We often associate Henry David Thoreau and John Muir with wild, untrammeled wilderness. While John Muir grew up in the agricultural midwest, he moved to California, and his books and journals reflect the wilderness he found there. But Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond, even then far from wild, and his journals remind us that he lived in a landscape far more agricultural and far less wooded than the one that we now have in this part of Connecticut. As Foster describes it,
Thoreau ... lived through the peak of ... agrarian splendor [in New England], during a time when the population was spread quite evenly across the landscape in small farming villages and most people made a living by working products from the land. He built his cabin at Walden Pond in one of the few forest areas remaining in Concord, actually a woodlot that served for a century and a half as a source of fuel and timber and food for an active country population ... Toward the end of Thoreau's life a second transformation of the countryside began, this time back to a wilder state, as New Englanders moved into the new farmlands of the Midwest or relocated into the emerging cities of the Industrial Revolution ... Since Thoreau's day, most of the land has reverted to forest .... [5], p. xi.
These observations are well-illustrated in Foster's study of land-use history in Petersham, Massachusetts (Figure 1).2 An inevitable part of the reforestation of New England is the associated decline of animal and plant species associated with open, agricultural habitats. Grassland birds, for example, are among the most threatened birds in southern New England. One could argue that we have returned to a more ``natural'' landscape than the one that existed during Thoreau's time and that the loss of grassland birds and plants is nothing to be worried about because we are returning to a more ``natural'' state than the one of a century and a half ago when they were ``artificially'' common. But the characteristics of our contemporary forests are very different from those of the forests that greeted the first European colonists almost four centuries ago.
