This episode of Past Present Future just changed my mind about Thoreau being a fool.
For one, he put his himself on the line for the Underground Railroad. And a larger point Runciman makes about Thoreau is that he’s hypocritical in ways that’s easy to make fun of, like saying you’re isolating at Walden Pond while going to your mom’s house every week to get your clothes washed. However, that doesn’t mean you should dismiss his ideas about abolition and civil disobedience, the same way you can’t dismiss the Extinction Rebellion message just because the people participating in it are comfortable middle class people who use air conditioning and eat nice food. They’re still right — climate change will still make life miserable unless big changes in industry happen. We’ll suffer whether or not those protestors have street cred.