ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIAN REBECCA SOLNIT has argued that there is a “Thoreau Problem” in readers’ tendency to compartmentalize Thoreau. “Scholars and critics,” she complains, “permit no conversation, let alone any unity, between Thoreau the rebel, intransigent muse to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and that other Thoreau who wrote about autumnal tints, ice, light, color, grasses, woodchucks, and other natural histories, essays easily and often defanged and diced up into inspiring extracts” (972). This split in our thinking about Thoreau, she continues, is symptomatic of a larger split in American thought: the denial “that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country, are inextricably interfused” (972–73). Few critics, she says, “have been able to find Thoreau's short, direct route between them” (973).

Critics have indeed encouraged such a split between Thoreau the lover of nature and father of American ecology and Thoreau the individualist who champions social reform and passive resistance. Lawrence Buell, who dubbed Thoreau “the patron saint of American environmental writing” (Environmental Imagination 115), represents the former view when he suggests that as his career progressed, “Thoreau became increasingly interested in nature's structure, both spiritual and material, for its own sake, as against how nature might subserve humanity” (116). On the other hand, Alfred Tauber, in a book placing Thoreau in the context of ethics, argues that Thoreau was more “egocentric” than “ecocentric” because Thoreau always saw even nature in relation to self. “Thoreau, in the end,” Tauber concludes, “offers us only an incomplete portrait of moral identity, because he was so rigidly focused on the individual” (221).

For the past twenty years the emphasis has been on Buell's “green Thoreau,” his study of nature and his place in the history of the emerging natural sciences. Although this emphasis has been fruitful and important, there has been little notice of Thoreau's equally important immersion in the emerging social sciences of his own day, especially history, geography, and ethnology. John Aldrich Christie made a pioneering effort on this topic in his 1965 study, Thoreau as World Traveler, but his book has over the years been unjustly ignored.