Word: thoreau
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...Harvard offers a liberal arts education. This has no practical purpose. I study government. Not political science; government. I learn about tyranny of the majority, not health care. Rather than learning about basic accounting or business management, as my brother at Virginia Tech does, my bookshelf is full of Thoreau and my checkbook is a mess. I am learning how to think, although I have nothing that practical to think about (something you may have noticed from this column). Not that I mind, I may never get rich, but as one government professor noted, I will never be bored...
...begrudge them, for myself or others. But it seems sad, really, that many folks will graduate from Harvard having been up the Washington Monument but not the one on Bunker Hill, having been to Ireland but not South Boston, the home of Kafka but not of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, or Longfellow...
American environmentalism, as a credo, as an ideology, as whatever you'd like to call it, is a remarkably democratic tradition. Whether analyzing the thought of Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1837, or that of John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club in 1892) or Rachel Carson, the environmental movement in this country is founded on a belief in the link between all human beings and their natural environment. Some of these links, as Carson sought to inform us, are of a direct, "scientific" nature. The chemicals that enter into and damage our environments have similar consequences on our bodies...
Near the beginning of Walden, Thoreau writes that "it would be some advantage to live in a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them." The irony, of course, is that now we would say even the most "civilized" mid-nineteenth-century American lived a life far more primitive than any imaginable today. No Coca-Cola (nor plastic bottle in which to hold it); no Gore-Tex jacket (nor zipper with which close it); no Chevy...
...eyes of the consumer, these products exemplify Thoreau's celebrated "simplicity." The company's best-seller is a drink you can buy at Store 24 for a little over a dollar. Its two main ingredients are sugar and water, and it comes in a plastic bottle with a twist-off cap and coated wrap-around paper label. That...