A film by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation… We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake.” – HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Airing on PBS on March 30 (Episodes 1 and 2) and March 31, 2026, at 9:00 p.m. ET (check local listings)
The film traces Thoreau’s journey from his early days in Concord, Massachusetts, to his deep engagement with the moral crises of his time, including industrialization, slavery, war, and environmental degradation.
Join leading Thoreau scholars featured in the new documentary for free public events exploring the documentary. In these lively conversations, the experts who helped shape the film will reflect on the themes introduced in each episode, discuss the historical context surrounding Henry David Thoreau, and share additional insights from the making of the documentary.
This is a rare opportunity to hear directly from the scholars who appear in the film as they unpack the ideas, landscapes, and questions that frame the film. The conversations will include time for audience questions.
Many Thoreau Society members and award recipients contributed to this documentary project and to our understanding of Thoreau and his ideas and why they matter in today’s world. We encourage you to learn more from each of them. Click on their name below, or scroll down to explore their scholarship.
Kristen Case
Executive Director of the Monson Institute, a tuition-free residential program for low-income college students in an artist residency setting. Formerly, Professor of English at University of Maine, Farmington.
Current Thoreau Alliance board member and chair of the Membership & Development committee. Former editor of The Concord Saunterer.
Rebecca Solnit
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, most recently The Mother Of All Questions.
2022 Thoreau Society medal awardee
Sandra H. Petrulionis
Distinguished Professor Emerita, English and American Studies, Penn State University
Former Thoreau Society board member, executive secretary, and committee chair.
“When Henry Thoreau declared in “Civil Disobedience” that “the only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right,” when he asked if there could “not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience”, and when he asserted that “they only can force me who obey a higher law than I” (Reform Papers 65, 81), he took an uncompromising stance in an increasingly heated public debate.”
Cristin Ellis
Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi
Member of the Thoreau Alliance board and liaison to ASLE, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
“Thoreau may or may not have been a proto-new materialist, but he was certainly a cranky materialist: he made no secret of his frustrations with the empirical science of his day. Indeed, even as his lifelong practice of observing nature became more conventionally empirical over his last decade, his objections to the dry and dusty lifelessness of scientific writing remained as pointed as ever.”
John Kucich
Professor of English at Bridgewater State University
Current co-president of the Thoreau Alliance and former editor of The Concord Saunterer.
“The last words Thoreau uttered on his deathbed — “Indian” and “moose” — testify to the role his Penobscot guides played in his growing understanding of the New England environment. While he was quickly canonized as the patron saint of the environmental movement, Thoreau’s long and complicated relationship with Native Americans has proven more troublesome.”
Rebecca Kneale Gould
Associate Professor in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College
Former Member of the Thoreau Society Board of directors and recipient of the Thoreau Society Distinguished Service Award
“While Thoreau spoke of trees as our relatives, it goes without saying that acknowledging the personhood of trees has not been the majority practice in Western culture.”
– from “And All the Trees of the Field Shall Clap Their Hands”: Contextual Reflections on Powers, Thoreau and the Sacredness of Trees.”
Lawrence Buell
Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University
Former member of the Thoreau Farm Board of Directors, and recipient of both the Thoreau Society Medal and Thoreau Society Distinguished Service Award.
“Whether we like it or not—not simply because Henry David Thoreau was what he was and wrote the way he wrote but certainly in the first instance because of that—Thoreauvians are faded for all time to be divided between those who think that his true legacy is or at least ought to be such and such; and those who believe it just isn’t capable of being so specified.”
Elise Lemire
Professor of Literature at Purchase College, SUNY
Former Member of the Thoreau Society Board or directors and recipient of the Walter Harding Distinguished Achievement Award
“All those who are voting for civil disobedience in Lexington raise your hand.”
A young man with long red hair and a bushy beard, the initials of the United States Marine Corps stamped on his military-issue shirt, addressed some forty other fatigue-clad men huddled around a bonfire. In the nearby darkness, memorial statuary flanked the Old North Bridge, solemn reminders that the American Revolution started here.
It was May 28, 1971.
Henrik Otterberg
Former member of the Thoreau Society Board of Directors and bibliographer of the Thoreau Society Bulletin since 2016.
“What sort of book is Walden ? Its author left no lasting generic marker
with which to guide the reader. The original subtitle, Life in the Woods ,
was dropped on Thoreau’s own instruction pending the second
edition, and no other signs then remained that would indicate genre
or mode from the vantage of authorial intent. This said, one might
well consider a number of classic literary modes, if only to indicate
the spread of the work.”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU examines the life and work of the 19th-century writer in the context of antebellum New England and the larger United States, as well as through the universal themes he focused on in his writings: an individual’s relationship to the state, how to live an authentic life, our connection to nature, and the impact of race on American life. Set against the political and social tensions of the mid-19th century, the film traces Thoreau’s journey from his early days in Concord, Massachusetts to his deep engagement with the moral crises of his time, including industrialization, slavery, war, and environmental degradation. Through his essays, journals, and landmark works such as Walden and Civil Disobedience, he became an inspiration for generations of writers, thinkers, and activists.
The film draws on a rich collection of archival materials, newly filmed cinematography in Concord and beyond, and interviews with scholars, writers, and environmentalists. Among the people featured in the film are Pico Ayer, Douglas Brinkley, Lois Brown, Kristen Case, Laura Dassow Walls, Clay Jenkinson, Robin Kimmerer, J. Drew Lanham, Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, Rebecca Solnit, and more.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU is narrated by George Clooney and voices are provided by Ted Danson (Ralph Waldo Emerson), Tate Donovan (William Ellery Channing), Jeff Goldblum (Henry David Thoreau), and Meryl Streep (Lidian Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Mary Merrick Brooks, and Maria Thoreau).
“Thoreau’s insistence that conscience must guide citizenship, and that solitude can be a source of strength, continues to speak directly to our time,” said executive producer Ken Burns. “He challenged Americans to ask hard questions about who we are and what kind of society we want to build, a challenge that remains as urgent today as it was in his day. But perhaps most importantly he asked us to stop and to pay attention to the world around us.”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU is a Ewers Brothers Production, in partnership with Florentine Films and WETA Washington, D.C. Directed by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers. Written by David Blistein. Produced by Julie Coffman and Susan Shumaker, Producers Christopher Loren Ewers and Erik Ewers. Director of Photography Christopher Loren Ewers. Edited by Erik Ewers and Ryan Gifford. Co-Produced by Cauley Powell. Original Music Score by David Cieri. Narrated by George Clooney. Voice of Thoreau by Jeff Goldblum, and other voices by Ted Danson, Meryl Streep and Tate Donovan. The executives in charge for WETA are John F. Wilson (posthumously) and Kate Kelly. Executive Producers are Ken Burns and Don Henley.