Dear America,
As I write these lines, the governor of my ruby-red state has barreled ahead to bring the multi-million dollar “Alligator Alcatraz” in the imperiled Everglades to full capacity, and I find myself thinking about Henry David Thoreau. I often wonder what my literary hero would do if he were living today, facing human and environmental travesties both strange and eerily familiar.
Thoreau tends to be thought of today, when he’s thought of at all, as a nature-loving recluse who, sure, also wrote some important political essays as a side hustle. But this is wrong, for this famous Transcendentalist cultivated his deep sympathy for the physical world and his political voice simultaneously, and even symbiotically. A closer look at his lifelong negotiation between these two impulses may be useful to those of us vacillating between foursquare political engagement and withdrawal.
Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond was not the act of a recluse, but of a man bent on social reform, which he believed started with the individual. He built his house (which he never called a cabin) very close to a well-traveled road to prompt fruitful conversations with his neighbors about a different way we might live in the world and with one another. What’s more, his most famous political act—his brief imprisonment inside the Concord jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, thereby protesting slavery and our imperial war-of-choice with Mexico—occurred smack in the middle of his two-year “escape” to Walden’s shore. Thoreau, to be sure, deployed language in Walden and elsewhere that positioned the realm of Nature as antidote to and even escape from a dysfunctional society. So, yeah, it can be confusing. But it’s just as true that he relied upon his close observations of the physical world to orient his moral compass so that he might grapple fruitfully with his rights and responsibilities as a New England townsman and U.S. citizen.
Given our current circumstances in Florida, vis-á-vis undocumented immigrants, I’ve been dipping into Thoreau’s journal entries from early 1851, the days and weeks just after the Fugitive Slave Law was enacted by Congress. For further context, on April 3rd of that year, a runaway slave, Thomas Sims, was detained by the authorities in Boston, not far from Concord where Thoreau lived. On April 12th, Thoreau’s “free” state of Massachusetts returned Sims to his enslaver in Georgia. On March 30th, just days before the Sims incident, Thoreau writes, “Spring is already upon us. I see the tortoises or rather I hear them drop from the bank into the brooks at my approach—The catkins of the alders have blossomed…” In mid-April (the exact date does not appear in the journal), not long after the Sims tragedy, Thoreau writes, “In ’75 2 or 300s of the inhabitants of Concord assembled at one of the bridges with arms in their hands to assert the right of 3 millions to tax themselves, & have a voice in governing themselves—About a week ago the authorities of Boston, having the sympathy of many of the inhabitants of Concord assembled in the grey of the dawn, assisted by a still larger armed force—to send back a perfectly innocent man—and one whom they knew to be innocent into a slavery as complete as the world ever knew….” Sims would endure for several additional years as an enslaved man, sold across the South, until he escaped to the North for good in a crude boat during the Civil War. Here’s Thoreau on May 1, 1851: “Observed the Nuphar Advena Yellow Water Lily in blossom Also the Laurus Benzoin or Feber Bush Spice wood near Wm Wheeler’s in Lincoln—resembling the Witch Hazel.”
I find these dramatic juxtapositions between the “nature-loving” and “political” Thoreau in the journal, often separated by only a punctuation mark in the same entry, especially poignant. But more, it’s the relationship between these voices that especially interests me. Thoreau’s close observation of the smallest, most quiet, organic workings of the natural world, which may seem downright weird to some contemporary readers, as it seemed weird to many of his contemporaries, sensitized him to the cruelest, most unnatural violations of human decency in the social world in which he also lived. Perhaps his most fiery abolitionist essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” much of which he drew from his Spring 1851 journal entries, concludes as Thoreau vents his disappointment with his fellow citizens and elected officials, gathering instruction from the sweet scent of a white water-lily. “It suggests,” he writes, “what kind of laws have prevailed longest and widest, and still prevail, and that the time may come when man’s deeds will smell as sweet…. It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri Compromise…. I do not scent in this the time-serving irresolution of a Massachusetts Governor, nor of a Boston Mayor.” Indeed, it’s not quite accurate to force a distinction between Thoreau the nature-lover and Thoreau the political activist. In the end, there was only one Thoreau.
Flash forward to Florida, 2025. I’m still seething over my own governor’s July 1st photo-op visit to “Alligator Alcatraz,” joined by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump. The president, predictably, leaned into familiar caricatures of the Everglades for the cameras, cruelly joking about vicious alligators dispatching runaway detainees. While I wouldn’t deny the ferocity of predator-prey goings on in the Everglades, it’s the tranquility of the region that leaves me breathless upon each of my journeys into various outposts of the national park. These excursions over the 30 years I’ve been a Floridian have involved kayaking, camping, and fishing on remote mangrove islands in the Gulf of (ahem) Mexico, the Milky Way gauzed overhead, hiking through cypress swamps—the cries of pileated woodpeckers and barred owls echoing through the canopy—and searching for snail kites tilting above unimaginably vast stretches of sawgrass either side of the Tamiami Trail highway, the sun painting the landscape in various surprising hues depending upon its mood. I see alligators, sure, but they never seem much interested in me. It’s hard to imagine a greater organic violation to this singular, sprawling ecosystem than cramming thousands of human detainees into repurposed FEMA trailers planted there across a strip of black asphalt.
Several human rights and environmental activists have articulated this essential argument, perhaps most passionately the nearby resident and member of the Miccosukee tribe, Betty Osceola. In multiple local news interviews, she decries the way proponents of the detention facility have described the place she calls home as an “uninhabitable wasteland.” To counter this false narrative, Osceola extols the rich and complex interconnection of human and nonhuman animal lives in the Everglades threatened by “Alligator Alcatraz,” highlighting harmful impacts that I, admittedly, hadn’t considered. “What about the light pollution that they have going on, right?” Osceola remarks. “We have fireflies out here. So it’s disrupting that circle of life that these animals need. There’s a family of panthers that live right around here. So I wonder how they’re feeling. How they’re all stressed out, and they don’t understand what’s going on.” Fireflies. As Osceola suggests, why shouldn’t firefly lives be part of our moral accounting when it comes to land use?
Those who know the region best know what, apparently, our elected officials do not: the Everglades has been partner to no mass detention facility.
So, yes, fellow Americans, light out these waning days of summer for the lake, woods, beach, desert, mountain, swamp, canyon, neighborhood park. Take a long walk. Watch some birds. Climb a tree, as Thoreau specifically recommends in one of his finest essays, “Walking.” I’ll be doing some of these things too. Yet not foremost to escape the social realm, but to engage profoundly with its cruelties and complexities, and to plot my own future course of legal resistance. I’m pretty sure that’s what Thoreau would do, too.
Yours, with hope and resolve,
Andrew Furman
Andrew Furman is a professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and teaches in its MFA program in creative writing. His fiction and creative nonfiction frequently engage with the Florida outdoors, but he has also written about Maine, Jewish identity, basketball, lighthouses, swimming, and cast iron cookware. His essays and stories have appeared in such publications as Prairie Schooner, Oxford American, The Southern Review, Santa Monica Review, Ecotone, Willow Springs, Poets & Writers, Flyway, and The Florida Review. He is the author, most recently, of the environmental memoir, Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness (University Press of Florida, 2025), and The World That We Are (Regal House Publishing, 2025). Other books include Jewfish (Little Curlew Press, 2020), Goldens Are Here (Green Writers Press, 2018), and Bitten: My Unexpected Love Affair with Florida (University Press of Florida, 2014), which was named a finalist for the ASLE Environmental Book Award. He lives in south Florida with his family.
Read additional prose by Andrew Furman previously appearing in Terrain.org: “Fox,” “Slashed,” and “The Problem with Pretty Birds” (nonfiction) and “Florida, 1961: On the Grove” and “What I Remember About Captain Horace Holtkamp” (fiction).
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by Luke, courtesy Pixabay.
