Life Far Beyond Walden Pond

These days uncountable numbers of yuppies & retired New Yorkers can be found living in sterile condominiums all over the country that bear the name of Henry David Thoreau's beloved pond. Despite the high price tags on most of these overcrowded mini-cities, which may be found under construction all over America at any time of the year, most are little more than poorly insulated clusters of prefabricated boxes, utterly devoid of any indication of individual personality. Doesn't it just make you sick? It does if you're one of the many people who still remember the actual content of Thoreau's writings and who shares the ideals he embraced. Most such persons cling tenaciously to those principals. Even among those who do not share Thoreau's ideology, it's sort of chic to quote from his Essay on Civil Disobedience, which also tends to piss off the majority of modern Waldenists. To any well read person in our society, Walden means a love of nature, a simpler way of life; but what did it mean to Thoreau - or to the generations of Waldenists who preceded and followed him? (You didn't think he made the name up, did you?) If the old folks and yuppies knew what you're about to find out, they'd more than likely never, ever, ever want to have anything to do with the name Walden again!

Back in the latter half of the twelfth century, when Thomas ˆ Becket was being canonized a saint and in the city of Pisa an Italian architect named Bonnano Pisano was starting work on a tower that would later be described as "leaning," a merchant from Lyons gave away all of his earthly goods and property to devote himself to the preaching of voluntary poverty. His name was Peter Waldo and his followers were called Waldenists. The cult began in the year 1173. In 1179, Pope Alexander III tried to squelch the Waldenists by issuing a ban on the preaching of their concepts without the permission of local Bishops. Nonetheless, Peter Waldo persisted and was eventually excommunicated in 1184. The cult he began enjoyed the patronage of a great many eccentric persons throughout the ensuing centuries, with Thoreau being among its most well known adherents. What do you think the yuppies would say, though, if the requirement to move into a new "Waldenesque" community were a vow of voluntary poverty? ...can I keep the Beemer?

The central idea of Waldenism is that the trappings of so-called "civilized life" are superfluous and that the accumulation of worldly goods is contrary to the enlightenment of the soul. If communing with nature had been Thoreau's primary goal, meticulous notes on how he managed to get by on twenty-seven cents a week would have been not only unnecessary, but a distraction from his intended thesis. They are neither - although, to many modern readers who are unaware of the true nature of Waldenism, the references to the inexpensiveness of Thoreau's lifestyle must seem cryptic indeed.

There was a related movement in the early nineteenth century that was aimed at the smashing of machinery (kind of an anti-industrial 'counter' revolution) whose followers were called "Luddites," after their (probably fictitious) leader, Ned Ludd. Luddites were not opposed to the ownership of goods or money but were vehemently determined to preserve their archaic way of life through the elimination of what were then recently invented labor saving devices. This cult began in 1811 and reached its zenith when, in 1813, the leaders of the movement (no Ned Ludd among them) were hanged after a mass trial at York. The movement enjoyed sporadic revivals in popularity on and off until near the end of the nineteenth century, when rising prosperity made it unfashionable. People with a fear or mistrust of machinery are to this day called Luddites, although neo-Luddites would be a more correct moniker.

If misnomers and monikers are to be the focus of our concern, and they are as likely as not to be - the theme recurs throughout this work, then the sterile condominiums for the aged and upwardly mobile should be renamed "Social Climbers' Village" or "Paranoiaville." Dwell on the concept of nomenclature for another moment and consider a hypothetical community of ecologically harmonious homes as unique as the personalities of the individuals who occupy them: the utopian vision is New Sumer Estates; where the dawn of human civilization in the Fertile Crescent meets the pushbutton convenience of the space age. It is a walled city-state of primitive splendor with hanging gardens (a la Babylon) and windmills, solar arrays and electric cars which would mark any such prototype community as anachronistic in any time/space continuum. Luddites (or neo-Luddites) and Waldenists might have difficulties blending into such an affluent and technical utopia, which we'll return to in the next cahpter.

The subject at hand is an unholy triad of dis-social back-to-nature pseudoreligious movements, of which saboteurs make up the final third. The anti-industrial movement of the saboteurs was synchronistic to that of the Luddites, but took place across the English Channel in France. "Sabots" were the wooden shoes worn by the peasant class, as any student of etymology knows, and saboteurs were peasants who threw wooden shoes into the moving parts of factory machines to grind them to a halt. Pretty cool, nec'est pas?

What effect does a deeper understanding of Thoreauvian Waldenism and the related movements have on life in twentieth century amerika? Ever heard of Monkey Wrenching? Seek out and procure a copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. The protagonist of Abbey's supposedly fictitious work is, in fact, based on the real life person of one Dave Foreman. Once president of the Sierra Club and founder of the Wilderness Society, Dave organized Earth First into one of the most active, if not the most clandestine, splinter group of the whole environmental movement. Earth Firsters are ecowarriors who have been known to drive spikes into trees to rip timber crews' chainsaw blades off of their chainsaws in order to halt the clearcutting of wilderness areas. They have become adept at sabotaging* earth moving equipment and removing roadbuilding and real estate developers' survey stakes from proposed developments in environmentally sensitive areas. Odds are that more than one of the Earth Firsters' targets have wound up being named Walden! The Earth First movement has reduced to charred ashes innumerable commercial advertising (billboards) placed by thoughtless moneygrubbers in otherwise scenic wilderness. They are radical preservationists (as contrasted with conservationists) and their techniques are known as "monkey wrenching." Modern day disciples of the Waldenist, Luddite or Saboteur movements would have all felt right at home among the Zippies ( i.e. 'Zen insprired pagan professionals') that make up the modern continuation of environmental activism.