Fittingly for a man seen as the first environmentalist, Henry David
Thoreau, who described his isolated life in 1840s Massachusetts in the
classic of American literature Walden, is now helping scientists pin down the impacts of climate change.
The American author, who died in 1862, is best known for his account
of the two years he spent living in a one-room wooden cabin near Walden
Pond “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life.” Packed with descriptions of the natural world he loved,
Walden is partly autobiographical, partly a manifesto for
Thoreau’s belief in the rightness of living close to nature. “I never
found the companion that was so companionable as solitude,” he writes.
“Simplify, simplify.”
But Thoreau was also a naturalist, and he
meticulously observed the first flowering dates for over 500 species of
wildflowers in Concord, Mass., between 1851 and 1858, recording them in a
set of tables. When Richard Primack, a biology professor at Boston
University, and fellow researcher Abraham Miller-Rushing discovered
Thoreau’s unpublished records, they immediately realized how useful they
would be for pinning down the impact of the changing climate over the
last century and a half.
