The boatman : Henry David Thoreau's river years

Resource Information

The work The boatman : Henry David Thoreau's river years represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Billerica Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The boatman : Henry David Thoreau's river years

Title remainder

Henry David Thoreau's river years

Statement of responsibility

Robert M. Thorson

Creator

• Thorson, Robert M., 1951-

Author

• Thorson, Robert M., 1951-

Subject

• Massachusetts -- Concord River Valley
• Stream conservation
• Concord River Valley (Mass.) -- Environmental conditions
• Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862
• Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862
• Stream conservation -- Massachusetts | Concord River Valley
• Ecology

Language

eng

Summary

The Boatman gives readers a Thoreau for the Anthropocene epoch. As a backyard naturalist and river enthusiast, Thoreau was keenly aware of the way humans had altered the waterways and meadows of his beloved Concord River Valley. And he recognized that he himself--a land surveyor by trade--was as complicit in these transformations as the bankers, lawyers, builders, landowners, and elected officials who were his clients. Robert Thorson tells a compelling story of intellectual growth, as Thoreau moved from anger, to lament, to acceptance of the way humans had changed the river he cherished more than Walden Pond. In his twenties, Thoreau had contemplated industrial sabotage against a downstream factory dam. By the mid-1850s he realized that humans and an "imperfect" nature were inseparable. His beliefs and scientific understanding of the river would be challenged again when he was hired in 1859 as a technical consultant for the River Meadow Association, in America's first statewide case for dam removal--a veritable class-action suit of more than five hundred petitioners that pitted local farmers against industrialists. Thorson offers the most complete account to date of this "flowage controversy, " including Thoreau's behind-the-scenes investigations and the political corruption that eventually carried the day. In the years after the publication of Walden (1854), the river boatman's joy in the natural world was undiminished by the prospect of environmental change. Increasingly, he sought out for solace and pleasure those river sites most dramatically altered by human invention and intervention--for better and worse.--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Biography type

contains biographical information

Cataloging source

MH/DLC

Dewey number

818/.309

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

LC call number

PS3057.N3

LC item number

T486 2017

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography