How has the environment around Walden Pond changed since Thoreau’s day?
Concord was a farming town then, and most of the landscape was cleared for agricultural farming and cattle and sheep grazing. When Thoreau was alive, there were only a few patches of woods, but that area is now forested. During Thoreau’s time, people began abandoning agricultural life, and it underwent a very dramatic decline after the Civil War. Now there’s relatively little agriculture left in New England, and it means that the whole pattern of wildflower and animal distribution has changed very dramatically. It’s not really good or bad; it’s simply a change that is being driven by the economics of agriculture and logging. The part that you could say is not good is that a lot of the wildflowers need open habitats to survive, so many of the wildflowers that Thoreau saw can’t be found anymore because they require open meadows to survive. When Thoreau was alive, there were a lot of orchid and lily species, and those are hard to find today. There’s also been a change of animal population
