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Henry D. Thoreau, the nineteenth century American transcendentalist, is known as a nature writer. The work by which he is best known, Walden (1854), is a record of his living in the woods at Walden Pond for nearly 2 years. Lawrence Buell, in his The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writings, and the Formation of American Culture (1995) presents Thoreau's view on nature from the perspective of environmentalism and in the light of its implications for nature politics. Its underlying assumption is of a dichotomous picture between, on the one hand, the natural and the biological, and, on the other, the social, the cultural, and the conventional. A shift from homocentrism to biocentrism is called for. This paper questions this Buellian politics of the environment and tries to destabilize its assumptions of coexistence between man and nature. In order to show why this is problematic and to present an alternative vision of environmentalism and political education, I shall discuss Stanley Cavell's reading of Thoreau, a reading conditioned by ordinary language philosophy. Cavell's Thoreau will redirect us from biocentrism to humanism and provocatively turn political education away from anodyne aspirations for coexistence and towards a qualified isolation. Political education is learning how to be a "neighbor," with nature and other people, bridging the private and the public – a political education for the perfection of human nature. To be a neighbor in this sense, I shall argue, is something other than mere coexistence.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-4047-1_12

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