6.1 If Manchester, England was the cradle of the industrial revolution and its twin, the environmental movement, then America was the place these two children grew up. American industry was in the process of subduing a continent. Railroads were opening up vast territories to exploitation: huge landscapes were set to crops of cotton or maize, and whole regions torn up in the frenzied search for gold and oil. Daniel Yergen captures the scene well in his history of the oil industry – The Prize: “Fueled by the rule of capture – and the race for riches – the wild drive to produce created in the Oil Regions a chaotic scene of heaving populations, of shacks and quick built wooden buildings, of hotels with four or five or six straw mattresses crowded into a single room, of derricks and storage tanks, with everyone energized by hope and rumor and the acrid scent of oil. And everywhere, there was one inescapable factor – the perennial mud. “Oil Creek mud attained a fame in the earlier and subsequent years, that will ever be fresh in the memory of those who saw and were compelled to wade through it,” two writers observed at the time. “Mud, deep, and indescribably disgusting, covered all the main and by-roads in wet weather, while the streets of the towns composing the chief shipping points, had the appearance of liquid lakes or lanes of mud.”

6.2 But a handful of lone voices saw things differently. One such was Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

6.3 Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

6.4 He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.

 6.5 Thoreau was initially not so much concerned with the impact of industry on the environment as its impact on the human sensibility – his concern was not the chemical composition of the atmosphere, but the spiritual composition of the human soul.   He took a stand against the rise of industry and its factories and big cities and mankind’s consequent loss of connection with the natural world. To demonstrate his point most practically, in 1845, exactly a hundred years before Dr Servettaz began his campaign to save lake Annecy, Thoreau cut himself off from society and spent two years living in the woods as close to nature as he could get.

6.6 “I went to the woods 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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"

6.7 His account of this time, “Walden”, extols the beauty of nature and argues passionately for the protection of at least some parts of the country from the ravages of urbanization and industrialization. His spiritual quest led him in the 1850s to become “increasingly fascinated with natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram, and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his words.

6.8 The beauty of Walden pond was to capture Thoreau’s heart as lake Annecy was to capture the heart of Dr Servettaz. He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the 26 square miles (67 km²) town in his journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

6.9 Thoreau was both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, his late essay, "The Succession of Forest Trees", shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.”

6.10 That his writings combined a love of Nature with the political imperative to resist an unjust state – or an unjust state of affairs, made him one of the major inspirations for the environmental campaigners who were to come.