Henry David Thoreau

[NaturistChristians]

Henry David Thoreau, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World., Walking:

We cannot adequately appreciate this aspect of nature if we approach it with any taint of human pretense. It will elude us if we allow artifacts like clothing to intervene between ourselves and this Other. To apprehend it, we cannot be naked enough.

Naturism was part of a literary movement in the late 1800s (see the writings of André Gide) which also influenced the art movements of the time specifically Henri Matisse and other Fauve painters. This movement was based on the French concept of joie de vivre, the idea of reveling freely in physical sensations and direct experiences and a spontaneous approach to life.

An important early influence on anarchist naturism was the thoughts of Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and Elisee Reclus.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Influential early eco-anarchist work

Thoreau was an American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. His thought is an early influence on green anarchism, but with an emphasis on the individual experience of the natural world, influencing later naturist currents. Simple living as a rejection of a materialist lifestyle and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy. "Many have seen in Thoreau one of the precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism represented today in John Zerzan. For George Woodcock, this attitude can be also motivated by certain ideas of resistance to progress and of rejection of the growing materialism which is the nature of American society in the mid-19th century." John Zerzan himself included the text "Excursions" (1863) by Thoreau in his edited compilation of anti-civilization writings called Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections from 1999.

In this case, the word naturalist meant naturist.