My young cousin, George, finds weekend homework an "outrageous intrusion" into his personal life. When he asked his teacher why she misused students thus, she explained that it was a "school rule."

"Well," declared George, "here's what Thoreau said about rules: 'Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.'"

The teacher was not appreciative, but she should have been. George, who had learned the quote from my e-mail signature, is in the process of becoming a Thoreauvian. May his tribe increase.

I grew up close to Thoreau's 61-acre kettle hole and fished it religiously, preferring the descendents of the perch he communicated with by "long flaxen line" over the alien trout stocked by the state. I was drawn to Thoreau because of his contrarianism, contempt for mindless authority, humor, humanism, practicality, good sense and, above all, his passion for nature. His philosophy provided an antidote to the mind-numbing ruminations of European crackpots who wasted their lives (and my fishing time) expounding on such nonsense as whether animals have souls.

Most people who dislike Thoreau and accuse him of hypocrisy (and there are many) don't understand the man. Not that he didn't have his faults. He could be petty. Walden was his second choice after nearby Flint's pond, that still bears the name of the farmer who denied him access and whom he savaged in print, calling him "unclean and stupid." On the other hand, Thoreau was enormously generous.

Thoreau's Walden woods were more stump field than forest and more suburbia than wilderness. No independent hermit, he frequently made the 15-minute stroll into Concord to dine with friends; and friends brought him food. But this was less a function of need than his love for people and their love for him. Harvard-educated and moneyed, it was easy for him to condemn the Irish for defiling the countryside with their "sties" and for their failure to bootstrap their lives to the level of self-sufficiency he wrongly imagined he had attained. Yet he befriended and helped the Irish.

No one in his community did more to fight slavery. His cabin became an important station on the underground railroad. He knew and defended John Brown, and in 1859, when the Concord selectmen refused to allow the town bell to be rung at Brown's memorial service, Thoreau rang it himself. When Massachusetts voted to return run-away slaves he refused to pay his poll tax and was thrown in jail, where he would have remained indefinitely had not his aunt (to his annoyance) paid up for him the next day.

Thoreau was a scientist -- not a dabbler, but a star student of Louis Agassiz. Basically on his own, he figured out the natural succession of trees, and his keen eye along with his iconoclasm allowed him to embrace Darwinism when all around him reviled it. Common wisdom held that the six-foot-wide stone circles on Walden's bottom had been fire pits constructed on the ice by Indians. BS alarm blaring, Thoreau correctly identified them as the "nests of the chivin" (aka fallfish), reviled by modern anglers but which he found to be a "cupreous dolphin" and passionately pursued, especially in Maine.

It's hard to dislike anyone with a sense of humor, and no contemporary writer had a better one than Thoreau. Consider this passage from "The Maine Woods": "We saw a pair of moose-horns on the shore, and I asked Joe if a moose had shed them; but he said there was a head attached to them, and I knew that they did not shed their heads more than once in their lives." And this from Walden: "There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven pounds -- to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he did not see him."

Thoreau was America's first eloquent environmentalist, worrying about the future as well as predicting it. "Maine," he wrote, after witnessing the slap-dash development even then blighting the state, "perhaps, will soon be where Massachusetts is." And he authored the shibboleth of modern environmentalism: "What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on."

Here is a philosopher the world needs to pay more attention to and to like better. One begets the other, for Thoreau -- as he wrote of the pond he loved -- "of all characters...wears best."

Ted Williams is Editor-at-Large for Audubon magazine.