Henry David Thoreau has been called the patron saint of early environmental thought in the U.S., from his transcendentalist writings during the mid-19th century to his decision to live a secluded life at a cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
A new Ken Burns documentary, Henry David Thoreau, directed by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers, examines Thoreau not just through the lens of American history, but also asks what his work means in our current era. All three episodes are now streaming on pbs.org, the PBS app, and Prime Video.
The Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier spoke with the Ewers brothers about the film.
Reid Frazier: Was there anything about Henry David Thoreau that surprised you as you got to learn more about him in the making of the film?
Chris Ewers: Yeah, I think almost everything I learned about Henry through the process of production was a surprise. I walked away from Thoreau in high school knowing him only as a prophetic hermit who hid away from society on the shores of a pond and spent his entire life writing about that experience. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.
My reintroduction to Henry as a part of both of [making the film] really opened my eyes to a much fuller picture of a man whose contributions, not just writing, we all know him as a writer, but [also] to science, to philosophy, not so much to poetry, as he was a very bad poet, by all admission. As the abolitionist, as the advocate for social equality, there was so much more to him and his life and his story than most of us know, which is, of course, one of the main driving reasons for the film itself.
Reid Frazier: And Erik, what are some things about Thoreau’s life that you think most people just don’t know or understand that you wanted to get across in this movie?
Erik Ewers: Like my brother, I experienced Thoreau the first time in high school. And suffice to say, I got a C minus on my Walden essay because I didn’t invest in what he was saying at all. I barely understood it, to be honest with you. So like many, perhaps most, people, I walked away as someone who was just dismayed by this 19th century writer who wrote very poetically and very, very dense prose. And I failed to understand any value in it.
So you can imagine 40-something years later, all of a sudden, I’m asked to make this film. So we started reading, and it just opened up this incredible world, dispelling every single myth. That the time that he lived at the pond, and I put “lived” in quotes, was only two years, two months and two days out of 44 years of life. So imagine that you pack a human story into just two years — like, take your life or my life or anyone’s — it’s not doing justice to the full person.
He was a socialite. He wasn’t a hermit. He got around town. He visited people. People visited him regularly. He had very, very close friends. He was also kind of a curmudgeon, and he also had very high expectations of people. And if you didn’t live up to his expectations, he lost interest in you. So he’s a very complicated human being, just like the rest of us.
And one of the things that Chris and I have [learned] is that every human story has extraordinary points to it. And as storytellers, all we’re trying to do is bring out all of the person’s character and life in all of its subtlety, the highs and the lows.
Reid Frazier: The film describes an early trip up the Merrimack River in New England that Thoreau took with his brother early on in life. Chris, can you just talk about that trip? Why was that significant? And why did you guys decide to focus on that for part of the film?
Chris Ewers: The trip is significant for a number of reasons, large and small. An example of the small significance is the fact that the Thoreau that we know was very much a land-based individual, whereas he spent an enormous amount of his time on the water. He was an avid sailor, an avid boatsman and I think that’s important because it really frames a lot of his own personal discovery.
The trip he takes with his brother, the intent was sort of an adventure exploration travel to the White Mountains. And what he experienced along the way would end up dramatically influencing his appreciation, understanding and devotion to nature itself.
It forced him to question what it was that we were sacrificing in terms of the natural world for the clothes on our back, for material things.
What they saw along the Concord and Merrimack rivers from Massachusetts into New Hampshire was factories and mills. It was not the beginning of, but certainly [was] the first act of the Industrial Revolution. And Henry especially noticed the effects that it was having on the natural environment. It forced him to question our capitalistic approach; it forced him to question consumerism. It forced him to question what it was that we were sacrificing in terms of the natural world for the clothes on our back, for things, for material things. This was a sort of an inflection point for him.
Reid Frazier: Erik, when I screened the film, this trip seemed sort of foundational in laying out the intellectual history that you are really delving into with his response to modern life.
Erik Ewers: I think he started the trip kind of naive. He and his brother spent their childhood and a lot of their early adult life in nature, playing in the woods. They were outdoor kids. And people today might say, ‘Oh, so what?’ Well, kids back then didn’t play outdoors. They maybe were in their yard. But wild nature —forests and rivers — those were considered dangerous places to go in society. And these two ran amok all day with adventures that they would make up all over Concord. So when they both launched their boat that one morning to row, pole and sail up the rivers, they were just doing it with youthful enthusiasm.
And you’re right, it was revelatory for him. He noticed that Indian burial grounds were dug up by farmers, and sometimes the bones and markers were just cast aside, and he thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s awful.’ The treatment, the lack of respect for these humans. He saw how the destruction of the forests for fields was flooding, and like my brother said, he started to see literally the Industrial Revolution come to life. Not just in seeing factories, but there were dams and waterfalls, which stopped the spawning of fish, which was a big deal. He also saw the waterways at times choked with vessels, bringing cargo and supplies and products up and down the river for distribution from these factories.
And so I think they were both very dismayed at how modern things got the farther they went north. Expecting to see more and more wildness, it was exactly the opposite. And so it did frame a lot of his thinking. He was outraged at the end of that trip. They did enjoy themselves, but it was not at all the trip they expected to have.
Reid Frazier: The chapter of his life that most people know him from is the two years on Walden Pond and the book that he wrote about it. Why did he go to Walden, and what came out of that for him?
Chris Ewers: Walden was an experiment, sort of a social experiment for Henry. He had reached a point in his young adulthood, early ‘20s, where he had graduated from Harvard. He had lost his brother John, with whom he had taken the trip up to the Concord and Merrimack rivers, which was devastating for him. He was failing miserably in his pursuit of making a career through writing. And he was having a really hard time sort of placing himself in the society as he knew it.
You know, it’s not a scenario unfamiliar to early 20s and 20-somethings today, right? I mean, you’re out of school, you’re at this crossroads in your life. You have to decide what to do, where you’re going to work, how you’re going to make a living, how you’re going to become a part of society, right?
So rather than just buy into it, Henry describes this mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. He decides instead to dive headlong into this social experiment. He doesn’t remove himself from society, but he steps away from it — about a mile exactly — to a place where he can, you know, build a small house on [Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s land and figure out how he can live deliberately.
He famously wrote that he wanted to live deliberately, and he wanted a viewpoint and perspective from which he could question all of these things that he just couldn’t accept in society. So from that point, he spent two years of his life on Walden. He didn’t write about it initially. He went there initially to write the manuscript for a book about his and his brother John’s river trip.
He has this revelation that the transcendent nature, essence of nature, isn’t in the supreme vistas at the top of mountains or at Lake Tahoe or some beautiful pristine place, but it’s in your backyard. It’s over your shoulder.
I think that over the two years that he was there, he certainly was able to discover life through a different lens. He became much more spiritually connected with the natural world. He was able to separate himself mentally and emotionally from the constraints of modern society. And ultimately, after he left and brought the results of his experiment back to society, spent almost seven years writing the book.
Reid Frazier: Erik, what is the lesson of Walden that you think people should know about?
Erik Ewers: I think it changed everything for him. He suddenly became a good writer, which is surprising. He goes off into the woods, spends two years writing and contemplating and thinking. And the next thing you know, through [a] trip to Maine where he climbs Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine, he has this revelation that the transcendent nature, essence of nature, isn’t in the supreme vistas at the top of mountains or at Lake Tahoe or some beautiful pristine place, but it’s in your backyard. It’s over your shoulder. It is anywhere you want to find it.
I think the biggest takeaway from his experiment for two years, two months and two days [on Walden Pond] is that everyone can find their own inner truth that will drive your sense of purpose, meaning and joy in life.
I think it transformed his life, and it confirmed for him that you can live simply and deliberately, find meaning and purpose, and find truth, inner truth. I think the biggest takeaway from his experiment for two years, two months and two days [on Walden Pond] is that everyone can find their own inner truth that will drive your sense of purpose, meaning and joy in life.
How can you be happy if you don’t feel like you’re doing something meaningful? If you’re just sitting around eating bonbons, are you ever going to be happy? Probably not. What he wanted us to learn is that at the end of Walden, in the conclusion, he says don’t go live by a pond; that’s not the point of me telling you this tale. My point is that you need to find your experiment based on what you believe to be true about yourself, about your connection to the world, about your connections to others, your philosophies, your moral interpretations of society. You need to conduct your own experiments to see how you can fit into society in a way that gives you true happiness, true meaning and true purpose.
And my God, in the past 20, 30 years, we have lost our way as people, especially with the invention and proliferation of social media. We have lost our way. We don’t even know what the truth is anymore. You can’t tell when you’re scrolling if something is completely generated by AI or if it’s an actual, real event that really happened. It’s very, very dangerous because it’s not only going to affect our perception of the outer world, it’s going to affect our perception of ourselves. We all need to operate on truth. And I think that this 19th century guy, actually more than anyone I can think of, has something of incredible value to us today. And that’s why we’re so passionate about this film and about this man.
Reid Frazier: The other big aspect of the film that really struck me was not just Thoreau’s meditations on the environment or materialism, but also on social justice. Chris, maybe you could talk about how he encountered those issues in his time. I mean, this is the middle of the 19th century. Slavery was still legal.
Chris Ewers: The female contingent of the Thoreau household in Concord was incredibly active in the abolitionist movement. They were very intelligent, very well-read, and very outspoken in support of the abolition of slavery. Initially, Henry sort of steered clear of it, stayed out of it and decided rather to focus on his own writing. You know, it was through a handful of policy changes, [such as] the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, where he saw multiple newly-freed slaves having escaped from slavery in the South, returned essentially as property from his home state of Massachusetts, where slavery was [by then] illegal. So he saw this hypocrisy. He saw 30 years after the Declaration of Independence declared all men equal, he sees we’re not upholding this. This hasn’t been enacted. We’re not living this.
So over the course of several years and multiple experiences, his approach changed. After [Ralph Waldo] Emerson gave a very fiery speech in opposition of slavery, he started identifying himself as an agent of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society [to which his sister Helen belonged]. He became physically and emotionally invested in the cause.
Henry teaches us that environmental conservation, care for the environment, and social justice are not separate movements. They’re not separate ideas. They’re very much intertwined.
I think ultimately, Henry teaches us that environmental conservation, care for the environment, and social justice are not separate movements. They’re not separate ideas. They’re very much intertwined. They’re both very much a man-made construct. They’re parts of the same idea: How we treat the environment is connected directly to how we treat people, particularly disenfranchised or marginalized people. These experiences opened Henry up to an entirely new, passion in life [meeting] John Brown, especially.
Reid Frazier: Say more about that, about his impressions of John Brown (the radical abolitionist).
Chis Ewers: Even though he influenced nonviolent protest and particularly, very heavily influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, his intent was never to be a nonviolent resistor, right? He sees something that he feels is unjust and speaks out about it. For Henry, it was never about, is this legal, whatever it is. It was always about, is this right? So along comes John Brown, who, you know, dependent upon your point of view, is labeled as a terrorist, a murderer. (Brown was executed in 1859 after attempting to lead a raid on a federal armory in what is now Harpers Ferry, W. Va., to start an armed slave insurrection.)
Henry meets him and describes him as a blast of light, a comet in the sky for freedom. And John Brown really heavily influences Henry and Henry’s thinking to the point where he says, “You know, I can see a point in which my death or my taking of a life could be necessary in support of abolition.” Henry had experienced multiple epiphanies throughout his life, whether they be about the environment, about social justice, or about how to live a life well-lived. There are these moments, these inflection points that influenced him heavily, and his writing.
Reid Frazier: After watching the film, you can’t escape thinking, “Okay, here’s a guy who’s saying, basically, stop looking at your phone, look around you, experience the world.” What would he think of our world that we live in today? Do you ever think about that?
Chris Ewers: [The writer] Bill McKibben says it pretty well in the film. He says we’ve built the world that Henry was afraid of, you know, the world that he feared. Through his writing, he railed against everything that we chase, you know? We’ve covered the world in concrete, asphalt, and steel. We live lives of distraction constantly.
One of the things that he modeled so well for us was practicing presence. It’s something that we have all but forgotten how to do collectively as a race of people. I think that there’d be certain things that of course I think he’d be fascinated by. Certain technologies, I think that he wouldn’t be able to help himself, but to enjoy using. In his time, he railed against the railroad, the telegraph.
Yet, these were things that he used, maybe not the telegraph, but he certainly rode the railroad 70 times. It enabled him to have a lecturing career, so there are the inevitabilities of conveniences. But I think that if Henry were around now, it’d be the most iconic example of, ‘I told you so.’
Reid Frazier: Erik, what aspects of Thoreau’s mental universe would resonate with people today?
Erik Ewers: The problem is that not a lot of Thoreau’s universe relates to people today. But I will tell you, Chris and I have done more than a dozen different premiere and promotional events on behalf of the film. I will tell you what has astonished me is that after each event ends, there’s usually a rush of people who want to come up and share stories or comments. Every single event, there has been a faction of young people who come up and want to talk and stay, sometimes for an hour or more after.
When I was in Seattle, there were a half dozen students. I talked to them for over an hour, and I think it’s an important thing to mention that they were saying, ‘I’m so inspired by what I saw and what you spoke about. How do I engage with my own life?’ They’re asking me to tell them. So it’s actually proof positive how dislocated they are from their own quality of their own lives. And we all know why. We don’t even have to point fingers. We all know why. What I ended up saying to them is that, you know, that is Thoreau’s whole point, that you have to find it. It takes an effort. Finding out the truth of anything requires an effort, even about yourself. You can’t just sit there and do nothing about it. If you want to change, you have to act.
And some of the kids would say, ‘Well, should I be getting arrested then? Like he did, in protest of slavery for not paying his taxes.’ And I said, ‘I can’t answer that question for you. You have to do what you think is right, given how strongly you feel about something.’
I think, unfortunately, there’s not a lot of Thoreau that resonates in today’s world. And we find ourselves kind of duty-bound, honor-bound to try to do our small part to elevate this 19th century guy who, almost 200 years ago, was talking about the same crap that we’re dealing with today on a philosophical level. It just wasn’t as high a technological or modern innovation kind of level, but it’s still the same mentality, and we can change. We do have the ability to make choices.
Filmmakers Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers directed the film, Henry David Thoreau.
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