In 2022, the HRC’s Works that Shaped the World public lecture series focuses on religion.

Henry David Thoreau was a 19^th century author in the United States, and his most famous book, Walden (1854), has often been seen as one of the first examples of “nature writing.” The book has had a significant place in the study of environmental literature, and it shaped 20^th and 21^st century environmental politics for good and for ill. This public lecture will argue that attention to “religion” and related terms in Walden can offer a new reading of the book and reform our understanding of its significance for environmental politics. Many canonical white thinkers of the conservation movement who followed Thoreau – figures like John Muir and Aldo Leopold – were either inattentive to or in some cases in league with white supremacist understandings of nature. This lecturesuggests that Thoreau’s legacy for environmentalism should be understood, in contrast, as invested in matters of justice among multispecies communities.

Alda Balthrop-Lewisis a Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. She is the author of Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and she co-edits the American Academy of Religion book series Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion, published by Oxford University Press.