At Walden Pond, CA Students Find a Local Lens on Historical and Environmental Protection

Academics August 27, 2026

This spring, history teacher Mitchell Morris took his American Environmental History class to Walden Pond to explore the complex balance between preserving nature and making protected spaces accessible to the public. Through discussions of conservation, Indigenous perspectives, national parks, and Walden’s own history, students challenged assumptions about what wilderness should be and who it should serve.

Story by Natalie Cherie Campbell
Photos by Natalie Cherie Campbell

Although many �鶹�� field trips to nearby Walden Pond explore the literary legacy of Henry David Thoreau, when CA history teacher Mitchell Morris took his class there in April 2026, their focus wasn’t on transcendentalism. Rather, the students walked the pondside trail because it is a federally protected National Historic Landmark.

Morris says his upper-level course, American Environmental History, “explores the ways that Americans have shaped, and been shaped by, the lands and waters of this country.” Topics included Native American and colonial relationships to the natural world; the environmental philosophies of Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Muir; the Progressive Era conservation movement, and the features and, some say, flaws of U.S. national parks.

Ceci Bogan ’27 joined the class having recently returned from an off-grid semester exploring the canyons of Utah’s backcountry, primed to engage with questions about environmental stewardship. “This class added a historical take to questions like, ‘Do we come to nature thinking we belong here, we continue to belong here, and we must do so respectfully, or do we come to nature thinking that it is not our real home, that we are visitors and are damaging it just by existing?’” she says.

Holding such questions about the relationship between people and nature, Morris’ students learned the history of America’s efforts to protect some of its most beautiful places through the National Park Service. They read from Gifford Pinchot’s essay “Principles of Conservation,” which advocates for active management of parks to prevent waste and ensure public benefit, as well as from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, which bemoans “Industrial Tourism”—development for the sake of accessibility that threatens to destroy sacred, solitary wilderness. Contrasting these viewpoints shaped the central exploration in Morris’ national parks unit: “Who and what are the national parks for? Conversely, who and what are they not for? Finally, and most importantly, who and what should they be for?” he asks.

Gabriel Burd ’27 thinks the National Park Service should prioritize the natural landscape, but that “a balance must be found between human and natural interactions, as often both extremes end in harm,” he says. “Nature does not serve humans or vice versa,” he adds. “The national parks should impact a large number of people not only as a form of recreation but also to inspire them to protect the environment.”

Ceci says she appreciates how U.S. national parks connect visitors with nature on many levels: “The majority of Americans don’t have the knowledge or means to hunt down their own wilderness and experience it alone, so the national parks help to facilitate that relationship.” She concedes that their design—with paved roads, parking lots, air-conditioned visitor centers, and gift shops—calls into question whether the parks even count as wilderness anymore. But even so, Ceci doesn’t hold to Abbey’s more exclusive approach to maintaining sacred untouched nature.

“I don’t mind that there is nature in the country that is available in a comfortable way,” she says. “Those who cannot or do not wish to explore the more complicated aspects of being in the wilderness can remain on the paved roads or in the shuttle bus. What matters to me is that this does not happen to all of the wilderness. If the ‘non-industrial tourists’ out there want to find ‘real’ wilderness, they can. If they want to check out the mainstream locations that make nature accessible to ‘industrial tourists,’ they can do that too.”

While not featuring sweeping vistas, Concord’s own little piece of the National Park Service, Walden Pond State Reservation, is the location of Thoreau’s cabin, where he lived separate from society, immersed in nature. Giving rise to Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Thoreau’s reflections inspired a change in the ways Americans think about the use of nature, making it a perfect place to consider these questions in action.

“Walden is an example of the elaborate balancing act of national parks,” Gabriel says. With rich ecological and historical significance, natural beauty, and a long history of recreational use as part of community life in Concord, Mass., “there’s no easy solution,” he adds. “That’s why it’s a constant struggle; how do you balance all those needs?”

Charlotte Cavanaugh ’26 appreciated the layered approach to accessibility at Walden Pond, which allows visitors to choose how they spend their time there. “The main beach area, the information center, and the path to the site of Thoreau’s cabin are all designed for maximum accessibility, while other areas remain quieter and less structured,” she says.

While exploring the information, maps, and displays in the visitor center, the class seized an unplanned opportunity to speak with a ranger about this struggle to balance the interests of humans with those of the pond itself. Sometimes those interests aren’t in conflict, the ranger told them. A new bathhouse is serving a recreational purpose while also positively impacting the ecosystem by reducing human impact on the water.

“This is the kind of nuanced thinking that I think should be used throughout all national parks,” Gabriel says.

“It reflects Pinchot’s principle of serving the greatest good for the longest time, while also preventing waste, as the materials used were sourced from the trees cleared on-site,” Charlotte says. “In this way, Walden embodies an ongoing negotiation between access and preservation, illustrating how the original goals of conservation continue to evolve in practice and who and what the parks are for has shifted back to being for the enjoyment of nature as well as the conservation of materials.”

To Ceci, however, Walden Pond is missing the mark in some key ways. Its infrastructure doesn’t bother her. What does, she says, are restrictions on who can use the pond and what it can be used for. Pointing to parking fees, fencing, and prohibitions on running, biking, and dog walking, she’s concerned such measures limit accessibility. “By restricting the ways in which a public park can be used, fewer and fewer people will make the effort to visit, and those who do will be afforded less and less of an authentic experience,” she says.

The debate among Morris’ students is just what he hoped for from the excursion. “Walden Pond State Reservation gives us a chance to look at the tug-of-war inherent in our parks system—preserving nature while making that same nature accessible to more people—and how that has shaped it,” he says.

No matter the impressions Walden Pond made on his students, Morris’ hands-on approach to environmental history empowered them to bring their perspectives into community action. Their final project for the course involved creating a proposal for redeveloping the recently decommissioned Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Concord land parcel, not far from CA’s campus.

Charlotte says it was “eye-opening” to participate in town planning: “Seeing that we can directly engage with the work was a huge thing for me.”

“We were able to talk in class and then actually do what we’d talked about, like going to the town meetings and being part of these discussions,” Ceci says. “The fact that we’re actually able to be part of that feels really cool.”

Gabriel adds, “Mitch did a really good job of utilizing the area we are in, like visiting Walden and the prison. It really is very unique to be able to do this.”

Having their assumptions repeatedly challenged gave Morris’ class what Ceci calls a “myth-busting” quality. “It’s easy to think that wilderness needs to be perfectly preserved, but wilderness should be witnessed and appreciated,” she says. “If a forest gets turned into a parking lot, you can’t appreciate nature. If a forest is entirely blocked off from human use, you can’t appreciate nature either. There’s no way to benefit from this beautiful world we live in if we’re not able to access it, be there, and experience it. I think it is important to find a balance, take both into account, and ask how we can be part of this ecosystem.”

Gabriel shares, “I always assumed when visiting national parks in the past that everything was good. It’s preserving this beautiful landscape. How could it go wrong? But learning about 500 families being displaced for the creation of Shenandoah or a member of the Blackfeet tribe losing access to their ancestral hunting grounds and experiencing food shortages due to regulations in Glacier made me reflect on the impact of capitalism, government neglect of certain populations, and other sources of harm in the name of conservation and public recreation. It made me ask, ‘What are the alternatives?’”

For Charlotte, learning about the complexity of Native Americans’ relationships with the natural environment and that they also “left a large environmental impact, though less than the colonizers,” unsettled an idealized image of Indigenous cultures she hadn’t realized she’d absorbed.

However, she adds, “If we can’t engage with our environment in a healthy way that does not permanently damage the earth, we’re doing something very, very wrong. We need to take a look at what we’re doing and re-evaluate and adjust the way that we’re engaging with nature and our surroundings. That should be our main goal.”

One of the first texts the class read is a Haudenosaunee creation story about Skywoman, who falls from the sky holding seeds. Some animals sacrifice themselves so that she can have land to stand on, and Skywoman in turn gives the plants to the animals for food. Together, all the animals and Skywoman grow a world to live within in harmony.

Ceci recalls this text, which sparked an insight for her that grew into one of her main takeaways from the course: “Humans are an integral part of the ecosystem. We’re no more and no less members of this ecosystem than animals; we are animals. And I think we need to stop this myth that as soon as a human walks onto wilderness, it’s no longer preserved. We need to start seeing ourselves as part of a story instead of someone who’s stepping all over it or removed from it.”