"This is My Lake Country": Wordsworth, Thoreau, and the Making of Modern Watershed Consciousness (2014)

Undergraduate: Mandy Eidson

Faculty Advisor: Janice Koelb
Department: English & Comparative Literature

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In the past few decades, watersheds have become a standard unit of resource management and a familiar topic among artists. Many contemporary writers exhibit what has been called modern watershed consciousness, a form of awareness that recognizes interdependencies between humans and nonhumans within and among watersheds. William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau, two Romantic writers of the nineteenth century, anticipated, were actively engaged in, and continue to be instrumental to the making of modern watershed consciousness. Although both Wordsworth and Thoreau mostly confined themselves to regional geographies, they occupied a wide terrain of consciousness and encouraged watershed stewardship at a global scale. In England, Wordsworth strived to integrate the interests of the environment, economics, and equity while campaigning against the incursion of railways in his native watershed during the mid-1840s. Operating under a similar philosophy and aspiring to be a kind of American Wordsworth, Thoreau opposed water extraction schemes in his own region and invited a global audience to share in his visions of watershed recovery and universal interconnectedness. Within the field of environmental literary criticism, or ecocriticism, reexamining Wordsworth and Thoreau as writers who helped formulate modern watershed consciousness allows for a broader framework to interpret their legacies and learn from their examples.