[balti]

or Thoreau, Humboldt’s global vision galvanized a more personal, provincial approach to experiencing the vast living organism that was nature. A little stream in Concord was his stand-in for Humboldt’s thundering Orinoco River, the neighboring hills became Thoreau’s Andes, and according to Emerson, the Atlantic Ocean was for Thoreau “a large Walden Pond.” As he surveyed his smaller domain, Thoreau could sound supremely anthropocentric: “What is nature unless there is an eventful human life passing within her?” he wrote at one point. “Nature nought without human experience,” he jotted at another. But Thoreau could also adopt a less domineering voice—in Walden he famously asked, “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” He was deeply interested in what he called “the mysterious relation between myself and these things.”