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As we saw in the introduction to this book, for Thoreau the “crank within” was all that mattered. Whereas men had always had a hard time reaching that spiritual sense, the new machines, monetary systems, and general complexity of industrial society had estranged humans from their purer natures. “The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market,” Thoreau argued in Walden. “He has no time to be anything but a machine.”13

Thoreau’s answer to the “fool’s life” of Concord—the “seeming fate, commonly called necessity”—was to repair to a solitary hut by Walden Pond. Leaving other humans behind would allow him to focus on himself and develop his consciousness by communing with what was natural. “I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself,” he wrote. To him, she became “sweet and beneficent society” as “every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy.” Nature’s rhythms filled his life, and if it rains and keeps Thoreau in his house, it’s no bother because “being good for the grass, it would be good for me.” Thus, the year’s temperature swings and weather events condition him to know, morally, what was natural and right.

This attitude of natural revelation is what still draws us to Thoreau. It seems he can access a reservoir of natural righteousness and pipe it directly to us. It is no accident that DeKorne’s publishing ventures went out under the imprimatur of his own devising: Walden.

“THE SUN RENEWS US, IN AN ALMOST RELIGIOUS WAY”

The photographer Naar included DeKorne’s home in his book, one that followed a collaboration with Norman Mailer on graffiti culture in New York and Norma Skurka, a New York Times writer. The book was named Design for a Limited Planet, and it explored the range of hippies and architects who were abandoning their city lives and heading out to places like northern New Mexico to build a new type of home that used the sun instead of fossil fuels for space and water heating. Bouncing around the countryside, Naar “captured a key moment in the history of the solar architecture in the United States, namely the few years during which it was no longer the scientific curiosity it had been prior to 1973, and not yet the somewhat larger phenomenon it would become after 1977 when Carter’s incentive policies were implemented.”14

The people who were drawn to solar energy then believed in the kind of self-sufficiency and value for nature that Thoreau espoused. But their unique contribution to American thought was the idea that changing the way they used energy was changing them as people. Just as Thoreau became “a part of herself,” many of the solar advocates held the rather remarkable belief that changing the space heating arrangements used to regulate the temperature of their dwellings was bringing them something like spiritual enlightenment.

In Design for a Limited Planet, homeowner after homeowner spoke to the spiritual changes they underwent while living in a home that was connected with the earth’s systems. One said that making his home less dependent on a utility company “is primal and gives you a feeling of control over your destiny.”15 Another, Paul Davis, said his house gave him “a sense of being more in touch with nature, not cut off from it. A house like this becomes an extension of your body.” Davis didn’t even like modern control mechanisms, instead controlling his ventilation system with “a pull chain strung with colored beads” because that felt “a lot nicer than throwing a switch or fiddling with a dial.”16 A Taos resident living in a home patterned on Michael Reynolds’s famed early “earthships” and built partially out of beer cans called his “the happiest house we have ever lived in.”17

Perhaps Junius Eddy, whose Rhode Island home was designed by the ubiquitous solar architect Travis Price, summed up the zeitgeist into which these solar pioneers were plugged: