Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [86]
DeKorne wanted to live with the rhythms and energies of nature—and without the strictures of civilization. The quest, though it had social implications, was deeply personal. DeKorne had turned his back on the consumer culture to live “a Thoreau-like life with a wife and two kids.” Quite intentionally, he and his cohort recalled the transcendentalism of the 1840s.
PUTTING THE AXE TO THE ROOT OF SOCIETY’S EVIL
The 1840s in America were a time of tremendous technological change. In 1830 there were twenty-three miles of railroads. Twenty years later, there were nine thousand. The first telegraph message was sent in 1844, and suddenly information could travel faster than any animal or machine. At the same time, more and more white men could vote as suffrage began its long, slow spread. The banking system grew larger and more powerful. By 1860 there were 1,500 banks, each issuing its own notes and sending money flying around the country.8
This was the world of Henry David Thoreau and his short stint at Walden Pond living on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property in his homemade cabin. The American continent was in the process of becoming networked: Information, transportation, citizens, and goods were beginning to flow easily from one place to another. More people and things covered more distance than ever before, and the difficulty of getting almost anything from one point to another was decreasing.
As early as 1828 James Kirke Paulding could write a guide to New York for tourists called The New Mirror for Travelers and Guide to the Springs. “All ages and sexes are to be found on the wing, in perpetual motion from place to place. Little babies are seen crying their way in steam boats, whose cabins are like so many nurseries,” Paulding wrote.9 Thoreau might have recoiled from this world, but many found it more exciting than the world into which they had been born. Conversely, the dislocations of the time were also deeply disturbing. Dozens of groups of thinkers and activists sprang into the American public sphere. “In the 1840s there were dozens of reforms competing for the honor of naming the root of society’s evil and putting the axe to it—abolitionism, Grahamism, phrenology, prison and asylum reform, temperance, pacifism, compulsory education, women’s rights, land reform, workingmen’s associations, and so on,” wrote historian Taylor Stoehr.10
The Transcendentalist response to all the changes for good and ill in American society was, largely, to focus on the self to the exclusion of societal concerns. In particular, DeKorne’s hero, Thoreau, was prone to drop out. Even the deepest and most generous examination of the Transcendalists as a social movement excluded Thoreau because he was “interested in social reform only by way of personal example.”11
Whereas industrialists and utopians like John Etzler imagined that machinery could transform the world, Thoreau believed that social change could be accomplished only through internal changes. In reviewing Etzler’s green-tech utopian manifesto, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, By Powers of Nature and Machinery, Thoreau took issue with Etzler’s vision of a world in which everything could be done by the “motion of the hand at some crank.” Thoreau wrote, “But there is a certain divine energy in every man, but sparingly employed as yet, which may be called the crank within,—the crank after all,—the prime mover in all machinery,