Thoreau defends trees against his generation of tree abusers

Thoreau complained about his generation's attacks on forests:

"It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness—breaking nature, taming the soil, feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him."—Journal, 2 February 1852

Thoreau replanted a pine forest for his friend Emerson, and he wrote about how birds encouraged reforestation by dropping trees' seeds into new neighborhoods. Thoreau walked in the woods as both a soul who loved trees and plants and as a "scientific explorer" who wrote about trees' leafing-out dates and the plants that grew along the rivers where he traveled.

Thoreau wrote:

Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,—to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.—The Maine Woods

The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder,—and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.—The Maine Woods

When Thoreau died Ralph Waldo Emerson described his friend in terms of his love of Nature and the trees of Massachusetts:

"He was the attorney of the indigenous plants . . . .so much knowledge of Nature’s secret and genius few others possessed, none in a more large and religious synthesis."

"He remarked that the Flora of Massachusetts embraced almost all the important plants of America,—most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the nuts."

"He loved Nature so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities, and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. The axe was always destroying his forest."