Conclusion: The Promise of a Delighted Environmental Ethic

Summary

This book is primarily an interpretation of Walden. Focusing on Walden as I have, however, ignores some of the most interesting scholarship on Thoreau of the past few decades. Sharon Cameron and William Howarth have both argued for the centrality of Thoreau’s Journal in any assessment of his life and work as a whole.¹ For both, the Journal is Thoreau’s great work, both by external literary criteria and in his own view. This argument rests on the way in which the ongoingness of the Journal suits Thoreau’s sense that thinking itself is ongoing, that it can never rest, that it always happens in place, as I suggested in the Introduction.