The following piece was written by former CEO of Invasive Species Council and current 4nature President, Andrew Cox.
Originally published 3rd June 2025 via 4nature.
We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
While on a road trip in the north east of the USA with my brother, our curiosity led us to Boston. Calling home, my partner reminded me that Concord, Massachusetts was nearby and home to many famous 19th century writers, including Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau.
For many environmentalists, Walden Pond holds special significance as the setting for Thoreau’s book about his 2 years, 2 months and 2 days living in a simple one-room cabin by the lake. The book, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, describes in beautiful detail the natural world around him. His reflections ask timeless questions about how to live a meaningful life in a complex world and offer insights into self-reliance and the value of nature, questions that remain relevant today.
We rerouted to Walden Pond and found a landscape seemingly little changed from Thoreau’s time. Being March, the winter ice thaw was well advanced and the tree buds were swelling with spring’s imminent arrival. It was not difficult to imagine Thoreau in this same place. As he wrote in his journal:
These earliest spring days are peculiarly pleasant…The combination of this delicious air, which you do not want to be warmer or softer, with the presence of ice and snow, you sitting on the bare russet portions, the south hillsides, of this earth, this is the charm of these days.
I walked about a kilometre along the lake foreshore to the site of his cabin, now marked with stones where the foundations and chimney were.
A sign captures the start of one of his many memorable sentences: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Thoreau stayed in a cabin owned by Waldo Emerson, his mentor and friend who shared the same transcendental ideals. In 1922, the descendants of Emerson gifted the land containing the lake and surrounds to the state of Massachusetts with the requirement for ‘preserving the Walden of Thoreau’.
Today this vision is realised through the 136 ha Walden Pond State Reservation and is enjoyed by about 500,000 visitors a year. The reservation has a visitor centre that shares the story of Thoreau and the impact of his writings on the world, a replica of his cabin and a must-see volunteer run bookshop.
Visiting Walden Pond has reawakened my appreciation of Thoreau’s work and what he saw. It was as if my eyes were now his, and the impressions he conveyed, the keen observations of lichen on a tree, the sound of a wood thrush or the fragrance of the meadow now seem more real. I was no longer an Australian trying to imagine an unfamiliar place.
Reading Walden when studying environmental philosophy at university seemed tedious. Now when I dip into this book and his other writings, I gain great joy. I see immense beauty and wise insights into nature and life, with words of a musical quality. There is no writer quite like him. It was only well after his death at age 44 from tuberculosis that Thoreau’s work grew in influence, being important to many leading thinkers including Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and Leo Tolstoy.
As a colleague later suggested, Thoreau’s writings were relevant to the directions of my own life:
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves…how worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity…
If you find yourself in the New England region of USA, I encourage you to visit Walden Pond.
All photos by Andrew Cox.