Return To The Nature

The huge change of industrialization in the 20th centuries made the mankind start realizing that industrial civilization not only brought comfortable and convenient life to people, but also the serious natural environment damages, the global eco-system disequalibrium and the existing environment deterioration.The research of environment problems and environment ethics is more and more valued by people. However in the Chinese and Foreign traditional research, people usually take the 20th century as the initial stage of environment ethics. In fact, as early as the period of Thoreau, there was already the bud of environment ethics in his thought.Through the analysis of the historical environmental background that formed the thought of Thoreau, the formation of environment ethics thought benefits to the childhood environmental emotion accumulation, the impersonal influences of living environment and the thought of Emerson, and the ages call of the social economical development. There are strong ethics state of mind in Thoreau's environment thought. In his opinion, all the natural creations have lives and it is equal between nature and people, so mankind has to respect the nature to get along with it well. Thoreau earnestly practiced. He lived a simple life, criticized'controlling nature', rebuked industrial technique, and lay claim to'protect'nature etc. He practiced his own environment thought and ethics in his life.The comprehensive analysis of Thoreau's environment thought has a huge influence on latter times. It is advantageous to constructing "spirit home" of the modern people, the choice of modern people's life style, and the propulsion to the modern environmental protection exercise. Thoreau's thinking on the formation of china's economic development model, the launch of environmental protection, choosing lifestyles, facing a spiritual crisis, the revival of traditional culture and the purification of literature have important practical significance. In short, Thoreau's idea of returning to nature is to find the harmony of human and the natural world, to find a path of humanity. Thoreau's environmental ethics values transcend time and space. He belongs to the United States, to china, but also to the world.