What if the future of forests depends less on human management than on our willingness to learn from other species? Dan McKanan returns to Thoreau’s “Succession of Forest Trees” to trace a forgotten, democratic vision of ecological change.
John Kaag revisits Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story "The Celestial Railroad" to explore how Transcendentalism’s soaring ideals could drift into comfortable illusions—and how figures like Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and a changed Ralph Waldo...
Lawrence Buell reflects on a lifetime of reading Emerson and Thoreau, arguing that Transcendentalism is a philosophy of continual self-renewal, calling us at every age to resist conformity, sustain vision, and imagine the world otherwise.
Megan Marshall returns to the lives and words of the Peabody sisters to ask what use Transcendentalism is now. Through their example, Marshall finds that the movement’s enduring promise lies in its demand that thought become deed.
In this essay, Charles M. Stang investigates Thoreau's belief that we have lost the art of truly seeing, and that recovering—or rather, developing for the first time—our full sensory potential represents both an educational and spiritual imperative