A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

AUTHOR: Thoreau, Henry David

Thoreau’s treatment of the relation between wilderness and civilization includes several issue of relevance to his veg*nism: his expression of disgust and anger when they kill a squirrel for dinner but cannot bring themselves to eat it, his anti-anthropocentric stance on land cultivation and engineering innovations which disturb the migrations of fish, and his apologetic monologue addressed to the fish (the shad). Thoreau's attitude towards the human modification of the environment and the destructive cultivation of wilderness stands in stark contrast to that of his fellow-Transcendentalist and ethical vegan, A. Bronson Alcott.

KEYWORDS: food, animals, land usage, environmentalism, nature, religion, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen):

To become civilized requires of "uncivil men" that they "temper their diet duly with the cereal fruits, consuming less wild meat and acorns” (200). Thoreau mentions his own dinners of boiled rice or, arriving at Billerica, huckleberries from the vine, bread and sugar, with “cocoa boiled in river water” (34). They "stop to pick nuts and berries, and gather apples by the wayside at their leisure” (114) and enjoy “our supper of hot cocoa and bread and watermelon” (336). Indeed, the food that Thoreau and his brother take with them on the trip is potatoes and melons from their own garden. Still Thoreau acknowledges the killing of animals for food. Speaking of an older English man who used to fish regularly, Thoreau writes: “His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their bibles” (19). He describes killing and cooking pigeons: “...for beside the provisions which we carried with us, we depended mainly on the river and forest for our supply. It is true, it did not seem to be putting this bird to its right use, to pluck off its feather, and extract its entrails, and broil its carcass on the coals; but we heroically persevered, nevertheless, waiting for farther information. The same regard for Nature which excited our sympathy for her creatures, nerved our hands to carry through what we had begun” (223).

However, he describes their killing of squirrels as a crime: “The carcasses of some poor squirrels, however, the same that frisked so merrily in the morning, which we had skinned and disembowelled for our dinner, we abandoned in disgust, with tardy humanity, as too wretched a resource for any but starving men. It was to perpetuate the practice of a barbarous era. If they had been larger, our crime had been less” (224). Thoreau goes on to ask,

Behold the difference between the one who eateth flesh, and him to whom it belonged! The first hath a momentary enjoyment, whilst the latter is deprived of existence!’ -- ‘Who could commit so great a crime against a poor animal, who is fed only by the herbs which grow wild in the woods, and whose belly is burnt up with hunger?” (qtd. 224).

He is quoting from an essay published in The Dial (Vol III, no. 1 : 82), that includes “Extracts of the Heetoopades of Veeshnoo Sarma,” by which the editors of The Dial likely meant Vishnu Sarma’s Hitopadesha, an ancient collection of Indian fables and general advice.
Eastern religious texts are referenced in A. Bronson Alcott’s Journals; he was very impressed by their wisdom and advice, and passed the books onto his friends in Concord.

During his river travels, Thoreau makes several references to “the dam” that has disturbed the usual habits of the fish and eels that he is describing: “Salmon, Shad, and Alewives were formerly abundant here, and taken in weirs by the Indians, who taught this method to the whites, until the dam, and afterward the canal at Billerica, and the factories at Lowell, put an end to their migrations …” (28). Thoreau speculates on the capacity of nature to outlive the signs of human society: “Perchance, after a few thousands of years, if the fishes will be patient and pass their summers elsewhere, meanwhile, nature will have levelled the Billerica dam, and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals…” (28). Reflecting on the settlement of Billerica, Thoreau describes the arrival of white settlers and colonists, their destruction of the forest and habitats of native species, the creation of farms and orchards, the removal of the Native peoples, and the renaming of the various villages and towns based on Anglo-Saxon names, and the naming of these people: “Yangeese, and so at last they are known for Yankees” (46-48). This description of the colonization of native New England repeats the same ideas and themes as A. Bronson Alcott, but Thoreau’s description is quite clearly negative while Alcott terms this development “civilization” and “progress.”

Last updated on March 8th, 2024

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