In Walden, Thoreau wrote, “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?” Thoreau’s lifelong engagement with Nature was an essential element in his development as a writer and thinker. His turn to science was an effort to understand the earth, air, and water that shaped his world. But he also continued to identify himself as a Transcendentalist, and he was careful to root these beliefs in the living earth. What role did 19th century science play in his evolving Transcendentalism? How did his work anticipate later scientific developments? How do his later, more scientific writings fit alongside his other work? What does it mean to view Thoreau as a scientist when that term was rapidly changing? How did he understand the connection between the human and more-than-human world? How did science shape his approach to social reform? The 2027 Annual Gathering invites proposals that explore the many aspects of Thoreau’s engagement with the natural, scientific world.
While we welcome, as always, papers that reflect on Thoreau’s writing and legacy, we also welcome papers that do not center Thoreau but rather illuminate how his era more broadly experienced or thought about the essential elements of life; or how those thoughts and worldviews might be present today.
Possible topics include
- Finding the “higher law” in the elements and the natural world (“Heaven is below our feet as well as above our heads”)
- Surveying and botanizing as ways of understanding landscape and community
- Water as an essential element in Thoreau’s physical and spiritual excursions
- The role of science in transcendentalist utopian communities
- The impact of Eastern religions and philosophies on Thoreau’s view of Nature
- Thoreau as interdisciplinary thinker and practitioner (“a mystic – a transcendentalist – & a natural philosopher to boot”)
- Thoreau and the natural sciences (such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, ecology, geology, and physics)
- Thoreau and major scientists (such as Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, E. O. Wilson)
- Thoreau’s “earthly intelligence” (environmental spirituality, observation, ontology)
- Thoreau and agricultural innovation
- Thoreau and development of ecology
- Thoreau’s relationship to technology
- Thoreau and STEAM, integrating the sciences and the arts
- The role of science in the broader Transcendentalist movement
- Science and social reform in the Transcendentalist era and after
- Successors to Thoreau’s engagement with science