¶ … 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...

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…