Concord’s
Commitment to Conservation
W When someone says, “Concord is a special place,” they could likely be referring to its history, whether that be its role in the American Revolution or its literary tradition. But those things belong, after all, to the past, and so they are more reasons for saying Concord was a special place than that it is. Many towns have history, especially in New England, but few of them, like Concord, retain the sense of a living historical legacy. Concord, then, is a special place, as much as it was a special place, because of a long and ongoing tradition of conservation. Conservation in Concord means caring both for historical sites and indigenous natural beauty, protecting lands from development, and keeping away pollution and invasive species. The shared commitment of residents, nonprofits, and state agencies has made the quality and extent of conservation in Concord exceptional, or, put otherwise, special.
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Like everything else in Concord, its conservation has a deep history. In fact, the conservation movement in Concord is arguably as old as the modern conservation movement itself. The writings of the Transcendentalists were among the first to champion the preservation of nature against encroachments from industry. Thoreau’s maxim, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” continues to be a mission statement for conservationists all over the world. But the Transcendentalists did not only write about conservation. When, in 1879, the State of Massachusetts announced the extension of the Lexington and Arlington Railroad to where it would destroy a wooded area in Concord called the Leaning Hemlocks, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and others signed a petition against “building the new line through what is to us and to all lovers of nature most precious ground.”
| 2021 Guide to the Great Outdoors
BY SAM COPELAND
The foundations for the conservation movement in Concord have consistently been laid by private individuals. A generation after the Transcendentalists, American ornithologist William Brewster purchased the land known as October Farm to protect it from being developed. Many of Concord’s historical sites, like the Old Manse and Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, were cared for by private families before being handed over to conservatorial organizations. More recently, in 1989, over 60 acres of the woods around Walden Pond came under threat when a real estate company proposed to bulldoze it and build offices and condos. The National Trust for Historic Preservation had listed Walden Woods as one of America’s most endangered historic places when Don Henley of the Eagles heard about the controversy. Henley, who had been inspired by Thoreau’s writings as a college
©Teresa Ferraiolo
Sunset on Walden Pond
