The conservation of a balance between nature and civilization has always been a heavy duty for mankind. However, keeping a fair balance has begun to lose its meanings by the rapid growth in the development of industries and human desires for a higher good. Such growth in human kind gradually pushed men closer to yet to be discovered parts of wilderness that were once feared and avoided by many. Such movement was largely influenced by the writer of the novel Walden, Henry David Thoreau, especially by his approach of romanticizing a deliberate life in the wilderness. Critics, such as William Cronon, note that romanticists such as Thoreau fails to comprehend the true form of nature; and also that the influence that Walden had given the American men and women had brought forward some undesired side effects to the relationship between nature and civilization (destruction, pollution and extortion toward nature). However it is clear that Thoreau's romanticism of nature was solely aimed to better comprehend, respect, and possibly experience the benevolence of conjunction between nature and humanity.
Thoreau was an extraordinary thinker. For a man of such high level of education to leave every materialistic goods and pursuit a solitude life in the woods as such must have required either a strong affection for nature or certain hatred against civilization. In Thoreau's case he was simply in love with the divinity of nature and desire for a deliberate life. Of course he was a lover of nature however many people who consider of his journal Walden to be focused primarily on the environment are wrong. Regardless of the general comments on Walden, it is about one man's attempt to find the principles by which to live a proper life. Thoreau says "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.