From XR Global newsletter July 2025
--- # Ancestors of XR > A cartoon image in green of a candle on a short holder burning inside an hourglass. It is clearly meant to suggest the XR logo.
Henry David Thoreau's birthday was July 12. He would have been 208. He was a writer, a teacher, a philosopher, a scientist, and a maker of pencils (really!). He is most famous for his experiment in simple living, described in his book, Walden, but there is a lot more to him than that.
Thoreau was a complex man whose legacy tends to get oversimplified. For example, he protested the Mexican-American War, but he wasn't a pacifist. Rather, he believed that particular war to be wrong. Likewise, he was not exactly an anarchist, not exactly a transcendentalist.... He was exactly Thoreau.
The concept of principled civil disobedience comes directly from his essay, *On Civil Disobedience*. He discovered ecological succession, one of the foundational concepts of what later became ecology, and he advocated for the protection of animals and wild places. He took racial justice seriously, speaking out against slavery and the genocide of Native Americans and working with the Underground Railroad. His vocal support of John Brown's anti-slavery raid was largely responsible for Brown becoming an inspiration to the American abolitionist movement.
> See also Blessed unrest in the face of clear and present danger for a foundational foprop pattern and Hawken 2009 Blessed unrest for the relationship between non-violence in ancient Indian culture (especially Jainism), Thoreau, Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
In his concern for science, for environmental conservation, and for human rights, in his willingness to take personal risk and to defy his own government to do what he thought was right, in his support of both civil disobedience and active rebellion in a good cause, in his unending curiosity about and love for the world, he prefigured Extinction Rebellion. Indeed, we exist now largely because he lived.
Happy birthday, Henry!
--- Within the seven Rs or activist commitment, Thoreau's civil disobedience can be embraced as an aspect of #regenerative activism
Here we introduce 'Regenerative activism', one of seven Rs of activist commitment in the mutual sector, concerned with the heart-mind, the forces of life and death, deep time, the more-than-human, evolving structures of feeling, and eldership.