WALDEN ALIVE:

THE ECOLOGY OF WALDEN POND, WALDEN WOODS, AND THE BOOK WALDEN

Thoreau’s book Walden (1854), which has been called a founding document of the modern environmental movement, is a classic expression of American Transcendentalism, a social movement related to Romanticism, that was centered in Concord, Massachusetts, during the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, around the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism, among other things, placed especial emphasis upon “Nature,” striving to detect the divine (the sublime, the ideal or Real) in the mundane (the profane, the Actual, the phenomenal world).

Walden’s words have an intimate and profound connection to the characteristics of a particular landscape known as Walden Woods (with Walden Pond cradled in its midst)—i.e., to the Walden Ecosystem: some 2,680 acres of fire-prone disclimax “Northern Pine–Oak Forest” situated in Concord and Lincoln, Mass. In and through the literary symbol of Walden, and doing what any good Transcendentalist would have done, Thoreau (who was Emerson’s protégé and beneficiary) explored both the inner cosmology of his own being and cosmology as a whole, all the while scrupulously maintaining fidelity to the spatial and temporal particularities of Walden Woods.

While drawing upon many sources by way of quotation and allusion (Classical mythology, the Bible, Oriental scriptures, American and European history, English literature, etc.—all of which we will mention in this course), the book is nonetheless inextricably linked to the “humble” landscape for which it is names: features and phenomena of the terrain, of the pond, of the biota, of the weather, and of the ecological relationships of Northern Pine–Oak Forest, for example, had a controlling influence upon Thoreau’s prose.

There is in Walden—which is, after all, a literary work, not a work of science—an amazing degree of fidelity to the ecological realities of the Walden Woods landscape, but the high degree of fidelity has become apparent only recently, and it is obscured by the author’s supreme artistry. That is to say, everything appears in Walden in its proper ecological context. One should not be surprised to discover this, given the Transcendentalists’s yearning to detect the universal in the particular, but this is a fact that became discernible only a few decades ago.

What is surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Thoreau’s fidelity to particularities did not hamper his search for universals; on the contrary, it actually facilitated his quest, and that is the “magic” of Walden. But this raises the interesting question: If Walden Woods had not been there at all, or if it had been a different kind of woodland (or the pond a different kind of pond: mesotrophic or eutrophic instead of oligotrophic), or if the landscape itself had been radically different from what it is, would Thoreau have found other features and phenomena in some other kind of landscape to be as fruitful in terms of tropes and figures and symbols as he found Walden Woods to be? What would the book Walden look like if the area around Walden Pond resembled Yosemite Valley?

Recent developments in the earth and life sciences provide the ecological framework necessary to understand Walden in a way that was impossible two or three decades ago. We now can interpret and understand the literary text of Walden in the ecological context of the Walden Ecosystem. In short, the links between Walden and Walden are profound, multifarious, complex, and illuminating. As a literary artist, Thoreau was not compelled to conform to the characteristics of the Walden Ecosystem, but as a Transcendentalist he was bound to do so.