With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in "The Environmental Imagination". With Thoreau's "Walden" as a touchstone, Buell gives us an account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being. In doing so, he provides an understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.