Imagine Henry Thoreau’s mother, trying to pack him up for Harvard in 1833. “Simplify, schmimplify,” Mrs. Thoreau might have exhorted her abstemious son, “At least take a change of socks and underwear.”
No such resistance to consumption afflicts my daughter, Hannah, as we shop for college in 2009. A pile of necessities grows in her bedroom, including but not limited to a Powerbook, extra-long sheets and comforter, assorted instant soups, mugs, posters, shoes galore, and a shower caddy with a startling array of bath products. To Hannah, the collection seems an expression of delight in her imminent adventure. For me, the proliferating acquisitions are a bulwark against my insecurities. At this late date, I fear, I have failed to prepare Hannah for her future.
My defenses took a shuddering blow when the St. Mary’s College website announced Hannah’s reading assignment for freshman orientation: Field Notes from a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert. My teenaged perusal of Walden immersed me in images of Thoreau’s experiment in the pre-industrial New England woods. Kolbert presents a much darker vision: a post-warming world of vanishing species, churning hurricanes, and shriveling ice sheets. According to the journalist’s muster of experts, the climate change crisis is neither potential nor impending but upon us. Is Hannah ready for a planet Kolbert describes succinctly as melting?
Protecting one’s offspring from traumatic information is de rigueur for most parents. I prefer to think of it not as withholding the truth but as preserving childhood. On September 11, 2001, many adults sheltered young ears, as I did my third grader’s, from tragic news of the Twin Towers and Pentagon. The appropriate ages to broach disturbing or horrific subjects is a matter for debate, as I realized when a teacher assigned 10-year old Hannah the task of printing internet photos of skeletal Holocaust victims. But surely some level of maturity is required to cope with Kolbert’s haunting eyewitness reports. An Inuit hunter, who has been observing climate change accelerate since before Hannah was born, says, “Our children may not have a future. . . . It’s not just happening in the Arctic. It’s going to happen all over the world. The whole world is going too fast.”
“Surely joy is the condition of life,” wrote Thoreau in an essay celebrating the wilds of Massachusetts. Though convinced about the global warming, I also believe in biophilia, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s theory that humans are hardwired to need an intimate connection with non-human nature. For years my family let me lure them outdoors, away from all electronic temptations, to hike in the Catoctins or stargaze far from city lights. Evidence is mounting (though not as fast as greenhouse gas data) that such experiences bolster child development, relieve stress, thwart obesity, augment cognitive abilities, and deepen spirituality. As I watched my children arrange stones in a streambed, I felt they were building a bastion against loss and disappointment, a font of optimism and resilience for whatever lay ahead.
But by Hannah’s sophomore year of high school, creek walking faded into memory. While Thoreau tucked a few field notes in his straw hat, Hannah’s text-crammed backpack weighed so heavily that she walked at a slant. Yet the AP Chemistry class could not find time to explore the thermodynamics of our endangered atmosphere. In their quiet desperation to earn Ivy League admission or scholarship money, Hannah’s contemporaries devoted their hours and energies to seeking top grades and SAT scores. Abetted by equally desperate parents, even volunteers at tree plantings seemed more concerned with plumping their resumes than beautifying the neighborhood with living carbon sinks.
Henry Thoreau studied hard, too. He knew ancient languages well enough to write home in Latin. In classical literature, Virgil’s Georgics especially spoke to him. A poetic tribute to farming, the Georgics express the reassurance Thoreau found in the eternal rhythms of the seasons. Such simple faith, in the renewal of spring and the beneficence of the sun, must seem quaint to this college cohort. Young Henry could learn the art of beekeeping from a 2000-year-old manuscript, but today’s students confront bee colony collapse disorder. In Kolbert’s book and elsewhere, they read of delayed blooming patterns, shifting wildlife migrations, and other symptoms of an unstable earth that Thoreau could not have imagined. How do it feel to learn that by 2020, when today’s teens dream of having children of their own, their planet may have reached a tipping point? “The frontiers are not east or west, north or south,” Thoreau wrote, “but wherever a man fronts a fact.”
Yet I am glad Hannah’s future alma mater assigned Kolbert’s Catastrophe. With so few readers in Concord, Thoreau fretted, a man who reads an important book “will find nobody to speak to, but must keep silence about it.” Learned professors, thankfully, will guide the Class of 2013 in discussing the science and politics of global warming. Prepared or not, Hannah and classmates must speak up for their own future. But before she heads off, I’ll tuck a pair of hiking books into her dorm pile. And I’ll hope she emails often, preferably in English. Perhaps something she reports will help me learn how to prepare her little brother, almost half a generation younger. To Eli at least, Class of 2021, the sun is still a morning star.
