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Restoration at Walden Pond
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18348 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1990 |
3,127 Words |
| Author
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William R. Jordan IV
William R. Jordan IV is studying American civilization at
Brown University. |
For two years in the middle of the nineteenth century, a small, clear pond near Boston surrounded by mixed deciduous and evergreen forest inspired some of the most important thinking ever contributed to the American literary canon. This is Walden Pond, where in the summer of 1845, Henry David Thoreau began his famous experiment in living "deliberately" in communion with nature. For the cost of some used materials he constructed a one room cabin, and with a minimum number of possessions lived for just over two years on a parcel of land that was owned at the time by another great man of American thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Now, more than 140 years later, a series of efforts to restore the land immediately around the pond has led to a basic question: Just what does it mean to restore an ecological system? Certainly those involved in managing the area, now a state-owned park, agree that some sort of restoration is in order. Walden has been changed radically since the 1840s, and the denuded and eroding shores are unquestionably in need of attention his voluminous journals, Thoreau himself made a meticulous record of the pond's surroundings as they appeared in his time - a precious resource for those who might be tempted to create a literal reconstruction of the pond as it appeared to its most famous resident. Some would argue, however, that the pond's surroundings had already been influenced by the activities of European settlers by the mid-nineteenth century, and that it is less important to recover the particular landscape of Thoreau's time than to reconstruct or maintain Walden in the spirit of Thoreau, presumably implying a natural setting, largely undisturbed by human beings and conducive to thought. Methods differ as much as philosophies. Whereas some are confident that the pond can heal its own wounds if protected for a time from public pressures, others feel that these pressures demand active human intervention in the restoration and management of the damaged shores.
An Unspoiled Retreat?
Either way, the restoration effort naturally raises questions about the condition of the pond in Thoreau's time and about the relationship between that nineteenth-century landscape and Thoreau's thinking. Certainly the image of the Walden of the 1840s as an unspoiled wilderness retreat is not wholly without foundation. Thoreau would have been relatively undisturbed as he sat, pen in hand, looking out his cabin window. Walking through the surrounding woods, he made meticulous observations and his descriptions of the pond and surrounding area deliberately convey a sense of wild nature offering "no path to the civilized
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