Framed by her experiences along Florida's northern Gulf Coast, its troubled history, rich ecology, and recent environmental disasters, Alda Balthrop-Lewis contemplates what constitutes an environmental ethics. To do so, she turns to Henry David Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden. Reworking the myth of the two Thoreaus, the naturalist and the political advocate, she argues that they are joined in the Thoreau of Walden as she also dispels assumptions that he was ‘asocial, apolitical, and areligious’ (p. 38). She stitches his enjoyment of different communities in the woods with his political stances against slavery and capitalism and his practiced ascetism to present a nuanced reading of a complex Thoreau and his religion. This religion she defines as ‘an ascetic practice that aims to set right his social and political relationships as he came to understand them through the course of his life in Walden Woods’ (p. 35). By focusing on the one document rather than ranging through the diverse texts in the Thoreau oeuvre, Balthrop-Lewis can dig deeply into its passages and reference points to pull out the threads of her argument. Even so, she occasionally conflates the two-year experiment in living with the book that went through multiple revisions, some of which involved post-cabin reflections, before it was sent to press almost a decade later.

To begin, she teases out a social Thoreau that belies his claims about solitude and his reputation as a social crank. Unsurprisingly she plays with the proximity of the Walden hut to Concord and his mother's laundry services and the visits by such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ellery Channing. What is new is the sense of Thoreau's vison of social life as including ‘more-than-human and more-than-living beings’ (p. 42), the birds and trees and the deceased former residents of the Woods, particularly its Black inhabitants, that he treats as members of his community. One of the endearing sections comes when Balthrop-Lewis relates the conversation of the chickadees he shares with the woodchopper Alek Therien, their ‘mobbing calls’ to each other a model for extending community to readers by alerting them of the dangers of injustice (p. 66).

Next, she constructs a reading of Thoreau's politics as grounded in relational politics and an ethics of care. Building on her construction of Thoreau as a social being, she reads his voluntary renunciation of things not necessary, his commitment to simplify, not only as an effort at self-cultivation but also as a political, ethical statement about the injustices of slavery and the ‘emerging industrial capitalism’ (p. 97). Using his statements about clothing, she not only grounds Thoreau in the social contexts of his time but also reads a critique of labour, both the wage labour of mill workers and the unpaid labour of enslaved people, and the ways Thoreau intervenes in the controversy erupting around the rhetoric of slavery. While she cleverly grounds Thoreau's politics in material history, she misses a chance to unravel the implications of self-reliance, to which she nods, as a political response against institutions that do not square with the self's moral sense and that values the members of the democratic ‘society of spirit’ she envisions on Thoreau's behalf (p. 94).

Then, Balthrop-Lewis deploys the material asceticism of the simplified life to excavate Thoreau's critique of philanthropy, both of which are central to her reading of the religious Thoreau. Contemplating how best to respond to those less fortunate, Balthrop-Lewis, through Thoreau, claims that philanthropy as commonly described is ‘a sort of idolatry’ (p. 143) that resonates with despair rather than joy. Instead, she sees Thoreau opting for a philanthropy of being good, quietly, as a way of doing good (p. 147) that correlates both to ascetic renunciation and relational acts of justice that include writing. Writing, she argues, is a ‘major part of Thoreau's political ascetism’ (p. 192) because he understands that he is writing a sacred text for a community of readers to awake them to the need for political justice. To make the case for Thoreau as a writer of scripture, she turns to his use of sacred texts in Walden. While she acknowledges his readings on the traditions of other religions, she primarily teases out Christian references to get at what he means by the good life and higher laws. Through it all, she ties his understanding of religion to renunciation, community, and social/political justice. Finally, she argues that the Thoreau of Walden creates a model of the ‘moral life’ that includes practices of political and environmental justice, justice for humans and all beings, a delight in the natural world, and the impulse to share (p. 268).

Through an abundance of research, evidenced by the extensive footnote conversations and contextual material that might distract the reader even as they enhance the scholarship, Balthrop-Lewis draws a convincing picture of Thoreau's religion. Some of the fun of the book comes with the deep dives into cultural history and religious and philosophical readings of select passages in Walden. Clearly organised with lots of verbal roadmaps, this book makes complex philosophical ideas accessible to readers interested in Thoreau and social justice.