摘要：In Walden, Henry David Thoreau devotes a celebrated chapter to his “Brute Neighbors,” as he calls the animals, mostly wild, who share his living space on Walden Pond. They play an essential part in shaping Thoreau’s experience of the place he inhabits or, rather, co-inhabits. His biocentrism inaugurated a powerful current in American culture, a current that is still being nourished today by Thoreau’s heirs (Rick Bass, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, David Quammen and many others). Over and above its status as one of the constitutive documents of American culture, Walden – and the “Brute Neighbors” chapter in particular – offers just one example of the way the representation of animals, from the earliest cave drawings to present-day wildlife documentaries, from colonial narratives of travel and exploration to contemporary nature writing, has served Americans in defining essential aspects of their geographic (local, regional, territorial), their cultural and their social identity. Even an “asphalt jungle” implies some kind of animal other. “It is hard to count the ways in which other animals figure in the stories that environmental historians tell,” as Harriet Ritvo points out (129).
