In tradition of Thoreau, a call to action

If Henry David Thoreau could have installed solar panels on the log cabin he built near Walden Pond in the 1840s, William Moomaw says, the Concord-born philosopher would have fretted over losing the excess electricity the panels usually generate in the summertime.

"It seems sinful, or wasteful, in a sense Thoreau would appreciate," said Moomaw, a Tufts University professor, at the recent kickoff lecture of the Thoreau Society's first Lyceum Series.

A member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who, along with Al Gore, won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, Moomaw had a suggestion for homeowners facing a similar crisis of conscience: Hook your solar panels up to the grid and sell electricity back to your utility company.

It's a thrifty approach the self-reliant Thoreau probably would have approved of.

Moomaw's lecture and others in the series are part of a push by the scholarly Thoreau Society to expand its outreach programs, a push that includes bringing high school students from across the country to Concord this summer and providing teachers with materials that feature controversial thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, an outspoken critic of the American consumer culture.

The goal, society officers said, is to show nonscholars how Thoreau's writings have resonance today on issues from global warming to healthcare. The message they want to convey, they said, is summed up by a famous passage from Thoreau's 1854 masterpiece, "Walden": "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life."

That theme of Spartan living, introspection, and using only sufficient resources to live is not in vogue in today's fast-paced, debt-ridden American culture, said Michael Frederick, the society's executive director.

"How can you actually take some of Thoreau's ideas and adopt them?" he asked. "Simplicity. Trying to live a greener lifestyle. Especially important is thinking deliberatively."

It would not be the first time Thoreau inspired people to change the world. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi cited Thoreau's 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience" as crucial to their development as activists. Environmentalists regularly cite "Walden" as one of the earliest and most sensitive portrayals of modern man's interaction with nature.

But today, when people seem to be consuming resources and polluting the environment at an unsustainable rate, Thoreau's voice is needed more than ever, Frederick said. The society chose to start with a lecture series by world-renowned environmentalists and health specialists.

"We must also live deliberately," said Moomaw. "In the 21st century, we too must front the essential facts of life. We're treating the atmosphere and land as a giant waste dump."

Held in Concord Academy's Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel, Moomaw's April 2 lecture drew about 60 people. On Wednesday, at the last lecture, Harvard Medical School professor Herbert Benson is scheduled to speak on stress-related ailments, the kind Thoreau may have foreshadowed when he said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

Moomaw's lecture focused on the new "green" house he and his wife, Margot, built in Williamstown in Western Massachusetts last year. They installed devices such as a copper coil that collects heat from shower water as it washes down the drain and pipes that draw heat from the soil even in the winter because they are under the frost line.

Striving to reduce their "carbon footprint," the amount of fossil fuels their house used, involved a dizzying array of choices that Moomaw said made him appreciate Thoreau's call to lead an examined life.

"To get there required an enormous amount of decisions," he said.

Margot Moomaw said consumers can save energy by purchasing appliances that do not have costly, energy-draining additions like refrigerators with ice makers or dishwashers with extreme heat cycles.

"This Thoreau would appreciate," she said during the lecture. "Simplicity. Beware feature creep."

Discussion about simple life changes will be central to the experience of as many as 20 high school sophomores and juniors Frederick expects to come to Concord for a week this summer, at a cost of around $1,000, as part of the society's new Thoreau Country Today program. Students will stay with Concord families and visit historic sites while discussing the author's theories, he said.

The summer program is linked to the society's new DVD, "Life With Principle," which is designed to spark classroom discussions about civil disobedience. "You have activities that are going on in scholarship," said Frederick. "We're able to take that and funnel information to high school teachers and students."

The society is expanding physically, too, with its planned move from Bedford Road in Concord to the Thoreau birthplace and family farm on Virginia Road, a historic house and 20-acre farm the town gave to the nonprofit Thoreau Farm Trust last year.

The trust has raised $800,000 to renovate the house and needs around $200,000 more to finish the project, said executive director Nancy Grohol. The society has about 200 members and a budget of about $300,000 a year, Frederick said.

Rob Beede, an architect who attended Moomaw's lecture, is the kind of layman the society wants to reach. His sister, an environmental activist, told him about the lecture, he said. He agreed to attend because he wanted to hear Moomaw speak on environmentally friendly buildings.

"I feel a little out of the loop in terms of green buildings," he said. "Green buildings and designing homes that have a small ecological imprint are hot topics in the world of architecture these days."

Most who came to hear Moomaw's lecture learned something new.

Nonscholars learned that while Thoreau stayed in his log cabin to contemplate nature for about two years, he walked into town on Sundays to have a home-cooked meal with his mother.

Scholars learned that his log cabin was really not very energy efficient.

"Who does not love a log cabin?" asked Moomaw. "They are such a part of American culture. But they are really inefficient. It turns out wood is not a good insulator. That wood is just transferring out heat. The most efficient thing to do is live in an apartment."

John Dyer can be reached at johnjdyerjr@gmail.com.