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Grex Nature Item 63: Big News from Walden
Entered by md on Fri Jun 28 13:07:49 UTC 1996:

I was a member of the Thoreau Society for many years.  I loved 
their simplicity (membership dues $4.00 a year, Bulletin a 
mimeographed sheet), their obsession with Henry's life and works, 
their membership (Russian dissidents, Japanese Zen scholars, 
little old ladies, a hobo, me, the King of Denmark, etc.) and 
their annual meetings in Concord.

Then, in the late 1980s, Don Henley (the Eagles guy) took up the 
cause of the endangered woods around Walden, and the Thoreau 
Society went Hollywood.  There were protest marches led by people 
like Ed Begley.  There were fund-raising campaigns.  *Lots* of 
money started pouring in.  The Thoreau Society bought the Thoreau 
Lyceum, an organization less well-known but equally dear to the 
hearts of Thoreauvians, then dismantled it and sold the house in 
Concord it had occupied (a house where Thoreau had once lived).  

The Society developed grandiose plans that involved buying a hunt 
club in the nearby town of Lincoln.  Their mailings took on a 
depressing sameness: two pages of forced earnestness, followed by 
a paragraph telling me what *I* could do to help (ie, get out my 
checkbook).  The Bulletin was as nice as ever (it was still being 
edited by Walter Harding, the scholar who founded the Society 
during WWII), but it tended to get lost in all the pleas for 
cash.  My reaction, which I later found out was typical among the 
members, was at first puzzlement, then appalled disbelief.  I 
didn't renew my membership.  

(So traumatic was the break for me that I joined the Emerson 
Society just to be able to say I still had some connection to 
Concord.  As if you needed any further evidence of how boring I 
am, I think I can say in all honesty that dropping out of the 
Thoreau Society and joining the Emerson Society is the biggest 
change of mind I've had about anything in the past 25 years.) 

Okay, here's the big news.  I received a membership offer from an 
organization called Walden Forever Wild (WFW) a few weeks ago.  
It was not slick, to put it kindly, but it was serious and 
ecology-oriented.  The list of sponsors and directors included 
various biologists and scholars, and the poet Richard Wilbur.  
Yesterday, I got my membership card, a copy of their newsletter, 
"The Voice of Walden," and a typewritten note (like, on a 
typewriter) from the V.P. and editor, Mary Sherwood, welcoming me 
and filling me in on current projects.  

WFW have only two projects.  One is to get Massachusetts to 
change Walden Pond Reservation, which is now a mess, to a nature 
sanctuary with professional ecology management.  The other is to 
build, on an appropriate site somewhere in Concord, a small log 
cabin to be called "The Thoreau Parlor," which would house WFW's 
office and a reading room, open to the public.  

If you would like to do something serious about saving Walden 
Pond and bringing Thoreau back to Concord (and get *your* 
typewritten note from Mary P. Sherwood) you may send your $25.00 
tax-deductible membership donation to: 

                    Walden Forever Wild, Inc.
                    Box 275
                    Concord, Massachusetts  01742

2 responses total.

#1 of 2 by rcurl on Fri Jun 28 19:37:23 1996:

What are the current respective activities of the Thoreau Society, the
Emerson Society, and WFW? Has the Thoreau Society vanished in an orgy of
antisimplification?

#2 of 2 by md on Fri Jun 28 19:51:15 1996:

The Thoreau Society is building a research library on the hunt
club property.  The hunt club building itself was supposed to
be a meeting center.  I assume that's where the Society's
offices are now, and where annual meetings are to be held.
According to Voice of Walden, "the hunt club has been almost
unanimously looked at by their members and others as about as
un-Thoreauvian as one can get."  It's at the end of a long
country road, and is much despised by neighbors because of the
traffic.  Also, says VoW, "its two drawing rooms are more like
something Proncess Diana would be invited to for tea, than a
gathering place for Thoreau devotees."  (WFW appear to be the
Trotskyites of the Thoreauvians.)  

WFW must be as poor as churchmice, and also endearingly inept
at organizing things.  They held a Walden Pond Day program this
year, "with the goal to start a sort of symposium of local
outdoor-minded groups."  After getting hardly any responses to
their invitations, they realized they'd scheduled it for the
Memorial Day weekend.  They went ahead with it anyway, with their
own exhibits of birds and wildflowers know to be at Walden, plus
a live wildflower exhibit and lecture by Mary Walker of the
New England Wildflower Society.  "A handful of people were
present," concludes the VoW article.  Hey, great oaks from
little acorns, and all that.

The Emerson Society is purely scholarly and literary.

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