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But for all of Thoreau’s conviction and his willingness to choose a new lifestyle, at least temporarily, his writing did little to slow the technological deepening of American society. Americans sought an inner moral strength that might change the world around them, but whatever happened internally, the world kept on keeping on. Everything he opposed—mechanical progress, the conception of nature as a storehouse for man, and so forth—became only more entrenched in society. “Emerson and Thoreau had no discernible effect on the dominant capitalist culture of their time,” political scientist Martin Schiff noted in his 1973 essay, “Neo-Transcendentalism in the New Left Counter-Culture.” 26 Perhaps Thoreau’s very inability to reshape industrial society is what has kept him relevant for so long. The issues he identified in our relationships with nonhuman environments remain as troubled and complex as ever.

The solar transcendentalists thought that finding prefigurings of their ideas in a famously American group of thinkers gave them a better intellectual heritage, but Schiff argued this very resemblance to the Transcendentalists, far from rooting them in the mainstream of American culture, probably doomed them to failure. “This relationship between New Left counter-culture, credited by its supporters with messianic characteristics for national salvation, and a nineteenth-century utopianism that made no significant impact on the unfolding of history raises many questions about the credibility and future of the counter-culture,” he argued.27

Perhaps comparing eras in this way is a flimsy enterprise, but the years following World War II and the 1840s stand out as times marked by rapid, radical change technologically and socially. There was explosive growth of industry, societal upheaval, and the extension of political rights to far broader classes of people.

Between 1950 and 1975 energy usage in America doubled. Oil poured into the system as Americans drove more and larger cars farther. Plastics replaced natural fabrics. Petroleum-based chemical use grew in farming; nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide applications per acre grew nearly tenfold. Meanwhile the Vietnam War and its chemical defoliants and napalm provided a dark shadow for the shiny new wonder products.28

The agricultural, infrastructural, and cultural worlds into which baby boomers were born had been transformed before they would hit thirty years old. They knew a big part of those changes were due to the changes wrought by increased energy usage. Every kind of commercial network was growing larger while social networks seemed to be growing thinner. Books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and TV shows like Our Vanishing Wilderness had shown the overwhelming impact humans were having on each other and life more broadly.29 Human beings built rockets to carry themselves to the moon, yet, as the Gil Scott Herron poem pointed out, “I can’t pay no doctor bill / but Whitey’s on the moon.” Technology was big and seemingly doing as much harm as good.

Something fundamental was flipping in American culture. The modernist dream of technology making the world a better place was falling apart. Technology seemed to be impeding social progress, not aiding it. The future no longer seemed to promise something better than the past.

As in the 1840s, all the mechanization and energy use and corporatism had some people feeling like American society had gone off the rails. There was just something fundamentally wrong with living the way Americans did. The very energy surpluses, the very economy that their parents and grandparents had built seemed like a perversion of what being a human was supposed to be. Political ecologists like Barry Commoner rode this wave of sentiment to popular fame. Environmental problems, like the smoke that choked nineteenth-century cities, were simply canaries in the societal coal mine. The energy crisis was, to Commoner, “a symptom of a deep and dangerous fault in our economic system.”30

To a well-read