Pirate's Cove

There’s something seriously missing from this “we’re all doomed piece”

Raleigh Exhibition Shows How Thoreau Helped Map Climate Change

Henry David Thoreau was big on taking walks—or “sauntering,” the word he once used in a lecture on the subject. In that lecture, the writer and philosopher asserted that he couldn’t feel well unless he sauntered for at least four hours a day.

It was on those long walks around Concord, Massachusetts, that Thoreau collected hundreds of botanical specimens, which he then brought home to press, scribbling down notes about where and when each plant was collected. Now, 648 of those preserved specimens are housed and digitized in the Harvard University Herbaria.

But while those specimens from Concord made it to this century in preserved form, many of the actual plants didn’t survive: an estimated 30 percent of the species from Thoreau’s records have gone “locally extinct,” according to the museum, with another 35 percent “close to the same fate.”

In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss, currently on view at NC State University’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design, draws on that digitized collection in a small but expansive-feeling exhibit that contends with the loss of biodiversity. Originally mounted at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the exhibit represents the joint scholarship of Marsha Gordon, Robin Vuchnich, Leah Sobsey, and Emily Meineke, an effort that marries science, art, and the humanities. This iteration of the exhibit, which expands on the original by tying in North Carolina flora and fauna, opened in September and runs through January 31, 2026.

Here’s the thing: times change. Thoreau lived from 1817-1862, so, born in the midst of a Holocene cool period, died as a typical Holocene warm period was starting. Things change.

The story spends a lot of time on the exhibition, interesting to read. Then

Is it depressing to see renderings of species we’ve driven out with deforestation, pollution, pesticide use, and a hundred other facets of modern life? Absolutely. Global insect populations are in a free fall, with a 2019 study determining that 40 percent of insect species are in decline, with the rate of species decline topping out at 2.5 percent a year.

Now, that is real. Mankind have an ecological effect through the aforementioned issues. We can do better, and we do do better now. Not so good hundreds of years ago.

“This came together from four friends, really,” Gordon says. “We were trying to think through something we could do around questions of climate change and the environment—thinking about it in a way that is realistic about what is happening in our country and all over the world, but also not to be so doom and gloom that people shut off.”

So, they took Thoreau’s stuff and put their own little cult spin on it

Thanks to Thoreau and other area naturalists, the ecosystem of Concord—which author Henry James once called “the biggest little place in America,” due to its historical import—has been documented across centuries. That record formed a portrait of the biological impacts of climate change. In Walden Warming, the botanist Richard Primack observes that Thoreau’s archives helped scientists determine that local plants were now flowering weeks earlier than they were 160 years ago.

1860 was right near the start of the warming, so, yeah. And, perhaps if we did better environmentally and didn’t waste time on cult stuff we could do more.

Read: Raleigh Exhibit Shows How David Thoreau Mapped ‘Climate Change’ Or Something »