Restoring Walden Woods and the Idyll of Thoreau I: From Literary Landscape to Politicized Landscape

Abstract

Walden Woods, Massachusetts, U.S., is synonymous with environmentalism in North America, and yet in recent decades the area has had to confront its overlapping and sometimes contested literary, historical, ecological, cultural, and political representations. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the traditions underlying restoration in Walden Woods. In this study, I use the case of Walden to explore the claims and challenges that are made of restoring a landscape over time, and how landscapes are reconfigured to reflect those claims. I focus here on the generation and selection of restoration knowledges, and especially restoration knowledges as a reflection of prevailing social attitudes and wider political and ecological contexts. Restoration knowledge is bounded by the wider institutional setting at Walden, and is shaped by threat and response narratives, as well as by the strategic employment of the ‘idyll of Thoreau’ to limit the ‘wrong sort’ of landscape change. Framing restoration knowledges against the institutional context of Walden illustrates how changes to restoration practices have reflected changing thinking, changing stakeholders, and wider efforts to define what Walden is, and what it is for.