We do not commonly speak of the “aftermath” of favorable events; rather, we tend to reserve the term for what follows at best equivocal occurrences. The title of Joshua J. Bowman’s book is thus apt, as in it he offers a markedly critical assessment of how Thoreau’s legacy purportedly distorts how we think, feel, and act about environmental issues. Its arguments are developed over the book’s three distinct parts, dealing, respectively, with the significance of imagination in political thought and practice, Thoreau’s moral and political thought, and the ways in which Thoreau’s political imagination remains imprinted upon environmentalism today. Thoreau was, in Bowman’s view, a visionary whose all-too-frequent whimsical moments get the best of his more serious insights and occupations. The book thus offers a more generous, less ad hominem, rendering of the style of bourgeois/conservative critique of Thoreau familiar from James Russell Lowell, Vincent Buranelli, and Kathryn Schulz. Yet there is pathos to Bowman’s effort, as the author at times seems torn between a genuine sense of admiration for several aspects of Thoreau’s life and thought and senses of concern and disdain for what it has inspired in the realm of environmental thought and politics.

The underpinning of the book is a conception of imagination, characterized as a creative, synthetic, and importantly aesthetic faculty that informs and interacts with both will and reason. Yet there are two kinds of imagination, the moral and the idyllic, which mirror the persistent “tension between an attunement toward reality and our desire to escape it. . . . [M]oral imagination corresponds to a will toward reality . . . while the idyllic imagination clouds or distorts reality” (pp. 10, 13). Granting for present purposes that the boundaries and features of reality are unproblematically unequivocal and uncontroversial, and thus so is the line to be drawn between these two species of imagination, Bowman maintains that moral imagination is the superior form as it properly grasps (at least some of) the truths that ought to guide human action, whereas idyllic imagination either does not perceive them or does not care to.

The book’s treatment of Thoreau develops within this conceptual framework, beginning with an exploration of the role of imagination in Thoreau’s way of thinking and acting (pp. 3–8, 24–25). Here, the author’s analysis is arguably at its best. He concludes that while Thoreau quite rightly appreciated the importance of imagination to all domains of thought and action, he unfortunately overindulged the idyllic and thus frequently missed the mark. When the discussion turns, in the second part of the book, to narrower consideration of Thoreau’s moral and political thought, the analysis falls in line with well-worn notions about the tensions between his strenuous, moralistic individualism and the apparent naiveté and performative contradiction that his life demonstrated (pp. 39–77). Despite being cast in terms of the moral-idyllic binary, there is little here that has not been said (or rejected) often enough in the abundant literature on Thoreau as to have become a commonplace. One thing that stands out, however, is a somewhat strained, repeated analogy between Thoreau’s attempt to marry autonomy with moral principle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the general will that reconciles freedom with (merely apparent) external coercion (pp. 47, 54, 60). The analogy, like the account of imagination that orients the book, is inspired by the work of the conservative critic Irving Babbitt, whose characterization of Rousseau was part and parcel of a critique of romanticism that clearly informs the author’s treatment of environmentalism later in the text.

Despite insisting, quite rightly, that we look beyond the handful of Thoreau’s essays that most studies rely too heavily upon, such as “Resistance to Civil Government,” Bowman derives his sketch of Thoreau’s political thought by and large from the very same handful of essays. Although the author deviates from this trend where he draws upon Thoreau’s journals, a few early essays, and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to develop an account of the latter’s view of nature and friendship, works central to Thoreau’s political as well as environmental thought, such as Walden and “Life Without Principle,” receive consideration that is scant relative to their significance. It is also in Part II that Bowman’s admiration for aspects of Thoreau’s life and thought is most apparent, yet both here and elsewhere this admiration is tempered by the repeated claim that Thoreau was too often charmed by fantasy and not seriously engaged with reality. Again, this evaluation of Thoreau has been made familiar to us by both his harshest critics (e.g., Buranelli and Lowell) and by his closest friends (e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson, in both his journals and in his eulogy for Thoreau).

A deeper understanding of Thoreau is not, however, the central aim of Imagination and Environmental Political Thought. Rather, as the title suggests, the author’s study of Thoreau within the framework of the moral-idyllic binary is largely prefatory to a critique of environmentalism that traces many of its intellectual and practical mistakes to Thoreau’s influence. Although Bowman draws upon a number of works that likewise fault Thoreau for the shape that American environmentalism has taken, he raises the stakes of this line of critique, tracing to Thoreau the roots of environmentalism’s alleged “misanthropy, radicalism, and arrogance” and “temptation toward sham spirituality” (pp. 99, 128). It is also here that the earlier analogies to Rousseau bear fruit in the claim, informed by a slightly misconstrued quotation from the deep ecologist Arne Naess, that the environmentalism Thoreau inspired has an inclination toward dictatorship in the name of the supposed ecological good (p. 126). (Naess’s argument, which is certainly contestable, was rather that current practices of consumption and environmental degradation make future dictatorship more likely.) Nor is this the only description of environmentalism that borders on caricature. Against the temptations to which Thoreau has made us perhaps insensibly prone, Bowman suggests the possibility of a suitably conservative and “religious environmentalism that is not fatalistic, apathetic, escapist, or misanthropic” (p. 133). Sketching the contours of such a triumph of moral over idyllic imagination is, however, not a task taken up substantially by the author. Instead, his efforts are mostly destructive rather than constructive, despite his insistence to the very end that “Thoreau’s idyllic imagination should be resisted while looking to his moral imagination for salutary examples” (p. 156). Along the way those examples are easily forgotten, overshadowed as they are by indictments that receive far more development than does the salutary side of the figure at whom they are leveled.

Ironically, the book suffers from a lack of imagination—an unwillingness to consider how and why what may appear to others as Thoreau’s whimsy seemed to him a firm and timely confrontation with reality. As much scholarship has demonstrated, Thoreau was amply possessed of the sort of moral imagination praised by the author, especially in his critiques of consumerism, market culture, and the shallow comforts of outsourcing principle to impersonal and expedient institutions (none of which receive much attention here). He seems idyllic because his views were, and still are, outside of the mainstream. Yet insofar as the book dismisses minority reports that continue to challenge our daily comforts as unserious and out of touch with reality, it encourages us to aim lower rather than higher, and perhaps unwittingly scores a moral victory for Thoreau and the movement he helped to inspire.