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Henry David Thoreau Comes To The Aid Of Climate Science

Henry David Thoreau, circa 1850
Hulton Archive
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Henry David Thoreau, circa 1850

On Earth Day 2013, I'd like to draw your notice to a fantastic essay by Andrea Wulf in The New York Times Book Review. Wulf explains how information recorded by Henry David Thoreau in his journals is now informing modern climate-change research.

In journal passages, some of which formed the basis for his famous treatise Walden, Thoreau carefully recorded the blooming dates for hundreds of plants in the area around Concord, Mass., from 1852 to 1861. Now, a team of scientists led by Richard Primack of Boston University is comparing those historical dates with the dates that these same plants flower today.

The average date of spring flowering is now 11 days earlier than it was in Thoreau's time. Wulf writes:

Primack and his associates have determined that plants in Concord are reacting to warming temperatures by flowering roughly two days earlier for each degree increase in temperature.

Thoreau is considered by many to be the world's first environmentalist. One hundred and fifty years later, as climate-change science becomes ever more vital, his impact on our thinking is still immense.


Barbara's new book, How Animals Grieve, has just been published. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking daily on Twitter: @bjkingape

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: April 23, 2013 at 12:00 AM EDT
This post has been corrected. Barbara originally wrote that the blooming dates used by climate scientists were published by Thoreau in "Walden." The dates were, in fact, recorded by Thoreau in his journals, as the post now states.
Barbara J. King is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. With a long-standing research interest in primate behavior and human evolution, King has studied baboon foraging in Kenya and gorilla and bonobo communication at captive facilities in the United States.

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