On Once-Wild Walden Pond

Concord, Massachusetts

Sierra Club Magazine, May/June 1989

More than 125 years have passed since Henry David Thoreau last walked the sandy banks and wooded hills near Walden Pond. Today modern society endangers not only the woods surrounding the historic pond but its very waters.

“I’ve been going to Walden for 30 years,” says Edmund Schofield, an ecologist and a member of Walden Forever Wild (WFW). “Now I see a mismanaged landscape and a sick ecosystem.”

Walden Forever Wild contends that masses of visitors are wreaking havoc at the pond, stamping out vegetation and causing its shoreline to erode. A 1983 report in The Hartford Courant identified Walden, which hosts some 750,000 bathers a year, as having the highest urine content of any freshwater body in Massachusetts. In an effort to resolve these problems, WFW is working for legislation to prohibit swimming in the pond. The beaches are still open, but the state has limited parking in the area, a step WFW hopes will deter visitors.

In neighboring Walden Woods, the Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance (TCCA) is fighting the construction of an office park. A 148,000-square-foot complex consisting of two three-story buildings and a 518-car parking garage is slated to go up less than 700 yards from the shores of Walden Pond. Ironically, the developer of that project, Boston Properties owner Mortimer B. Zuckerman, is also publisher of The Atlantic Monthly, which in the 1860s helped win a national reputation for Thoreau by printing his work posthumously.

“The placement of this office park in Walden Woods represents the very imbalance that Thoreau warned against,” says Thomas Blanding, a Thoreau scholar and president of the Concord-based TCCA, which works to conserve locales significant to Thoreau. “Its presence isolates us from the ‘tonic of wildness’ that Thoreau said was needed to invigorate society as well as individual lives.”

Blanding’s group began its campaign against the construction last June. With the support of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the New England Chapter of the Sierra Club and the Thoreau Society, it pressured developers to consent to an initial environmental impact study. In December the state ordered a second, more extensive review. Boston Properties appealed that order in court but was overruled in late March. The company has also indicated that it would be willing to sell the property – for a staggering $10 million, more than three times its 1984 purchase price. Meanwhile, the TCCA is continuing to work with government officials toward developing a conservation plan for all of Walden Woods.

Trouble looms on Walden’s opposite shore as well. Within 1,400 yards of the pond, also in Walden Woods, is the proposed site of a 135-unit condominium development. Local zoning codes prohibiting such developments in the area have been waived for the project because developers have said they would provide a certain percentage of lower-income housing. The percentage they are proposing just meets minimum requirements for exemption.

The TCAA and a local group, the Fairhaven Preservation Association, are contesting Concord’s decision to allow the condominiums. They are also trying to focus the required environmental impact study on existing traffic and sewage problems that the complex would exacerbate, and they’re asking that developers get state approval to build in an wetlands area.

“Many local people and officials seem to have lost touch with the town itself, with the historical identity tied to the land and the literature,” Blanding says. “If you can’t save the place where the conservation ethic was first asserted, how can you hope to assert the principle elsewhere?”