News from a Changing Planet -- #42 -- A Visit to Walden Pond
Considering Thoreau, Walden, and the lessons for our own resistance in the face of injustice.
I’m not sure exactly why, but at this time of year, when the leaves are changing (or at least I am expecting them to change…) from green to a patchwork outcry of reds, yellows and oranges, I often think about Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau kept such good records of climate and weather and nature data at Walden that they have become incredibly useful to scientists as a way of tracking the effects of climate change in one location of Concord, Mass., adding detail to the stark picture of the state’s warming: 3.5ºF of temperature increase since 1900, according to NOAA.
Richard B. Primack, a biologist, used that data to write a book about climate change at Walden, Walden Warming, and one of his chapters was about the changing date of Walden’s “ice-out”, when ice didn’t cover the surface of most of the pond anymore. For Thoreau, the average ice-out date was April 1. Between 1995 and 2009, ice-out came, on average, on March 17. Now, there are winters when Walden doesn’t freeze at all.
This annual reminder of Thoreau, especially in his incarnation as citizen scientist, is prompting me to share with you (a version of) an essay I wrote for an anthology about Thoreau, Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau:, which came out in 2021 from Princeton University Press, and which I am adapting here with the permission of its editor, Andrew Blauner.
Ice, for the Time Being
“Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well,” Thoreau wrote toward the end of the chapter “The Pond in Winter” in Walden, after watching Irish laborers harvest the glassy blocks of ice from the pond to send off to hotter climates.
He goes on to use this as a metaphor for a connection between himself and a Hindu priest, similarly bathing their intellects in the “stupendous and cosmogony philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta.”
Unfortunately, I remain fixated on the ice.
I was born in 1990. Unlike Thoreau, and unlike almost every generation before mine, I have only known a world where the amount of natural ice is disappearing, in the hotter summers and alarmingly warming winters, as glaciers and ice caps melt; it’s a world where Walden Pond doesn’t freeze for the winter anymore. Instead, my world is one with few and distant memories of ice skating on frozen ponds; it’s one where snow machines compensate for the declining snowpack, allowing skiers and snowboarders to imagine a different time with more reliable winters. It’s a world where 90 percent of American homes have air-conditioning, but in the hottest parts of the world—Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, home to 2.8 billion people—only 8 percent of the population does, despite the deadly threat posed by extreme heat there.
Despite this perversion—ice disappears from nature; machines make ice appear nearly instantly in many parts of the world—I had not thought much about where ice came from before refrigerators, or how to make anything cold in a pre-industrial world.
Before I read Walden, specifically that ice-cutting scene, it had not occurred to me that, even before a railroad linked Concord, Massachusetts, to Boston, blocks of ice could have been shipped from Walden Pond to India, perhaps, nestled in a jacket of insulating straw, twice crossing the equator, and ending up, clinked in a cocktail glass, cooling the elites of the British Raj (or, as Thoreau suggests, the wealthy Southern slaver in Charleston or New Orleans, or the guru studying the “Bhagvat-Geeta” on the banks of the Ganges).
“How did that business begin?” I wondered. That question led me to the story of Frederick Tudor, the mad ice king of New England, who made and lost and made again a fortune selling New England’s ice to tropical climates as well as to the courts of Europe.
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