Former Eagle Uses Memories, Celebrity To Fund Conservation Efforts
Author: Jim Patterson
Publication: AP Newswire
Date: November 30, 1993
Abstract: Henley talks about the Walden Woods benefit.
Inspired by Henry David Thoreau's 19th-century homage to Walden Pond, a group of celebrities launched an international fund-raising campaign Wednesday to buy historic land slated for development around it.
The leader of the group, singer-songwriter Don Henley, displayed a check for $$250,000 in announcing plans to save Walden Woods, the once-unspoiled forest that Thoreau retreated to more than 130 years ago to write his classic "Walden."
Seated in two neat rows at historic Faneuil Hall and sipping individual bottles of Evian water were such celebrities as Don Johnson, best known for his role as a cop on "Miami Vice," Ed Begley Jr., who recently played a philandering husband in the film "She Devil," Bonnie Raitt, whose latest hit is titled "Thing Called Love," and Dana Delany, who plays the tough Army nurse on "China Beach."
"When I was 17 and went to school in Andover, I went to Walden Pond and went skinny dipping there," said Delany, dressed in a black leather jacket and black stirrup pants. "I was understandably aghast when I heard what was happening there."
"Henry David Thoreau was 150 years ahead of his time," said the 42-year-old Henley, wearing a suit with a slicked back ponytail and glasses. "His writing presaged the environmental movement and it seems appropriate to save his lands."
The money was raised from ticket sales to two concerts headlined by Henley, Raitt, Bob Seger, Glenn Frey, John Cougar Mellencamp and others at the Worcester Centrum this week.
Henley organized the benefits after seeing a report on Cable News Network earlier this year about the proposed development of a condominium project and office park near Walden Pond.
The plan of the Walden Woods Project is to raise the estimated $$8 million needed to buy the lands from developers Mortimer Zuckerman and Philip De Normandie. Henley said Wednesday that Zuckerman has donated $$100,000 to the project.
The celebrities' plan also calls for the construction of affordable housing farther away from Walden Woods.
Others involved in the project include Michael Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and co-chairman of the Walden Woods Project with Henley, novelist E.L. Doctorow, former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas, and various state officials and environmental leaders.
"These places of refuge are going to become paramount," Johnson said. "It's up to us to take a stand if we're going to have a place to go and contemplate and know the Earth as it once was."
Doctorow, author of the best-selling "Ragtime," said:
"Walden was an Everyman and he chose Walden to be his Everywhere. Walden is a book that could only be written by an American. We wouldn't exist as a people without this book. We have to be able to say, 'you read the book, now see the place."'
Walden Pond is a 62-acre body of water in a 333-acre state reservation on the edge of Concord, an affluent town of 12,500 about 20 miles from Boston.
The pond, however, is far less pastoral than when Walden lived by its shore in a tiny shack in 1845. It lies less than a hundred yards from a highway and is adjacent to a garbage dump.
