| Sumario: | Henry David Thoreau is in many ways an odd hero for the environmental movement, especially in relation to climate change. Invocations of Thoreau and Walden in response to climate change tend to combine these environmental and anti-consumer traditions, embracing Thoreau and his life at Walden above all as a model for individual lifestyle environmentalism. For Thoreau's example to support rather than impede our ability to respond effectively to climate change, then, we need to popularize new versions of Thoreau: a Thoreau who came to understand he could not retreat into nature or the self from the enormous outrages of slavery, in which he realized he too was unavoidably implicated; and who would respond, I hope, with a similar realization of implication and similarly fiery political activism to the enormous outrages of climate change today. Matteson and Grote playfully stage a debate between these two tendencies, personified as two different figures of Thoreau in dialogue with one another, "Henry David" and "David Henry" respectively: DAVID: Would you have the Thoreau who speaks for Nature, and for the flourishing of the planet?.
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