Walking Written by Author Henry David Thoreau,

¶ … Walking" written by author Henry David Thoreau, the writer discusses the importance of living in nature and the beauty of an untouched world. Some critics have labeled Thoreau as one of the world's first environmentalists. He and the other members of the transcendentalist school were inspired by the wilderness and featured aspects of the natural world in their published works (Bagley 1). This is because the emphasis of much of his writing, "Walking" in particular, deals with the environment and the natural beauty that human beings take for granted and then abuse by destroying these places of nature and building structures and towns when the beauty should outweigh the human need.

What Thoreau desires, according to some, is to impart the importance of the wild and the wilderness. Even in metropolitan areas there are still locations of wildness which have yet to be manhandled. People need to stop and appreciate these places or else they will disappear entirely (Stabb 1). It became apparent to Thoreau and his comrades that the world was becoming more industrialized and that the nature that they so worshipped was being marginalized and minimized into smaller and smaller parts. Thoreau asks his readers to reexamine their priorities and to become like the hypothetical walkers of his essay. They are able to see the landscape that is around them and appreciate it for its own essence (2). His viewpoint is that although men can purchase land, no one can own the beauty of a natural landscape.

Thoreau traces the growth of industrialization in the United States and how this increase in industrialization leads directly to a decrease in respect and appreciation for wilderness. He does so by first making the concession that the United States had at one point been in possession of one of the most beautiful natural landscapes in the world (Thoreau 2). This, he says, was abandoned in the desire to acquire moneys a quickly and expeditiously as possible. The result was that less and less attention was paid to the ramifications of actions against the environment. This led to a national psychology where in the natural world is viewed as being of secondary importance to the intentions of the population.

One of the most interesting conflicts that Thoreau explores in "Walking" is the difficulty of man who has to destroy nature in order to construct housing in which he may life and yet also honor nature (Thoreau 1). This is still a conflict that comes up when environmentalists and developers clash over the use of land. In the words of Margaret Brulatour, Thoreau "discusses the conflict between the need for shelter and the waste of mortgaging one's life to purchase a house" (1). In essence, when mankind gives up too much of that natural world in exchange for materialism, then he also gives up one of the greatest parts of him or herself. The nature world is akin to man's nature. Thoreau writes, "Nowadays, almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest, and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap" (1). With the progress of time, there is the need to change some aspects, such as removing some wilderness to make houses but that there must be a limit to the amount of construction that occurs so that nature is not completely obliterated.

The modern environmentalist movement has its basis in the works of Thoreau, Emerson, and their colleagues (Oelschlaeger 1). Their writings inspired politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt to propose and support legislation which would protect the American landscape. It becomes evident that in "Walking," Henry David Thoreau intended to relate his feelings about the natural world and to encourage others to do whatever was in their power to protect and preserve the wildness of the wilderness.