One hundred and seventy-four years ago, on July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau, age 28, moved into a 10 x 15 x 8 feet cabin he built himself from pine wood and recycled materials on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

His experiment lasted two years, two months and two days. “I went to the woods,” he wrote in his 1854 masterpiece “Walden”, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

For Thoreau, a meticulous observer of nature, “essential facts of life” included the state of the flora and the fauna at Walden and at his nearby birthplace of Concord, and the timeless lessons embedded in the cycles of the seasons.

Thoreau’s reflections on nature and human nature seem more relevant today than in the pre-Civil War years of his time. Although he shrugged off as coincidence his “deliberate living” commencing on Independence Day, it is instructive to imagine what Thoreau would make of America today and how he would deal with our current crises.

Here is the Bard of Walden delivering his Independence Day address, circa 2019:

“The pink mayflowers and the lavender azaleas are blooming earlier at Walden by almost a week than in my time. Average temperature of a Concord spring has increased by 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the dark days of slavery. Only the willfully blind and the terminally ignorant fail to see that the cause is climate change. Greenhouse gas emission continues to destroy the environment while rising sea level, 8 inches since my time, threatens millions and swells the number of refugees. I read a report that around 1 million species on earth face extinction, a biodiversity loss of catastrophic proportion. Anthropocene is real. If the planet dies, we die. To concerned Americans I say: Stand on your roof in the morning and like the chanticleer, wake up your neighbor to the existential threat posed by climate change and reckless industrialization.

But will you? Probably not. When I said our inventions were pretty toys that distracted our attention from serious things, I could never have imagined that two centuries later, it would be million times worse. You are buried in the small screen of your smart toys, oblivious to trees, birds, rivers, seasons. The mass of men lead lives of toxic desperation, addicted to the shallow stimuli of social media. Meanwhile, the disease of debt and fake ownership afflicts everyone. I found farmers in my time becoming slaves to banks to own their houses, but it was the mortgaged houses that owned them. Now the farmers are leaving or dying but the mass of men – from baristas at Starbucks in Concord to worker bees in Silicon Valley  – have succumbed to the Faustian Bargain, putting even lemmings jumping off cliffs to shame.

But I am optimistic. I am heartened by the sight of solar panels and wind turbines. I am inspired by women-led movements to turn America into a more humane country, for the promise of the Green New Deal and the fight against misogyny and kakistocracy. I applaud ordinary citizens uniting to prevent walls from going up and civility and decency from coming down. I am moved by the generosity of immigrants feeding traumatized migrants at our Southern border and by Americans rejecting the click-swipe-rate economy in favor of meaningful labor.

In consuming less, creating communities and connections, concentrating on clean energy, and caring for all living, sentient beings are the preservation of the world.

Hasan Zillur Rahim is a professor of mathematics at San Jose City College.

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