Climate Change At Walden Pond

In the late 1840s, Henry David Thoreau made copious notes about the natural world of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. He noted the date the ice left the pond, when birds arrived, leaves appeared, and the dates of first-flowering for three hundred plant species. These journals were never published, but when Richard B. Primack found them, he knew they would be useful for documenting changes in climate since Thoreau’s time. The highbush blueberry, for example, now blooms three to six weeks earlier than in the 1840s.

In our free e-book for April, Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods, Primack carefully and compellingly reveals the scientific data in Thoreau’s writings and its implications for our own time. Get the e-book of Walden Warming free in April.

“Primack shares striking tales from the field and elucidates from an unnervingly close-to-home perspective the dynamics and impact of climate change on plants, birds, and myriad other species, including us.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist