If you could have a conversation with anyone..

[vulcanlogician]

Well, nature would not meet human standards for preventing animal cruelty, with so many predators eating other animals alive and with population growth controlled by starvation.  We may ourselves run up against the indifference of nature to our well-being with climate change and its effects.

I'd rather have my flesh torn apart by a lion and eaten alive, as tremendously painful as that may be, than kept alive for years in a stall in which I couldn't even turn around, until I was (eventually) fat enough for slaughter. Humans have shitty standards for animal cruelty. There are worse fates than being torn apart by lions, freezing to death in the winter cold, or dying in a brutal fight with a rival antelope during mating season. And humans have invented them all.

These aren't nearly as cruel as what humans have devised for animals. Lifelong servitude pulling a plow, being hooked up to a milk machine, kept confined in a wire box so you can produce eggs. Fuck it. I'll take my chances with the lions. Humans are ghastly torturers. Nature is kind by comparison. Is nature omnibenevolent? No. But she's something pretty close to it when compared with human beings.

Unlike the philosophy in A Week and Walden, Thoreau's journal entries are largely about his day-to-day observations of nature.

Of course, there is always a lot to discuss about Thoreau's ideas from his books and at least some journal selections.

I've read some of Thoreau's journals. They are thought-provoking. And they are also aphoristic. Each sentence becomes a paragraph in your mind. Each paragraph a chapter. Each chapter an entire book. Each book of his is a set of encyclopedias worth of provoked thought. And it's not like he's Hegel. (Abstract to the point of opacity.) All of us can comprehend and appreciate what Thoreau writes. Even those of us who aren't philosophy nerds. That's why I think it would work.

There's a journal subforum?

Yeah. I think so. But the philosophy forum would work to. Your choice. It would be awesome to do, I think.