# Cultivating Ecological Vision: Thoreau, Emerson, and Goethe The ecological crisis is inseparable from a crisis of perception, according to Ryan Shea, who will lead a workshop on phenomenological ecology at the CSWR on October 2-3, 2026. Turning to Goethe, Thoreau, and Emerson, Shea argues that ecology must become a discipline of attention that teaches us to perceive nature as a field of transformative relationships. May 13, 2026 By Ryan Shea | Edited by Russell C. Powell An encompassing ecological vision may be one of our best hopes not only for a healthy and habitable future, but also for a wise and worthwhile present. Such an ecology cannot be less than a science, but it can and must be more. It needs to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and engage a fuller spectrum of human capacity. The first teacher of this sort of ecology is nature herself: a grey squirrel burying the acorns of a red oak tree, a monarch caterpillar eating a milkweed leaf. Yet, we also have second teachers: cultural traditions whose goal is not to transmit doctrine, but to enable us to learn directly from the first teacher. ![Goethe portrait](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-05/Goethe.jpg?itok=Mo6nL8C1) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)One of the best of these second teachers is the German poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Two of his most illustrious students are Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson said of Goethe that “he has said the best things about nature that ever were said. . . . He has contributed a key to many parts of nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind.”[\[1\]](#_ftn1) Goethe, Thoreau, and Emerson all saw the importance of *coming to our senses*. Goethe entreated us to “not seek for something behind the phenomena—they themselves are the theory.”[\[2\]](#_ftn2) Thoreau wrote that “the question is not what you look at, but how you look, and whether you see.”[\[3\]](#_ftn3) Here Thoreau is taking a first step towards a rigorously phenomenon-centered science, which he further elaborated near the end of his first essay for *The Dial*: “The true \[scientist\] will know nature better by \[their\] finer organization; \[they\] will smell, taste, see, hear, feel better than others. \[Theirs\] will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.”[\[4\]](#_ftn4) Goethean science and American Transcendentalism are united in their single central goal: *to teach us how to see*. Once this lesson is learned, then we can attend to the trees, fungi, insects, rivers, mammals, mountains, and their ecological interrelationships. The kind of ecology we will learn from Goethe, Thoreau, and Emerson is not a new theory capable of better explaining millions of environmental data points. Rather, they train us into what we could call a phenomenological ecology: *how to start seeing ecologically*. I have seen much more of and into the interconnected natural world by working with Goethe and his American inheritors. I want to give a preliminary sketch of the two most important insights I’ve learned from them. The first lesson is about form and transformation. Goethe was so convinced of the importance of attending carefully to form that he coined the word “morphology” to name this practice when done with scientific rigor. During his European trip after leaving his position as a Unitarian minister, Emerson found his new calling at the Jardin des Plantes of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Here he spent weeks in careful attention to the vast array of wisdom-imbued living forms, set out side by side. Emerson tells us that “every form is a history of the thing.”[\[5\]](#_ftn5) And Thoreau spent the better part of each day looking carefully, drawing, and faithfully describing in his voluminous journals the forms of natural beings he encountered. Forms, patterns, shapes, and colors are the most basic lessons of our first teachers. Goethe, Emerson, and Thoreau help us cultivate the habit of attending to forms. Yet Goethe’s most famous botanical work is not titled *The Morphology of Plants* but rather *The Metamorphosis of Plants*. Its opening lines are: “Anyone who has paid even a little attention to plant growth will readily see that certain external parts of the plant undergo frequent change and take on the shape of the adjacent parts.”[\[6\]](#_ftn6) To attend is not only to cast a momentary glance at a thing, but to stay with it over time. When we stay with any natural being, especially a living one, we witness them grow and transform. Emerson declares that “\[nature’s\] permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation.”[\[7\]](#_ftn7) ![Papaver poppy](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2026-05/papaver.jpg) The bud, flower, and fruit of the common poppy (*Papaver rhoeas*)In a work laying out the principles of morphology, Goethe helps us to see why studying form always means moving beyond the fixed and static: “if we look at all these forms \[*Gestalten*\], especially the organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is at rest or self-contained—everything is in a flux of continual motion. . . . What is formed will be reformed again.” Goethe concludes with a methodological prescription, “If we want to behold nature in a living way, we must follow her example and become as mobile and malleable as nature herself.”[\[8\]](#_ftn8) This last sentence rewards sustained reflection. It is the motto of The Nature Institute in Ghent, NY, where I work as a researcher and educator. To develop an ecological vision, we need not merely to see new things and think new thoughts, but transform the way we see and metamorphose the way we think. Thoreau is the embodiment of Goethe’s dictum. He is quite literally a mobile naturalist. His four-hour daily walk was no mere physical exercise, but a phenomenological pathway. He was a true ecologist in its etymological sense (*oikos*, the Greek root for “ecology,”means “home”). He didn’t seek to domesticate the earth to his prefabricated worldview. Rather, he took up what Gary Snyder would later call the “practice of the wild” to come home *into* the world.[\[9\]](#_ftn9) Thoreau went to the plants where they were in their natural contexts, rather than bringing them into his lab. He went to them both in space and in time, *when* they were in their environments. Many of Thoreau’s journals are filled with phenological notes. Phenology is the study of *when* things appear in nature and comes from the same Greek root (*phaino*, *“*to shine, to illuminate, to appear”) as *phenomenology*. His records were so careful and systematic that contemporary environmental scientists are using them to track climatic changes over the last two hundred years. By living with and living into the time of the appearances as an ecological whole, year after year, Thoreau himself began to become “as mobile and malleable as nature herself.” This led him to write “The Succession of Forest Trees,” an essay explaining how forests change over time, forty years before Henry Chandler Cowles’s famous 1899 paper, “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan,”[\[10\]](#_ftn10) which served as a foundation of modern ecological science. Emerson, in “The Poet,” articulates the essence of the imagination as being “a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”[\[11\]](#_ftn11) Staying with individual forms of flowering annual plants over time enabled the mobile-minded Goethe to *see* metamorphosis. Staying with ecologies over time, year over year, taught Thoreau to *see* forest succession. Succession is the metamorphosis of a whole ecosystem. The second lesson I learned from Goethe, Emerson, and Thoreau is about moving beyond objectivity towards interrelationship. Ecology is the study of relationships, specifically between organisms and their environment. Since humans are organisms, we are frequently told that humans are not separate from nature but are a part of nature. John Muir’s famous quote—“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” —could be hung over the mantle in every ecologist’s home. To say that everything is connected is one thing. But to experience that connection oneself is something else entirely. How might we learn to have an intimate experience of relationship that does not descend into mere subjective impressions or accidental associations? ![Poppy leaf metamorphosis](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-05/Poppy%20leaf%20metamorphosis.jpg?itok=ZxCMDAmI) The different fully formed leaves of the common poppy (*Papaver rhoeas*) set out in their metamorphic sequence (leaf pressing by Craig Holdrege; photo by Ryan Shea)Goethe was not content to leave science as he found it. The scientific drive towards objectivity was crucial for Goethe, but only as a first step. He was greatly pleased when an eminent contemporary doctor described his thinking as “objective,” and commented that this was because his thinking was a perceiving and his perceiving a thinking. He spoke out against the one-sided introspection of the ancients, embodied in the maxim “know thyself.” Goethe said that we must strive for a harder and more paradoxical goal: “As human beings, we know ourselves only insofar as we know the world; we perceive the world only in ourselves, and ourselves only in the world. Every new object, clearly beheld, opens up a new organ in us.”[\[12\]](#_ftn12) Emerson quotes Goethe — “every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul”—at the end of the chapter on language in his book *Nature*. If Thoreau was the embodiment of the first lesson of phenomenological ecology (that we must become “as mobile and malleable as nature herself”), Emerson is the full incarnation of the second lesson: that we know the world only in ourselves and ourselves only in the world. He speaks of it all the time. In a way, Emerson never talks about anything else. He uses many terms to name this mystery: relation, analogy, symbol, allegory, circles, emblems, hieroglyphic. But perhaps his favorite term is *correspondence:* “Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”[\[13\]](#_ftn13) Therefore, “so much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess.” In “The American Scholar,” he summarizes the totality of what he has to say on education with a formulation that retrieves Goethe: “And, in fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself’, and the modern precept, ‘Study nature’, become at last one maxim.”[\[14\]](#_ftn14) Emerson showed us that in order to have a robust and experiential ecology, we must begin with “correspondence.” The sort of mutual involution, or co-recapitulation, we find in the relationship between the human-as-organism and its environment-as-known can help us to develop deeper ideas of what “relationship” might mean. Thoreau, Emerson, and Goethe give us a place to start.[\[15\]](#_ftn15) By beginning with our immediate experience and moving into the dynamic relationships we find there, we can take the first steps toward the cultivation of a new ecological vision. **Ryan Shea** is a full-time researcher and educator at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York ([www.natureinstitute.org](http://www.natureinstitute.org/)). He taught environmental philosophy, philosophy of science, interdisciplinary humanities, and nature writing at Providence College for eight years. He is also a doctoral researcher at MESH (Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities) at University of Cologne, Germany. His research seeks to develop the practice of phenmenological ecology, focusing on plants and insects. Ryan is editor of The Nature Institute's in-house publication *In Context* and co-producer of its podcast *In Dialogue with Nature.* He co-edited a recent translation of Goethean biologist Andreas Suchantke's book *Insect Forms and Patterns: Exploring the Language of Nature* (2025)*.* --- [\[1\]](#_ftnref1) Ralph Waldo Emerson, *Representative Men* (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1850), 270. [\[2\]](#_ftnref2) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, *Scientific Studies*, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), 307. [\[3\]](#_ftnref3) Henry David Thoreau, *The Journal of Henry David Thoreau*, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, vol. 2 (Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., 1984), 373. [\[4\]](#_ftnref4) Thoreau, “A Natural History of Massachusetts,” in *Natural History Essays* (Layton, Ut.: Gibbs Smith, 2015), 29. [\[5\]](#_ftnref5) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Uses of Natural History,” in *“The Best Read Naturalist”: Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,* ed. Michael P. Branch and Clinton Mohs (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 28. [\[6\]](#_ftnref6) Goethe, *The Metamorphosis of Plants*, trans. Gordon Miller (Cambridge, Ma.: The MIT Press, 2009), 5. [\[7\]](#_ftnref7) Emerson, “The Method of Nature,” in *“The Best Read Naturalist*,” 134. [\[8\]](#_ftnref8) Goethe, “The Intent Introduced,” in *Scientific Studies,* 63-64*.* The translation used here is by Craig Holdrege and appears in the Fall 2023 issue of The Nature Institute’s publication *In Context* 50, 12. [\[9\]](#_ftnref9) See Gary Snyder, *The Practice of the Wild* (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1990). [\[10\]](#_ftnref10) See *The Foundations of Ecology: Classic Papers with Commentaries,* eds. Leslie A. Real and James H. Brown (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 28-58. [\[11\]](#_ftnref11) Emerson, *Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson*, intro. Irwin Edman (New York: Harper Perennial, 1951), 278-79. [\[12\]](#_ftnref12) Goethe, “Significant Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase,” trans. Craig Holdrege, *In Context* 50 (2023), 13. [\[13\]](#_ftnref13) Emerson, *Nature*, in *“The Best Read Naturalist,*” 84. [\[14\]](#_ftnref14) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in *The Best of Ralph Waldo Emerson* (New York: Walter J. Black, Inc., 1941), 6. [\[15\]](#_ftnref15) The following books provide good introductions to Goethe’s phenomenology of nature: Craig Holdrege, *Thinking Like a Plant: A Living Science for Life* (Great Barrington, Ma.: Lindisfarne Books, 2013); *Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature*, eds. David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); Henri Bortoft, *The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature* (Great Barrington, Ma.: Lindisfarne Books, 1996). See also:- [ Transcendentalism Initiative ](/programming-threads/transcendentalism-initiative)