The fall of the year is always a good time to reflect upon the clipped and domesticated form of nature that abides throughout much of the North America. Fall is a time of hikes and pumpkins, hayrides and apple pies - the vestiges of a somehow more wild past. As the leaves put on their annual display, they bring ideas about man, landscape and the relationship between the two to the forefront of our consciousness.

Here in New England, it's hard to talk about nature without considering Henry David Thoreau and his influence on the way we think about the man/nature relationship. Though many essayists before him wrote extensively about the natural world, Thoreau presented a fundamentally new vision. His approach to life in the woods is important not simply because of his beautiful, often poetic descriptions of the simple peace and contemplation to be had there, but because it re-imagined the economic relationship between man and land. Thoreau's brand of economics and the way he discusses "getting a living" pre-figure the current movement toward the "social enterprise" model of thinking now taking hold in the nonprofit sector.

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Since their arrival in Concord, the Thoreaus had always been in the business of pencil making, and after he inherited the family firm from his father, Henry David became darn good at it. In fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson, once reported that Thoreau quit the pencil business because he had made the perfect pencil. He also quit a number of other jobs over the years, many of which he hadn't even come close to perfecting. In filling out his ten year anniversary questionnaire form Harvard, Thoreau stated that he had been occupied as a "Schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter - I mean a house painter - a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Writer and a sometimes Poetaster."

Through this varied set of jobs, and ultimately through his famous stay at Walden Pond, Thoreau took advantage of a new set of economic freedoms that allowed him to begin to hammer out the concepts that would become the basis of the environmental movement here in America. He used the economic trends and facts of the day as a means to pursue a values-driven agenda.

Thoreau published Walden right smack in the middle of the 1850s, a decade that saw total railroad mileage in the United States grow from 7,000 to 30,000. At the time, the US economy was beginning to really build momentum, barreling along like -- well, like a freight train on a long stretch of trans-continental track. In the years after the Panic of 1837 and before the onset of the Civil War, America really hit its industrialization stride, fundamentally changing the way that people lived and how national economies worked. That kind of change has not been repeated since the computer-driven globalization of international labor that we currently find ourselves in the middle of.

The men of Thoreau's time were given unprecedented economic freedom - it was only in these times that sons were allowed to become teachers or gardeners or house painters, and not doomed to a life of only pencil making as their fathers had been. As much as scholars, students, environmentalists and teachers have treated Thoreau's residence in the woods as a retreat from the economic circumstances of his time, few people realize that it was this very economic system that allowed Thoreau to pursue that life in the first place. Further many of the traits that determined the "economic character" of the day -- industriousness, mechanical handiness, self-reliance and entrepreneurship -- thoroughly permeated Thoreau's own character and shaped his approach to life in the woods.

What made Thoreau different (and what ultimately helped his ideas spawn a movement) was that he was the first to create a job for man within nature itself, to truly place him not above but within the workings of ecology. In choosing to "devote [him]self to labors that yield more real profit, though but little money," Thoreau attached non-material worth to the land and non-monetary payment to a job.

In a body of writing that is so rich and dense and often obtuse, it's easy to lose sight of what is real and what is metaphor. The same goes for the actions of a person who could be stubborn beyond all reason. But when Thoreau says that he "never assisted the sun materially in its rising, but, doubt not, it was of last importance only to be present at it," he is not speaking metaphorically. And when he states, "My friends ask what I will do at the pond. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progression of the seasons?" he's not just being a jerk. He means what he is saying in a very literal way, and these two statements reveal something about why he is working, about what all this walking around in the woods is for.

Though the study of economics has done a good job of detaching the everyday activities of occupation from any kind of moral significance, the reasons why we work remain fundamentally a moral concern, as they did in Thoreau's time. It is in the reasons for his work that Thoreau made his contribution to the environmental movement. He used the economic freedoms and norms of his time to advance the moral mandate of stewardship and to reject the emerging ethic of consumption taking hold in the major population centers of his time. In the face of the first malls and department stores, which appeared in America during the 1830s, 40s and 50s, Thoreau worked to learn about and maintain the ecosystems in which he lived.

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It is important to remember that this whole thing we call the environmental movement has its deepest roots in a chapter called "Economy." In the last twenty years, we have entered an era every bit as transformative as the industrial revolution through which Thoreau lived. The mobility of goods, services, ideas and people is at an unprecedented level. Winston Churchill famously wrote, "Democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all the others." Many people have extended this logic to the system of capitalism. As the world economy barrels along like -- well, like a trans-global jet airliner, we can take a page from Walden and use the trappings of the economic system to fix the things that are wrong with it.

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