The substantial difference between Emerson and Thoreau consisted precisely of the
theoretical need practised by Thoreau to be a free, “natural” man, almost an
oriental ascetic. Thoreau’s teaching, as his writings in Walden proved, aimed to
educate a man, who would become able to understand the environment he lived in,
in the hope of being able to preserve it.
Whereas for Emerson “nature is transcendental”, in the sense that the elements of
the natural world set up a sort of religious deism, for Thoreau the approach to
nature was not motivated simply by moral demands, but rather by a practical
intransigence, by a barely concealed objective to prove he was not involved in the
habits of the masses. He covered his own behaviour with political and social
importance and presented the latter as irritating actions of “civil disobedience”. The
amazement, with which he described his approach to the plant and animal world,
showed that his experience of living in the woods had nothing to do with satisfying
a personal inclination, but rather it put into practice the old philosophic motto
. Thus, Thoreau’s tales are always a metaphor for something
else. His forays into unexplored territories and his contacts with wild animals also
alluded to an exploration into the twists and turns of his own ego. His objective was
to indicate to his contemporaries the intellectual stimuli offered by the
environment by rediscovering the natural heritage, which technological and
scientific progress had ignored and hidden. On the other hand, the theories of
George Perkins Marsh (1801‐1882), expressed in Man and Nature (1864), an
extremely original geographic and scientific investigation, echoed Thoreau’s
philosophical reflections. In this work, Marsh dealt with the planet which he
conceived as an environment for man to fulfil his tasks. The radicalism of this thesis,
as Mumford so brilliantly highlighted, was the innovative idea towards man, who
was compared to a sort of active geological agent, capable of creating and
destroying, of influencing nature to the point of putting his own existence into
269 MUMFORD, Lewis, The Brown Decades, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1931, p.31
(Italian translation edited by Francesco Dal Co, Architettura e cultura in America, dalla guerra civile
all’ultima frontiera, Venezia, Marsilio, 1977, p. 68)
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