A Mission Statement for Humanity
How has this quote escaped attention all these years?
It is to the point, universal, inspirational, succinct. It amounts to a mission statement for humanity. It could change the world.
"Would it not be well for us to consider if our deed will warrant the expense of nature?"
Not dramatic enough for a manifesto? Give it another look. It is a powerful and radical thought clothed in disarmingly graceful, understated and nonconfrontational prose. It ought to be plastered all over those posters the kids made for Earth Day today. But it won't be, I can almost guarantee. I've never seen it quoted anywhere.
Henry David Thoreau worked that sentence into the middle of his journal entry for Feb. 17, 1841, an entry that admittedly was otherwise not likely to stir the modern soul. The preceding sentence reads, "The mechanic works no longer than his labor will pay for lights -- fuel -- and shop rent."
Still, Thoreau's journal is widely read today and always in print, something that can be said of but a comparative handful of journals, like those of Lewis and Clark or Anne Frank. Yet somehow Thoreau's sound bite for society has lain there on the page undiscovered or, at a minimum, unheralded and unused for decades.
A shame, because it says in one sentence what the environmental movement has been trying to say for decades, implicitly or explicitly, not always successfully: In everything we do, consider carefully what its impact on the environment will be and act accordingly.
Imagine if people took Thoreau's question into consideration as they went about their personal and professional lives. It would affect how big our houses are, how we heat and cool them and to what temperature. It would affect what we drive, how often we drive and how far. It would affect our choices in clothing, food, career, family size and leisure activities. There would be less consumption, and less waste. Do I need four pairs of hiking boots?
Pay the question heed and it will bite the ankles of corporate America every moment of every day.
Actually, were business to pay it heed, were it ever truly to become part of corporate decision-making, we'd have a revolution. Would GE have dumped PCBs in the Housatonic and Hudson rivers 40 years ago if its workplace ethic embraced Thoreauvian philosophy?
I showed this quote to a trusted friend of impeccable environmental sensibility, a person who treads very lightly on the Earth. His one reservation was that people might need to read it twice before the meaning washed over their consciousness.
I don't think that is necessarily bad, and I don't think Thoreau's thought is any less accessible than "Think globally, act locally," an enduring environmental maxim.
There are other quotes appropriate to this day, but they either are not quite as succinct, or are slightly off-point.
Aldo Leopold, author of the classic "A Sand County Almanac," penned a nice one-liner a half-century ago: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community." A little too textbookish, alas.
Wendell Berry, an elegant essayist and contemporary, wrote, "This is the justice we are learning from the ecologists; you cannot damage what you are dependent upon without damaging yourself." A neat observation, but not quite workable as the catchphrase for an environmentally refined civilization.
John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and one of the great early figures in preservation work, wrote, "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." This is a great and graceful synthesis of ecology, but a tad too abstract to serve as the philosophical I-beam for life.
Thoreau's maxim works. It ought to be put on computer screens, in boardrooms and on billboards.
"Would it not be well for us to consider if our deed will warrant the expense of nature?"
Second thought, forget the billboards.
Henry David Thoreau, the 19th Century naturalist and philosopher. The image is in the public domain.
The grave of Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts. To this day, people leave small items that in some way refer to Thoreau or his writing. Click to enlarge.