“Wherever the Hog Comes, the Rattlesnake Disappears,” or “Sic Transit Gloria Ruris:” Fuller and Thoreau on Civilization and/as Extinction

Abstract

In her Summer on the Lakes in 1843 Margaret Fuller regretfully foresaw the the settlers’ “mode of civilization will, in the course of twenty, perhaps ten, years, obliterate the natural expression of the country.” Such will be Henry Thoreau’s concern ever since (if not before) he set off to Walden Pond in 1845; year after year this concern will only intensify with Thoreau witnessing how “the wild fruit of the earth disappear before civilization” and “the whole country becomes a town or beaten common,” as noted in the 1858 Journal. This paper focuses on the proto-environmental thinkin/awareness indicated by Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (her only work of the kind) and tries to envision such a d irection of discourse as suggesting (and itself providing) a certain immediate intellectual/literary context in which Thoreau’s own environmental imagination will very shortly thrive and triumph.