On September 30, 2014, the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) held a community meeting to gather additional input from stakeholders, including the Thoreau Society, on the design of the new Visitor Center at Walden Pond. Construction of the new building, which will include exhibit space and a bookstore, will begin in the spring of 2015 and finish in 2016. Through the Friends of Walden Pond, our long-term partnership with the DCR...
Blog & News
Henry David Thoreau’s “Chesuncook,” the second essay of The Maine Woods, is well known for the controversy resulting from Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell’s decision to remove a now famous sentence referring to a pine tree.1 One hundred and fifty years later, Thoreau’s essay continues to resonate for another reason: its extended meditation on hunting, a pastime that attracts Americans to the woods throughout the...
The question is not what you look at—but how you look & whether you see.
—Thoreau, Journal, 5 August 1851
Scot Miller, Thoreau, The Maine Woods: A...
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In “Walking,” Thoreau not only defines sauntering as one of his cherished pursuits; he also self-consciously chooses a “perfectly symbolical” shape or contour for his sauntering journeys: "The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola . . .like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-...
I first started seriously reading the works of Henry David Thoreau almost twenty years ago when I was researching the biogeography of a particularly rare group of alpine butterflies. Back then I used to spend my time during the early summer...
Essentially Revolutionary
Henry Thoreau's Radical Moment—and Ours
By Wen Stephenson
On a clear and seasonably cold Sunday morning in March, I made my way through the streets of an old neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, and entered a large, converted brick building from some other century. Inside, in a cavernous room with worn floors and south-facing windows lit by the sun, a group of seventy or more young climate activists—mostly college students and recent graduates from the Boston area, along with a few veterans of the Occupy and global justice movements—...
2012-2013: The Thoreau Society received a $28,000 Creative Economy Grant from the University of Massachusetts. We are using the award to establish the Walden Climate Change Collaborative, create a new website for the Thoreau Society, and fund internships at the Thoreau Society.