The struggle for Walden.

Walden Pond in Lincoln and Concord, Massachussets - a worldwide symbol of the conservation movement - has become a battleground for often-angry opposing environmental-action groups. Some seek to preserve It as a "sanctuary," accessible only to walkers, while others desire to maintain its current recreational uses for swimming, fishing, and boating. With over 600,000 visitors from all over the world flocking annually to Walden's shores to rediscover the beauty of its waters and the inspiration of its forests and meadows, this is a dispute of some urgency.

Meanwhile, the surrounding Walden Woods - recently threatened by developers who sought to bulldoze trees to make way for homes, office buildings, and parking lots - has been rescued for now by Don Henley, a Texas-bred, Hollywood, based rock-and-roll musician, whose Walden Woods Project has so far raised over $11 million and purchased 96 critical acres. But serious questions remain regarding some of his organization's other expenditures. And the long-term future of Henry David Thoreau's Walden is not at all certain.

As the Pleistocene glacier covering northern New England retreated some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, meltwater and suspended sand and gravel poured downward from the mile-thick glacier to produce an 80-foot-deep deposit. Huge chunks of ice broke off and stuck in the sand and gravel as temperatures warmed. When these chunks melted, they formed depressions filled in with melt-water called kettle holes, one of which was the 100-foot-deep Walden Pond, a body of crystal-clear water with no streams entering or leaving it.

From that time until Europeans settled Concord in 1635, there was no appreciable change. Then some of Concords woods were cleared for farming and grazing. Two centuries later, though, Walden Woods still remained - a stand of pine forest used only for cutting fuel wood. Track for the Boston-Fitchburg Railroad was laid adjacent to Walden Pond in 1844, a year prior to Thoreau,s move there. More trees were cut for railroad ties and locomotive fuel by Irish workers who were housed in shanties around the pond.

Thoreau was born in Concord in 1817 and returned home after graduating from Harvard in 1837. It was then that he began spending his mornings "sauntering" in Concord's woods and meadows or floating over its ponds and rivers, and his afternoons recording detailed natural and philosophical observations in his journal, which later became the basis for his books and lectures. He also began a life-long friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, the minister turned American transcendentalist philosopher. Emerson's 1836 essay "Nature" profoundly influenced Thoreau with its revolutionary theme that each individual should seek a personal, fulfilling relationship with the natural world. Concord became the setting of the "New England Renaissance," where Emerson and Thoreau, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May and Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, befriended and visited each other, walked together through the woods, and penned literary works of international significance.

In 1845, Emerson offered Thoreau the use of his newly purchased wood lot on Walden Pond to build his small cabin and live as a naturalist. Thoreau wanted the solitude to write a book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in tribute to his lately deceased brother. He also wanted to observe nature directly.

So Thoreau began his famous sabbatical, spending most of each day walking, observing, and writing. Yet he was no hermit, frequently hiking along the railroad track to visit his family in the village and renewing numerous visitors with whom he shared chairs in his cabin - "one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society." He planted and harvested a bean patch behind his cabin and sold the beans for money. He also hired out as a surveyor.

In September 1847, having completed his experiment in simplicity, he became "a sojourner in civilized life again" and returned to Concord Village. The cabin was sold to Emerson's gardener and was later moved and used to store grain; its roof was used for a pig sty. Thoreau meanwhile became involved with the issues of his day, speaking out against social injustice and slavery. His 1849 essay, "Civil Disobedience," following his one-night stay in jail for refusal to pay tax for the Mexican War (which he felt would extend slavery), gained him worldwide fame and inspired later generations of social activists, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy.

In 1866, four years after Thoreau's death, the Fitchburg Railroad built an excursion park on the shores of Walden Pond - complete with concessions, swings, boats, and halls for dining, dancing, and gathering for church meetings and Fourth of July celebrations. The park attracted more and more city-dwellers and was later expanded to include a baseball diamond and a cinder track for runners and bicyclists. It all lasted until 1902, when the park burned down.

After World War I, the automobile brought increasing throngs to Walden - up to 2,000 people a day. This led to the building in 1917 of a bath house and a sand beach.

In 1922, the Emerson, Forbes, and Heywood families gave 80 acres of land surrounding Walden Pond to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Their deed restricted activity to "preserving the Walden of Emerson and Thoreau, its shores and nearby woodlands, for the public who wish to enjoy the pond, the woods, and nature, including bathing, boating, fishing, and picnicking," Management responsibifity for the reservation was given to Middlesex County. By 1935, Sunday crowds numbered over 25,000, attesting to its popularity with both local residents and visitors. In 1938, the Town of Concord took over a 40-acre site across from Walden Pond as a town landfill.

In 1945, the centennial of Thoreau's move to Walden, amateur historian Roland Wells Robbins located and excavated the foundation of Thoreau's chimney and stone floor; later, stone markers were erected at the cabin site near the pond's north shore.

But by 1949, conditions at Walden had gotten so bad with erosion of the shore and deforestation that the Thoreau Society (founded in 1941) demanded that the pond be restored to its natural state. In 1957, the county, in an attempt to enlarge the beach, chopped down 100 trees and gouged out the slope above the beach. The Thoreau Society and Save Walden Committee obtained a court injunction to stop the county's project. Then in 1960, Judge Ammi Cutter handed down a ruling ordering the county to return Walden to the forested condition that had existed during Thoreau,s time.

After Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent signed a bill in 1974 to switch the management of Walden Forest from Middlesex County to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Department of Environmental Management, Walden was developed as a state recreational park. The DEM removed the ugly concrete bath house and later restricted the number of people using the park at any one time to approximately 1,000 (this was accomplished by limiting the number of parking spaces to 350).

In the mid-1980s, two commercial developments were proposed; the Concord Office Park at Brister's Hill was to have been dominated by a 11147,000-square-foot office budding with a 500-car-capacity parking lot; and a 139-condominium project (Concord Commons II) was to be built at Bear Garden Hill. Although the state-owned land immediately surrounding Walden Pond was protected, the towns of Concord and Lincoln and the Concord Land Trusts - 40 percent of the nearby area known in Thoreau's day as Walden Woods - was unprotected from future commercial development.

Tom Blanding, a Concord literary scholar and Thoreau biographer, then head of the Thoreau County Conservation Alliance, spoke out locally and on national television, calling attention to the proposed development of Walden Woods. His activity resulted m Walden Woods being placed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of "America's Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places" in 1991. It also was the cause of Don Henley's involvement; seeing a CNN interview with Blanding, Henley's interest in preserving Walden's natural resources was immediately aroused - and the most recent stage of the Walden saga began.

Today, there are three primary groups locked in conflict over the future of Walden Pond and the best way to preserve the spirit of Thoreau.

Walden Forever Wild, a group founded in 1980, is led by Mary Sherwood, America's first woman forester - an individual who made it her task to plant trees and shrubs on the pond's denuded slopes with her own hands. At age 89, she still often sleeps in a tent, Thoreau-like. Her aim is to make Walden Pond a "historical/educational sanctuary" where recreational activities like swimming are prohibited in order to preserve intact its natural and historical values.

On the other side of the spectrum is Don Henley's Walden Woods Project, founded in 1990, with offices in Boston. Declaring that "the preservation of historic Walden Woods is going to require a healthy dose of 'operating' in the real world," Henley rallied a host of diverse Hollywood, New York, Washington, and Boston celebrities to the cause, including Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, Tom Hanks, Bette Midler, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, Sting, Whoopie Goldberg, Ted Danson, Kirstie Alley, James Michener, Jimmy Carter, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Senator Ted Kennedy. A 1993 record, The Songs of the Eagles, featuring many Nashville recording stars, netted over $2 million for the project. A star-studded $250-a-plate gala dinner in Boston raised $1.5 million more. A 1993 Labor Day concert drew 48,000 fans and raised another $1.2 million. Henley also enlisted dozens of corporate sponsor - ranging from AT&T and MTV to Hard Rock International - raising a total of $11 million to date. Yet Don Henley has been dismissively called "Henley David Thoreau" by many locals who resent his glitzy entry with his "Hollywood big-bucks people" into their almost sacred Yankee Thoreauvian wilderness.

"In between these two organizations is the DEM which, according to Denise Morrissey of the Walden Pond State Reservation, aims to preserve a balance between the conservation and historic values of Walden and the active recreational uses of Walden Pond and Walden Woods for swimming, boating, fishing, picnicking, hiking, and crosscountry skiing. Of the 150 state parks managed by the DEM, Walden is the most popular, thronged by swimmers, fishers, boaters, and winter skiers, as well as walkers who wish to recapture the essence of Thoreau. The DEM tries its best to resist today's pressures of suburbanization and commercialization in order to maintain Walden for present and future generations.

In addition to disagreements over strategy, the major focus of controversy is the Walden Woods Project's purchase in 1994 of the $1.5 million Adams Tudor mansion, a former fox-hunting lodge in Lincoln. Plans call for converting the mansion into the Thoreau Institute, with the collaboration of the scholarly Thoreau Society which would manage it. According to WWP executive director Kathi Anderson, "The institute win consist of a Thoreau library, archives, and accommodations for visiting scholars. It will also offer seminars on literary and environmental topics and reach out to schools via an electronic media center," An additional $1.8 million will be spent on a new @5,500-square-foot library addition to the mansion to house an extensive collection of Thoreau's books and related materials, some donated privately by families of three Thoreau scholars. The addition will also serve as a media center to project Thoreauls thoughts onto the Internet via the Worldwide Web. The WWP is seeking an additional $6 million to $8 million to endow the Thoreau Institute, thus requiring over $10 million to purchase and sustain it. Groundbreaking ceremonies for the new institute, attended by Senator Edward Kennedy, Don Henley, and other luminaries, was held in September 1995, and construction is currently underway.

However, the new Thoreau Institute's many critics fault the project on several fronts, including:

* Deceit: Millions of dollars raised from the public by the WWP for the advertised purpose of "purchasing forest lands to protect Walden Pond" are actually being used to purchase and endow the mansion and library for the exclusive use of selected scholars. * Cost/Image: The over $10 million that will eventually be spent on the elegant mansion and library seems incongruous in cost and spirit when contrasted with the $28.11 total that Thoreau spent to build his simple cabin by Walden Pond in 1845. * Access: The institutes Lincoln Mansion will be open exclusively to visiting literary scholars, not to the general public, many of whom donated much of the money used for its purchase and development. The Thoreau Lyceum, which was sold in 1994 to help pay for the Adam's mansion, had been open to all interested visitors. Ann McGrath, the lyceum's long-time curator, stressed education for students, many of whom came by rail from Boston and required only a short walk to visit the lyceum. * Location: The institute is isolated at the end of a dirt road, deep in the Lincoln woods, compared to the lyceum, which was more accessible in the Concord town center. * Actions: The 1,400-member Thoreau Society, composed of out-of-town academics and other Thoreau enthusiasts, has been more concerned with estoeric discussions about the fine points of old books than with the activism required to restore the eroded banks of Walden Pond.

What will be the future of Walden? Denise Morissey stresses that the 1993 DEM guidelines call for continued but limited swimming, fishing, picnicking, and hiking at Walden Pond. She feels that "sanctuary" status would be too difficult to enforce, since too many guards and police would be needed to keep recreational visitors away. Present plans call for shore bank restoration and tree-planting, which have begun to require temporary trail closures. Hopefully, the WWP's land purchases will serve as a buffer between commercial and residential developments and provide environmental protection.

Long-range plans call for the possible relocation of nearby Route in away from the pond for better safety, to lessen road-chemical runoff, to decrease car noise, and to enhance aesthetics. All of these measures must first be approved and then funded by the Massachusetts legislature.

The WWP's 1995 idea was to turn Walden Pond into an "international shrine" managed by the United Nations. It also wanted to return the woods surrounding the pond to its pre-Thoreauvian state. Many naturalists scoff that the subsequent removal of today's trees, fish, and wildlife to reestablish an unknown past ecology would be an impossible task.

But whatever occurs in the future, the shores of Walden Pond will continue to be trod by hundreds of thousands of feet of visitors from around the world, who come as pilgrims to experience the reality of this international symbol of environmental survival and natural beauty Can Walden survive its admirers and its feuding would-be protectors? In one form or another it must! For in Thoreau's own words: "In wilderness is the preservation of the world."

Joseph Lyon Andrews, Jr., is an internist and teacher at Tufts Medical School. His articles have appeared in the Boston Globe and other papers, and he is involved in numerous environmental efforts in the Concord, Massachusetts, area. This article is adapted from a portion of his forthcoming book, Concord Uncovered.