William Henry Hudson, A Crystal Age

British author, naturalist, and ornithologist, William H. Hudson grew up on

the Argentinean Pampas and then fell in love with Patagonia, where he
traveled to study the birds. As a response to industrial development, the
utopian vision of this novel published in 1887 centers on harmonious appre-
ciation of nature. A traveler recounts in the first person of an idyllic society
and of his struggles to adapt to it. The rich descriptions of the peaceful
lifestyle of working with hands, following a vegetarian diet, and celebrating
holidays based around nature, provide a beautiful example of a possible
reality that can be read as an anticipation of modern ecological mysticism.

“At night we sleep; in the morning we bathe; we eat when we are hungry,
converse when we feel inclined, and on most days labour a certain number of
hours. But more than these things, which have a certain amount of pleasure
in them, are the precious moments when nature reveals herself to us in all
her beauty. We give ourselves wholly to her then, and she refreshes us; the
splendour fades, but the wealth it brings to the soul remains to gladden us.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods
Known as a politically oriented poet-philosopher and a non-conformist thinker, the American
Henry D. Thoreau (1817-1862) established his reputation as a prophet for ecological thought and
the value of wilderness, representing a radical version of sufficiency in the history of ecological
utopias. In his view, nature is the mother of humanity, a creator of life and beauty. Seeking
solitude and self-reliance, he moved to the woods by Walden Pond, outside Concord Massachu-
setts, where he lived alone for two years in a self constructed cabin before returning to society.
Through his example, he sketches an alternative society and depicts a lifestyle based on a
simplification of life, stripped of materialism, so that humanity can return to its deepest core,
and recover a more worthwhile happiness in the appreciation of nature. Throughout the book he
expresses his concern for the damage caused by current human activities to the natural environ-
ment as a consequence of the urbanization of the nineteenth century and the “spiritual poverty”
of his contemporaries, who become their own slave masters. He then articulates the idea that
humans are part of nature and that we function best, as individuals and societies, when we are
conscious of that fact.
The edition here presented is limited to 100 copies for sale in the United States, 750 for England,
and 35 presentation copies.

“Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould
myself?”
“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human
race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.”