Blog & News

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...

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...

 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-...

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—...