by Richard B. Primack
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Most news about climate change focuses on the dramatic and the exotic: melting glaciers, rising sea level, the loss of polar bear habitat. Boston University field biologist Richard B. Primack makes it more real for us. He brings it right into our backyards, right now.
Primack was well established as a tropical botanist when, a decade ago, he decided to seek evidence of climate change closer to home. He was thrilled to discover that Henry David Thoreau collected data, created tables, and made observations in his journal, recording first-flowering dates for 300 different species in a wide area around Walden Pond from 1851 to 1858. Primack set out to follow in Thoreau’s footsteps – walking miles in the fields and woods of Concord, Massachusetts, to collect comparative data.
In Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods, Primack uses Thoreau’s detailed records as the starting point to take readers through a series of investigations about how higher temperatures have affected plants, birds, insects, and other life in the Northeast. The flowers and birds Primack tracks – from a lady’s slipper to a bobolink – are ones we know well. Climate change doesn’t feel far off at all.
Assisted over several years by his undergraduate and graduate students, Primack discovered that plants are now flowering weeks earlier than they did in Thoreau’s time. Some species have declined and some have disappeared. And the changes aren’t just with the flowers: his research includes ice-out dates, the effects on migratory bird arrivals, and many other topics. (Bird-watching was uncommon in Thoreau’s time, and his bird data are the oldest collected in Massachusetts.)
Although Primack has written for scientific journals, Walden Warming is for those of us who love to walk in the woods, for botanists and birdwatchers, for those who would like a better understanding of how climate change is affecting our immediate environment. With an engaging narrative style, Primack shows readers how he works and how he approaches research challenges.
Primack frequently quotes from Thoreau’s iconic Walden, as well as from the writer’s journal. He understands Thoreau and doesn’t get caught up in the mythology around him. “Thoreau was not (as some have made him out to be) a radical, antisocial individual who shunned humanity and saw value only in wild places. Walden Pond itself was not a wilderness by any stretch of the imagination…Thoreau’s point in going to Walden was not so much to avoid being around people – and if you read his journals, you find that for all his solitary walks, he did still interact regularly with the local residents – but to find solitude when he wanted it, the company of the natural world when he wanted it, and still maintain a connection to society because he wanted it.”
Primack envisions two future worlds: the one we appear to be headed toward, and one we could still have. Despite reporting disconcerting trends, his final chapter is a call to action and includes steps we can take to become observers and to join observer networks.
Many of Thoreau’s neighbors viewed him as a loafer and questioned why a Harvard graduate would not pursue a “serious” career. His on-again, off-again great friend Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented that Thoreau “had no ambition.” “Instead of engineering for all America, he was captain of a huckleberry-party.” Thoreau was very aware of his critics, commenting, “If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!” So, in the end, Thoreau gets the last laugh. More than 150 years later, we are still reading what the “captain of a huckleberry-party” had to say, and he is still arguing for preservation.