Sense of Place and Sense of Taste: Thoreau's Botanical Aesthetics

Abstract

The influence of 19th-century naturalist Henry David Thoreau's body of writings on contemporary American environmentalism has been extensively documented and theorized by literary scholars. Thoreau's prose evokes the natural world in scientifically precise terms and in combination with philosophical ruminations, historical references, and aesthetic judgements. As a transdisciplinarian, Thoreau's fascination for the local environment of Concord was not only scientific, but also cultural, historical, and spiritual. Bradley Dean sees Thoreau as a "protoecologist" whose later work anticipates the birth of modern ecology through its meticulous description of natural occurrences. Four years after Thoreau's death in 1862 from tuberculosis, the German biologist and follower of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, would propose the neologism 'Oecologie' as 'the science of the relations of living organisms to the external world, their habitat, customs, energies, parasites, etc.' Both terms 'economy' and 'ecology' share the Greek root 'oikos', originally denoting the daily operations and maintenance of a family household. As many contemporary environmental writers have underscored, ecology is the study of the earth "household." At the heart of Thoreau's protoecological writings is an aesthetics of the natural world. His ecological aesthetics resists paradigms of beauty that privilege art over nature, humanity over nonhuman life, and vision over the non-ocular senses of sound, taste, touch, smell, and spatial orientation. Moreover, Thoreau's aesthetic approach to ecology and the natural world is an embodied-rather than visually distanced-one.