Still relevant? Walden; or, Life in the Woods, a collection of Henry David Thoreau’s writings on the experiment of living alone, is a book of the highest praise. It speaks across an almost two hundred year gap in time to impart important lessons about humanity’s role in the natural world; and although the ideas are much, much older than Thoreau, the account given in Walden is decidedly impactful, especially today, as the human race’s migration into dense urban environments seems less like a long-term trend and more like a permanent development: one that has not only left much of the countryside depopulated, but also alienated generations of humanity from ways of life that were considered familiar just a handful of decades ago and the norm not long before that. If you are unfamiliar with the book Walden; or, Life in the Woods simply know that Thoreau set out to discard the trappings of society and Read more…