Henry David
Thoreau (1817-1862) once said, "What good is a house if you haven't got a
tolerable planet to put it on?" There
it is, the plain truth in a nutshell.
Today, in the face of melting glaciers and ice caps, tundra on the verge
of releasing "the methane monster," and fresh water supplies drying
up, human beings, dedicated mainly to creature comfort and large profits, seem
intent on burning the planet's carbon supplies untilEarth's thin atmosphere
can take no more. Born in a distant
time, distant by US standards, America's own Henry David Thoreau saw the
writing on the wall. Where, he asked in
the 1840's, from his cabin by Walden Pond, is humanity headed? Where do people think they're going on faster
trains? Why this impulse to expand,
consume, cut down, and overheat? When, as
he said, convinced, "We can never have enough of nature." Thanks to Greenpeace activists in Holland,
this post was prompted by their recent 248-page "leak" of an
extraordinarily undemocratic treaty called the TTIP which would have
devastating impacts on Europe's environmental, agricultural, energy, and
privacy standards if it were to pass. Trans-national
business interests, already in control of US commerce and policy, would love to
sink their fangs into European laws. In
the name of "free trade," the TTIP would lower Europe's now higher
standards in nearly every sphere of life.
But Europe doesn't need more electronic surveillance, growth hormones
for livestock, GMO's and companion herbicide, or that poisonous means of
drilling for gas called "fracking" (fracturing), just to name a few
examples of the TTIP's impositions. If
Thoreau were here, he'd likely advise European citizens to practice civil
disobedience in order to keep this insidious treaty from becoming reality! He wrote in Life Without Principle in 1854, "I think there is nothing, not
even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, to life itself, than this
incessant business," and "Even if we grant that the American has
freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical
and moral tyrant." Thoreau himself
was once imprisoned for not paying war-destined taxes on principle. Fierce individualist, philosopher, and
Transcendentalist along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was born in 1817, a
period totally uninformed by radio, television, telephones and computers. There were no cars, only horse-drawn carriages
and wagons in the streets of his hometown, Concord, Massachusetts, in the
forests and rolling farmlands of the Northeast.
Printed matter was the only organ of information for male-only voters. American readers had recourse mainly to
British works. Not everyone could read. Holding Negro slaves was legal in those United
States, and the steady, ruthless expansion westward continued, marked by the slaying
of Native Americans and the laying of rails for "the iron horse" as the
endangered natives called locomotives.
To construct America's increasingly dense network of rails, "railroad
barons" employed minority groups, especially the Chinese, whose situation amounted
to slavery. Between 1846 and 1848, the
US government waged war with Mexico and confiscated a large portion of its
land. It was a brutal time. Thoreau decried the violent market-based
values of his day and denounced policies which desecrated human rights and the
environment both. A Harvard graduate, he
said, "Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance
of generations and nations." He
himself wrote many. Gifted to think independently, questioning every
convention, he is best known for having gone off to the woods to live in
solitude for a few years, keeping a diary known as Walden. He famously
concluded that, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." As a Transcendentalist, he was, basically, an
idealist who saw the Supreme Good, what most people call God, expressed most eloquently
in the natural world. Thoreau was probably
saying that most of us, distracted by gadgets and an overwhelming interest in
property, miss out on the best things in life and die unaware. "Money is not required to buy one
necessity of the soul," he once wrote.
What, Thoreau asks, are we doing with our days? Where is our attention? Are we "living deliberately" and
"simply" as he himself set out to do? Are we true to our dreams and our ideals? Or are we slaves to details and jobs we don't
love? According to Thoreau, you can
never aim too high: "Do not worry
if you have built your castles in the air.
They are where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them." As the bella
stagione (beautiful season) unfolds, here, too, is a happy thought from the
mouth of Thoreau, pronounced in his lecture, Walking: "All good
things are wild and free." Thanks
to the brave and the conscientious, to those who want to stay awake, not live asleep,
may it always be so. UN'AMERICANA A
VENEZIA
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento