My Green Manifesto

by David Gessner

  When most people think of the Charles, if they think of it at all, they imagine a tame and preppy river, a river that got into the Ivy League, a river of boathouses and scullers. But when Captain John Smith spied the Charles from Boston Harbor in 1614, he wasn’t thinking about scullers or tea parties or final clubs.2 Like any explorer worth his salt, his dreams were of discovery—the main chance—and in the river he thought he’d hit upon it. He took one look at its great gaping mouth and assumed that it was a raging torrent of water that cut deep into the continent. It turned out he was spectacularly wrong in this assumption: not only does the river not reach halfway to California, it barely makes it halfway to Worcester. What Smith had not anticipated was that the Charles, like many people, has a mouth too big for its body. His disappointment over the river’s length did not stop him from naming it after his king, forever saddling the poor river with a name that is stiff and a little goofy. Imagine the difference if he had called it “The Chuck.”

  As for the river’s length, it covers, as the crow flies from source to mouth, about twenty-six miles, almost exactly the same distance as the Boston Marathon. This makes sense since the Charles, like the Marathon, begins in the town of Hopkinton. The difference is that the river, unlike the runners, isn’t interested in traveling straight and fast. By the time it wends its way to the harbor it has actually covered something closer to eighty miles, earning its Indian name of Quinobequin which means “meander.” That name is currently under debate, as is the river’s actual source—the good folks of Milford claim the river starts in their town, not in Hopkinton—but most agree that it emerges in the latter town, as my own observations confirm.

  I had agreed to drive Dan’s boats from Cape Cod to his house in Boston, but, a born meanderer myself, before delivering the boats I had to go to Hopkinton to search for the river’s beginnings. With a large canoe and a kayak atop my car, I rattled down Granite Street, where I observed small muddy creeks trickling into a manmade reservoir named Echo Lake. I couldn’t see how to get into the lake since the woods were posted with signs that said NO TRESPASSING: TOWN OF MILFORD WATER SUPPLY, and I couldn’t very well leave Dan’s kayak and canoe unwatched, so I drove up a smaller street until I saw a woman in her front yard washing her car. I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers, and sure enough when I pulled into the driveway and got out to say hi, the woman immediately pointed at the kayak and told a story about a recent canoe trip she’d been on. Her name was Amy Markovich and she ran a business called Echo Lake Adirondacks which sold the elegant wooden chairs that were displayed on her lawn. She was delighted that I was going to paddle the length of the Charles, and rushed inside to print out aerial photos of the lake, displaying them for me as though she were showing off pictures of her children. After she put the pictures away, she coached me on the best way to hike into the reservoir. She seemed genuinely proud to have this mysterious thing—the very source of the Charles—in her own backyard.

  She let me leave the car in her driveway and promised to keep an eye on the boats. I followed her instructions and hiked back down the road before cutting in on the ATV trails as she’d suggested. After about a mile I came upon the lake, which gave me my first hint that there was a hidden wilderness within the confines of Boston’s suburbs. It’s true that my initial sight was of a pile of litter at the base of a red cedar—Coors empties, water bottles, and a Newman’s Own salad dressing bottle, as if these had been particularly health-conscious litterbugs—but what I saw next was the blue bowl of the lake itself. Silver shined through the birch and pine and, with its many small coves, you could easily imagine you were looking out at a lake in Maine or Canada. I tramped around for a while—following deer tracks in the mud, listening to a kingfisher overhead—and tried to determine the indeterminable: Which of those muddy brooks, barely trickles now in early summer, was the true source of the Charles?

  After hiking out, I thanked Amy, promised to dedicate a chapter to her, then drove back down Granite Street and pulled over by a mossy graveyard to study the brooks to the north of the reservoir. These nameless incarnations are the first drops of what eventually will become the Charles—a truly modest beginning to a great river.3

  On the other end of the reservoir, the water dribbled out of Echo Lake and along Route 85, next to Wendy’s and Pizza 85, gradually picking up force and momentum. But only gradually. If you judged this river just from its beginnings you would have to conclude that it would never amount to much; a shiftless townie river that wasn’t going anywhere much less the Ivy League. Unambitious, it seemed destined to do no more than dribble behind the strip malls of Milford. Of course I knew that the river, like a lot of us, would overcome its muddled beginnings.

  A NEW MUSIC

  For the better part of the morning and into the afternoon a great blue heron waits then flies off in front of me, waits and flies off again, engaging me in a marathon game of tag. I first saw the bird not long after the initial rapids on the left bank by some turtles, and its size startled me. To real bird watchers, great blue herons, which have done surprisingly well in the face of continued habitat destruction, have lost some of their appeal due to the fact that they are fairly common. But, all alone and drifting up close to the bird with its full six-foot wingspan, I was reminded that it had earned the “great” in its name.

  Our game goes like this: I try to paddle by as quietly as possible, but inevitably the bird periscopes its long neck up, tightens as I approach, then rocks back slightly before leaping into the air. The pre-leap moment is a tense one for the bird and part of my game is trying to guess the exact second it will launch itself into the sky. Often this departure is accompanied by a loud, pissed-off sounding sproak. Of course I know I am anthropomorphizing: If the bird really is pissed off, why does it keep flying downstream from me instead of simply heading upstream a little and letting me go by? I don’t know the answer to this, but if I’m an irritant to the bird, then it is anything but to me. Each time it flies off I study its deep, slow flapping, its long neck pulled back into its chest. It looks graceful, ghostly, and ungainly all at once. A gray vision except for its chest, which seems to absorb whatever blue the reflected river offers. Even more than its size, its wing beat—so muscular and deliberate it looks like it is paddling through a substance more viscous than air—distinguishes it. The heron glides ahead to the next stop and the game continues.

  Pardon me for going on so long about a bird. These things happen when you are alone on a river. As it turns out though, Dan Driscoll has a thing for great blue herons, too. Dan can sound hardheaded and funny when discussing the Red Sox or the idiocy of state bureaucracy, but, like a lot of us, including me, his language sometimes goes soft when it turns to nature.

  Last night I slept over at Dan’s house in Watertown, and during the late innings of the Sox game, after a few too many beers, he began to talk about nature as his “only religion,” and admitted that the great blue heron was something close to his “totem bird.” I squirmed a little at that, and he backed off.

  “Well, at the very least, it served as a kind of mascot,” he said.

  The heron’s body is the blue of stains from old-fashioned carbon paper. The blue darkens to something close to black at the wingtips, lightened only by a white splash of feathers—the heron’s “headlights” as birders call them—between the two tones. I see it near a small side creek, periscope up, on alert, then retracted enough to completely change the metaphor: now neck and head look like a curled-back hand puppet. The primary feathers are more blue than the rest, the secondaries more gray, and together they create a color uniquely heron. Shining yellow eyes are circled by rings of black, but between eye and mask there is smaller circle of color: a whitish yellow that seemed to run like a bad watercolor down into the bill. At first the bird appears completely motionless, but then I notice the bill slowly opening and closing, as if it is whispering to itself. The wind ruffles the heron’s feathers slightly, but other than the bill, and the slightest s
hifts in posture, it stays still. Then, suddenly, it twists its head around and its bill flashes like the blade of a knife.

  When I take a break and look down at my field guide, it tells me that herons are colonial nesters, gathering together at night after days spent on their own. This strikes me as odd, counterintuitive. Herons always seem prickly about their privacy; they like their space, as the saying goes. My trouble reconciling the bird’s love of solitude with the fact of colonial nesting clears up when I read further down the page: Heron social life, like human social life, varies from season to season. For humans, summer is often the most social time, and the same holds true for herons. In summer they live in colonies and disperse to fish their own waters during the day; in winter they are on their own all the time, becoming territorial about their space. Part-time outgoing and part-time antisocial. A rhythm I could live with.

  I mentioned that Dan’s words grew soft and mushy when he began to talk about nature. Perhaps I am too persnickety, too preoccupied with the language that he, or any of us, uses to describe the natural world, but I am in the minority that believes we should watch our words, that false language both reflects and encourages false thinking, that our lives depend on our sentences. I feel particularly strongly that “being in nature” should not be described as some precious or highfalutin experience. After all, didn’t we as a species evolve, along with our words, while spending a million years or so living in the midst of the natural world? And wasn’t our relationship with that world, among other things, quite practical and direct? “Nature” is where the living roots of our language evolved, which suggests that that language should still be able to circle back and describe the place from whence we came. Like the natural world itself, natural language has become fenced-off and attenuated. Our words are zoo animals.

  So many people who speak for the wild world seem to feel the need to speak in the voice of the mystic, a hushed, voice-over reverence. We affect this high priest tone, and everyone else is expected to get down on their knees and listen to the whispered wisdom of the shaman. At times like those there’s very little indication that any of us have the quality that many humans find most important for living on earth: a sense of humor. You’d never guess that any of us ever laughed or farted. (Which, it needs to be pointed out, is different than translating Native American myths about trickster coyotes who laugh and fart.)

  I cringe when my language grows too flaccid on the one hand—oh, Great Blue Heron, help my soul and keep all sweetness and light—or, on the other, too rigid and devoid of feeling—Great Blue Heron, or Ardea herodias, a member of the order Ciconiiformes.

  Lately, I’ve been invited to give a lot of talks, and when I speak people sit listening, rapt, or at least putting on rapt faces. I suppose if I really wanted to make it big I would start spreading the word of doom and intoning the phrase “global warming” over and over, hitting my audiences with it like a big stick. But I’ve got other ideas, however, impure and pesky little ideas that get in the way. For instance, sometimes I think that, from an artistic point of view, the end of the world might be kind of interesting , at least more interesting than all the dull predictions about it. Another troubling notion is that I’m not really sure I want to be this thing called an environmentalist.

  I’m not trying to be glib here—I don’t think it’s unimportant to fight for environmental causes. It’s just that I would like to put forth a sloppier form of environmentalism, a simultaneously more human and wild form, a more commonsense form and, hopefully, in the end, a more effective form. Because the old, guilt-ridden, mystical envirospeak just isn’t cutting it. Maybe the musty way of talking about nature needs to be thrown over a clothesline and beaten with a broom. That’s what I’ve been trying to say at these talks I’ve been giving. My role, as I see it, is to try to pull the pole out of the collective environmental ass. It isn’t easy work. For a costume I wear a Hawaiian shirt and to get into character I drink a few beers. Throughout my talks I make jokes about how earnest everyone is and the audience usually laughs along semi-masochistically. Sometimes I get carried away. I start feeling megalomaniacal and believe I am the bringer of a new language. I imagine myself to be Bob Dylan at Newport, playing electric guitar among the folkies, trying (futilely) to get them to yell out “Judas.”

  This last metaphor was confirmed by one of the door prizes I was given recently, a CD tribute to Rachel Carson’s work, after a talk at a conference in Boothbay Harbor, Maine to celebrate Carson’s life and work. On the way home I listened to a song on the CD that told the story of the osprey’s near demise from DDT and then its remarkable comeback, a subject I once wrote a book about. It is fair to say that Carson is one of my greatest heroes but the music that came warbling out of my speakers seemed to be sung by a caricature of a late fifties Pete Seeger wannabe, who wailed about the poisons coursing through the ospreys’ bodies with such excruciating earnestness that it almost made me root for the birds’ death. Anything as long as the song ended. This, I found myself thinking, this is part of the problem. Why does nature turn us into this kind of warbler? It makes me long for a new sort of music, a music with energy, irreverence, and drive, a punk osprey tribute sung by, say, the Sex Pistols.

  And maybe, I think now, that’s a good place to start.

  A new music.

  THE FIRE THIS TIME

  I paddle through the afternoon, watching the pulsating light on the under branches of trees. Somewhere on the other side of this living green wall cars are rushing to and from the city, but that doesn’t concern me. How many types of weather can I name from the day? Too many to count. The wind comes up, the water ripples, the clouds blow over and create a chill, then disappear; after the sun bears down, the wind stops, and a short rain falls. Every turn of the river is different. There is no formula for it. As I slide past the forested banks whole riverside landscapes reflect in the water. The cloud continents rush overhead and the rain soaks me again. Shaggy weeping willows bow to the river.

  What would a new environmental music sound like? It might, at the risk of coming off like the mystics I just ridiculed, sound a bit like this river. Burbling, lapping, rushing, calm, excited, but above all fluid. And contradictory, too, rushing one way but filled with back eddies and counter-currents. Uncertain and confident all at once.

  Before I go all Siddhartha on you, however, let me add that it should also be blunt. Wedging downward past nineteenth-century romanticism and tunneling back toward the practical source of “nature language”: daily dialogues with fellow tribesmen, directions to the kill, songs sung by generations upon generations of roaming hunter-gatherers. Ugh. Wolf scat. Look—berries. That’s a kind of music, too.

  Of course it’s hard to keep a fluid, riverlike mind in this time of adamancy and increased hysteria. We live in an age of blowhards, windbags, and he-who-shouts-loudest wins. In the environmental community this means increasingly shrill warnings about our pending doom. We are never allowed, not for a moment, to forget GLOBAL WARMING and its corollary admonishment that we must SAVE THE WORLD. While I know it is sacrilege to say it, I still don’t believe that “global warming” is the answer to every question left on earth. Frankly, the subject exhausts me. I find my optimism and energy waning when my brain turns to that ever-popular environmental topic: The End of the World. Perhaps that is because I, like most of us, am not built to think in terms of the apocalypse. Too much of it and I am left stunned, helpless, curled up in a fetal position on the kitchen floor.

  It’s not that I disagree with the experts. If they are right, and they probably are, the next century will be a dismal one. Our present six billion will become ten. Our resources will dry up as the world warms and our population essentially doubles. Massive extinctions are likely to occur—in fact, they are already occurring—animals that have inhabited the planet for millions of years will be gone forever. The truth is that it’s great to care about sentences and write books and all, but I’m not sure anything is going to help. If the predictions
are even half-correct, we’re fucked.

  I admire all the thinkers who try to wrestle with these concepts and come up with ideas that will help. I admire all those brave enough to try and offer words and solutions. But for my part, I can’t help but despair. I’m out of my league really, and in that I’m not so unlike most of us. When it comes to politics, I have no global plan or solution. I’m sorry. It is not what I’m good at and maybe it’s not what the animals that we evolved into are good at. One of the religious purposes for the concept of an apocalypse was to force us to admit that life was terrifying beyond the ken of mere human beings. And it is beyond the ken.

  If you are like me, there is something particularly unpleasant about the fashion of apocalypse currently in vogue. At least with nuclear annihilation everything would end quickly. And at least it wouldn’t so obviously be each of our own faults. Our current fantasy of disaster has a distinctly unpleasant aspect in that we should all feel personally responsible. For the end of the world. Drive your car too long or take a hot shower and you’re contributing to the great, final doom.

  It isn’t just about feeling guilty either. I question the effectiveness of using the nagging tone in which so many of these announcements of doom are broadcast. You may find yourself wishing that, even if the doomsday predictions are entirely accurate (down to the last minute and extinction), even if our fate is sealed (or, almost sealed as they always like to say, giving us a last second chance at reform), even if it is all true (and I, for one, will admit it is true, more or less), even if all this is the case could we just SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT FOR A MINUTE? Could we at least take a week off from new projections of doom? A month off from talk of the apocalypse? Maybe even a year-long moratorium on books that begin with the words The End of, The Death of, or The Last?