Thoreau’s Science
In 2004 I began working with colleagues in history, literature, and art to teach an Honors Core Course cross-listed with American studies titled “Walden and the American landscape,” about Henry D. Thoreau’s canonical and prophetic Walden. When working on my second scholarly book about America’s signature landforms, kettle lakes (Beyond Walden (Bloomsbury, 2009) my scholarship got sucked into the literary black hole of Thoreau’s Walden, with an emphasis on 19th century thinking about the environment.
One thing led to another. And by 2014 I had published Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science, an invited book for Harvard University Press, which was catalogued as Literary Criticism and History of Science. In 2017, I followed this up at Harvard Press with The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, which was catalogued as as Biography and American History. Realizing that Walden Pond –a place of pilgrimage for an estimated 160,000 international visitors per year– had no guidebook, I published The Guide to Walden Pond in 2018 with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (now Mariner) that is essentially travel literature. And in 2026, my deepest dive into Thoreau scholarship — The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau— will be published by Princeton University Press: a book provisionally titled The Walden Experiments.
In short, without planning to, I became a scholar of Thoreau’s science as a component of Environmental History. I’m fully engaged as life member of the Thoreau Society, serving on its Board, and waiting for the upcoming PBS – Ken Burns – Florentine Films – Ewer’s Brothers — biopic on Thoreau with me as a talking head. I’m also regularly publishing in edited volumes and the Thoreau’s Society’s peer-reviewed journal, The Concord Saunterer, where I will soon publish a contribution to climate change: “Thoreau’s River Seasons: A Phenological Baseline.” As of 2022, I had published four scholarly book reviews for the journal Environmental History, and am now working several manuscripts for submission, one on Thoreau’s sense of wildness, and another on Aldo Leopold’s classic “Thinking Like a Mountain.”
Stone Walls
My Thoreau scholarship is being paralleled by my continuing interest in New England’s Stone Walls. The scientific aspects of this are described in Scientific Writing. But an equally important part of this subject falls under the province of history. In September, 2023 I drew these ideas to publish a lengthy essay in Smithsonian that opened and closed with Robert Frost’s famous “Mending Wall,” making the point that his walls were far more important as symbols than they ever were as fences and boundary markers. As such, what had originally been created as barriers became the binding threads for New England’s rural culture. This essay was awarded “Best History Writing for 2023” by the professional History News Network.” In 2024, I drew together my ideas on how to approach the inventory, management, and interpretation of stone walls for public benefit. This was published in The Public Historian in February 2025.
For my work in both of the endeavors, I was elected as a member to the prestigious American Antiquarian Society, one of only two geologists this millennium.
Creative Nonfiction
I’m also increasingly interested in creative nonfiction. My latest writing project is about a pioneer farmer in Lyme New Hampshire who was declared a lunatic in 1840, and whose farm lies near an abandoned and “lost” cemetery. This is under contract to the University of Massachusetts Press for publication in Fall, 2027.
For many years, I’ve served on the Advisory Board for the Connecticut Center for the Book. This year, I’m a panel reviewer in this genre for the Artist Fellowship Program of the CT Office of the Arts.
All of this above seems quite odd for a card-carrying STEM scientist. I’m not quite sure how it happened. Perhaps I’m just being human.
Top Photo: Dust Jacket image of Walden’s Shore. Lower photo: Stone wall in Holyoke, Massachusetts.