Walden Pond Inspires Combatants : Preservation: Two causes, affordable housing and the environment, clash as apartments are planned near one of Thoreau’s favorite spots.

Walden Woods, that bucolic setting of the Henry David Thoreau manifesto that has inspired philosophers and naturalists for more than a century, has become a battleground pitting two of the most noble modern-day causes: the environment and affordable housing.

Environmental and historical groups want to block a 135-unit condominium complex from being built less than a mile from Walden Pond, and a 148,000-square-foot office park even closer.

“If we can stop these two developments, we’ll have something snowballing here. This can be preserved for all time,” Thomas Blanding, an anti-development leader, said as he sat atop the magnificent Fairhaven Cliffs, one of Thoreau’s favorite spots in the mid-19th Century for thinking and writing. “If you can’t do it here, you can’t do it anywhere.”

The condo project’s backers, which include the state, say that this development will give at least a handful of low- and moderate-income people a chance to share the beauties of the area that Thoreau loved. Seven of the condo units would be available for low-income renters and 34 would be sold at below-market rates to middle-income families. These people have largely been shut out of a market where housing prices average $340,000.

As for the office complex, they say, it is not as if the developers would spoil a pristine wilderness. The site’s previous owner bulldozed it twice to sell its gravel, leaving almost no vegetation. And in the 700 yards that lay between the proposed office park and Thoreau’s beloved Walden Pond, there already are a four-lane highway, a trailer park and the town dump.

Neither proposed project would be visible from Walden Pond, which is under state protection, although its shores are showing wear from being trampled by as many as 5,000 people a day.

Each side has little regard for the supposedly noble motivations of the other.

The anti-development forces say the units would hardly make a dent in the area’s need for affordable housing and scoff at the idea that the condominium builders are some sort of philanthropists. They see the inclusion of lower-priced units as an exercise in raw political power: By offering those condos under market prices, the developers would have the upper hand over local zoning agencies, thanks to a 20-year-old state statute known as the “anti-snob zoning law.”

Supporters of the two projects, meanwhile, portray the opponents as suburban elitists, who make lofty environmental arguments when they simply do not want to share their community with anyone else, particularly the less affluent.

Now, the Hollywood crowd, led by rock singer Don Henley, has stepped into this increasingly nasty fray.

Henley became hooked on Thoreau when he read “Walden” as a high-school student in East Texas. “It was as if it was something I had known all along, and someone was expressing it for me,” he says.

When Henley heard about the development controversy in a television report last December, he decided to try to do something about it. He visited the site last month and started recruiting his show-business friends to help with a fund-raiser. On Tuesday and Wednesday, he held benefit concerts at the Worcester Centrum featuring such headliners as Bonnie Raitt, Jimmy Buffett and Bob Seger.

While state officials did not question his sincerity, they wondered publicly if Henley really understood what he was getting into.

In a letter to Henley earlier this month, Amy S. Anthony, state secretary for communities and development, cautioned the 42-year-old singer against allowing his efforts to be “used by those who would obstruct the development of worthwhile housing.”

She described the opposition as “a thinly veiled attempt on the part of a few to obstruct the construction of affordable housing in a wealthy suburban community” so Concord would remain “a single-family enclave for the wealthy.”

Henley was undeterred. “Symbols have been of enormous importance to man as long as he has been on this Earth--the flag, the cross, the Star of David, the bald eagle, the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon, the pilgrim, the cowboy,” he wrote in his reply to Anthony. “The worth of Walden Woods lies in its great symbolic value.”

Thoreau’s views on civil disobedience were an inspiration to such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, whose grandson Arun Gandhi has joined the anti-development forces. Thoreau’s eloquent tributes to nature helped shape the views of such environmentalists as John Muir and Rachel Carson.

And E. B. White once wrote in the New Yorker that he clung to Thoreau’s “Walden” in much the same way as he carried his handkerchief--”for relief in moments of defluxion or despair.”

On Wednesday, Henley held a news conference on a celebrity-studded dais that included such an unlikely combination of personalities as television star Don Johnson, novelist E. L. Doctorow and Michael Kennedy, the son of Robert F. Kennedy. There, he announced that the $250,000 proceeds from the concert would go toward a multimillion dollar fund that would have two purposes: purchasing and preserving the two development sites and acquiring alternative properties for low-income housing.

With that move, Henley hoped to mollify the affordable housing proponents and make the developers an offer they couldn’t refuse. The first contribution to the fund, for $100,000, came from Mortimer Zuckerman, whose Boston Properties is the developer of the office complex. Zuckerman had earlier made it known that he is willing to sell the site for his cost, which he estimates at $7 million.

(Zuckerman also owns the Atlantic Monthly, the magazine for which Thoreau wrote in the final months of his life.)

Still, it is far from clear whether Henley’s proposal will work. For one thing, just buying the two development sites could require raising $10 million, Henley estimates. That leaves housing advocates wondering how much will be left over for their cause.

Further, it may not be all that easy to find other sites for the middle- and low-income housing. Although she agreed to join the board of Henley’s fund, Anthony said “I’m doubtful, myself. Concord has already looked a lot. Some very good people have tried very hard in that community” and come up empty.

“I don’t think they’ve looked hard enough,” Henley responded.

Where Thoreau was able to build his little shingled house on Walden Pond for $28.12, average housing prices in Concord now are beyond the reach of anyone making less than $145,000 a year. Even the town’s own police chief cannot afford to live there and had to get a special exemption from an ordinance requiring him to be a resident.

Nor can many of Concord’s teachers, city workers and firefighters afford to live there.

Although town officials were not wild about the condo project from the start, they said they had to forge a compromise with the developers because only 2% of the housing in Concord now qualifies as affordable. That meant they were subject to the “anti-snob zoning law,” which limits the powers of local officials to block affordable housing developments.

However, Blanding, a Thoreau scholar who heads the Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance, said that Walden Woods has always been viewed as the “backside” of this historic town 20 miles northwest of Boston.

Even in Thoreau’s time, he said, it was inhabited by Concord’s outcasts--freed slaves, drunkards, Irish laborers and Thoreau himself, who was viewed as an over-educated, ne’er-do-well eccentric.

Concord’s regard for the woods where Thoreau loved to saunter apparently did not increase with time--as evidenced by its decision in the 1950s to put a landfill across the road from Walden Pond.

Edward Linde, president of Zuckerman’s Boston Properties, noted that the office site has been zoned for commercial use for 25 years and said no one raised the historic significance of the office complex site during the early stages of the approval process.

Similarly, Lorene Comeau, project manager for the condominium site, said environmental organizations had turned down an opportunity to purchase it well before the current developers, Philip DeNormandie and the John M. Corcoran Co., got involved.

But Henley insists that the Walden Woods carries a significance far beyond these local interests.

“Henry David Thoreau, for all practical purposes, was the father of the modern environmental movement,” he said, “and Walden Woods is the cradle of the movement.”