My Green Manifesto

by David Gessner

  I will be accused of wanting to bury my head in the sand. But I don’t want to bury my head; I just want a short fucking break to remember that there are good parts about being alive. I am not Henry David Thoreau, I get that, and I live in a limited, depraved, depressing time; but I am here to say that I can still experience joy and yes, maybe even a little transcendence, even when watching a river that is flowing behind a Stop & Shop. I don’t want to act naïvely, but I do want an environmentalism that I can live with; one that is a part of my everyday life, not running roughshod over it. Imagine living with a spouse who feels the need to scream, several times a day, “THIS MARRIAGE IS OVER! WE’RE DOOMED!” It’s not so different than being part of a group that is always erupting with, “THE WORLD IS ENDING!” Yes, okay, sure, we know it’s doomed, but could we just be quiet for a while, watch some TV maybe, go for a walk? Nothing is going to get better overnight, so maybe it’s time to think about a more effective way of shouting?

  What I am arguing against, I suppose, is an environmentalism that feels like the intellectual equivalent of a panic attack. Doesn’t it make sense to work toward a more integrated environmentalism, incorporating our selves, our worlds; a saner, calmer, more commonsensical environmentalism; an environmentalism that accounts for quirks, hypocrisy, nuance, comedy, tragedy? Of course even as I write these words I hear the counter argument, the argument of that imagined shrill spouse: “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? HOW CAN YOU HAVE SOME SORT OF LAID-BACK APPROACH TO THE END OF THE WORLD?”

  It’s not too hard to see why most of us don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on these larger issues. Who wants to feel that knot in their chest, that twisting in their gut? The feeling of panic I get about the state of the world is not so different, on a personal, physical level, from the tightness I experience when worked up about the state of my own finances.

  Paddling, it turns out, is a fairly effective way to shut up one’s mind. Dan did a lot of it in those first days working for the state, getting to know the river he would soon be fighting for. Today, paddling helps me turn from brain to body. Whatever else kayaking is, it is a form of work, and work, starting with the taking of small actions, is the only reliable way I know to escape from those insomniac anxieties that can strike even in broad daylight. In this case, that means rotating my paddle in and out of the water. Feeling the sun on my face, the sweat trickling down my neck as I paddle harder. Not that this is truly a “way out” of the problem, not that my paddling will help with global warming in any way or form. But it is a break, a respite, before returning fresh.

  And before long I am feeling good. My thoughts calmer, my muscles stronger. Birds also help pull me outward. I watch the flashing blue backs of swallows as they skim over the water, scooping up insects in mid-flight as I paddle through a channel some forty feet wide, between banks high with grasses, viburnum, and the occasional willow tree. Through my binoculars I can study the flight of one particular swallow, intrigued by its mussel-orange belly, trying to trace its every turn and twist, and then, concentrating even more deeply, trying to anticipate where it will turn or bank next. I can actually watch the moment it opens its bill and snaps—the exact moment it catches a damselfly out of the air. I follow the bird with my gaze as it hooks back over the bank, digesting.

  From the trees near the banks I hear a song—“peterpeter-peter” —a tufted titmouse. The titmouse sings for two main reasons, to define his territory and to woo a mate. It’s late in the season for the latter, so maybe he, like the heron, is letting me know I’m an intruder. This bird’s song is partly inside it, encoded, handed down from its parents and their parents. Some species—herons and hawks and ducks, for instance—will never expand their repertoire beyond this genetic heritage, or if they do expand, it will be by the nudge of accident. But for my titmouse, and for most songbirds, their music is only partly in the genes. It is also learned, which means it is varied and individual. This is why a modern mockingbird can imitate a chainsaw or car alarm. A bird’s song, then, belongs both to their species and themselves. Donald Kroodsma, the dean of avian vocal behavior, writes: “Listen carefully to robins or individuals of almost any songbird species as well, and you can hear how each bird sings with his own voice by varying his songs in either small or large ways from birds of his own kind.”

  My friends from my younger days laughed when they found out I had gotten deeply into birds. Birds, of all things. Fancy, pretty little birds. These friends were mostly athletes and they saw me as an athlete, too, not to mention as someone who was gruff and crude and drank too much. And now . . . birds!

  What I might have said to them, if I’d had the nerve, was that it was nothing fancy or pretentious that had led me to birds. Quite the opposite in fact. I believe that birds held the secret to something I’d been searching for. I slowly came to understand that it had been contact I’d been after the whole time, and that I had first sought out contact in drink and sport. What I might have said was that the contact that I craved was right there in an osprey’s dive. But maybe it’s best that I kept quiet. They would have laughed back then, I’m sure. But they are getting older now and it will not surprise me if a few of them gradually find themselves turning to birds.

  But still, the question: Why birds? I mentioned contact but it goes beyond even that. I think the answer ultimately has something to do with both narcissism and its opposite. I go to birds selfishly but I also go to them because they are one of the few things that are capable of prying me out of myself. They don’t do this always or even often and when they do it it’s not for very long. But they do it. They give me transport along with contact. For that, and the fact that they fly, I love them. I don’t like the geeky aspect of learning their names and calls as much as I like the sheer simplicity and transcendence of their lives. I am not talking about god here, and maybe god is not necessary. Maybe bird is enough.

  At my worst moments I live trapped in what my old professor Walter Jackson Bate called “the subjective prison cell of self.” I try to remember, during the dark, depressed, inward-turned times, that not only is there a world beyond me but that I have gone there—however briefly—and believe I will be able to go there again. This is the most reassuring thing I know. Not success or god or the big rock candy mountain. But the simple fact that there is still a world beyond us. That we are not alone.

  Let’s just assume for a minute that the experts are right and the world is doomed. Let’s assume that when my four-year-old daughter is my age she will be living in a crowded slum apartment eating human-being patties like those in Soylent Green. What am I supposed to do about that? As I said above: I just don’t fucking know.

  And how much does my long-term doom affect what I will do on a day-to-day basis?

  I will still drink my coffee; still make my things-to-do list; still go to work; still pick up my daughter at preschool; still watch my birds. I might think about eco-doom once or twice a week but it won’t truly impact my consciousness. When will that change?

  Perhaps there will come a time when the problem is so pressing that we all rally around to fight. Perhaps we will pull an all-nighter and summon Bruce Willis and his crew of roughnecks and somehow save the world. But while this last is a story I would like to believe, a story I hope for, it isn’t a story that I am going to put money on. Gloom and doom, while less palpable, seem a more likely forecast.

  And this is just about where my brain usually freezes up again. This is where I always feel the need to take things down a few notches, to leave the problem behind for a while and turn to other concerns. Extreme fear—THE END OF THE WORLD!—leads to extreme thinking. Trembling before the world, we create apocalyptic scenarios and cast ourselves as prophets. Consider your own life: the way during a middle-of-the-night panic your thoughts spiral away from Earth, zigging and shooting and swirling upward. How to ground those thoughts? Where to root them?

  I don’t know about you, but my own inclination is to return to the personal, which is not to turn
from the altruistic to the selfish. What I am suggesting is that, as pressing as the end of the world is, most of us have other fish to fry. I am not saying that this should be the case, just that it is. And I am not the first to suggest that, as vital as saving the world is, saving ourselves is of some importance, too.

  The dark secret of kayaking is that it can be pretty boring. Even with the stimulation of the changing weather and animal life, there are moments when the activity grows tedious and my back and arms ache. Doing anything for eight hours will wear you down. On the other hand the boring moments are more than counterbalanced by the delightful ones. On the banks of the marsh I see empty mussel shells and wonder if I’ll catch a glimpse of a river otter. That would be worth any tedium. Less romantic than imagining that sight, but equally stimulating, is the twenty minutes I spend paddling through what signs announce as a LICENSED SHOOTING PRESERVE. Gunfire tends to keep the human mind alert.

  The noise dies out as the river seems to change to creek. Suddenly I am twisting and turning back on myself in a sinuous maze, the marsh undermining any sense of progress. It often feels like I am going backwards, but I know that if I just keep paddling I’ll cover the thirteen miles I need to before I get to my campsite by nightfall.

  As I slog through the marshy passage, red-winged blackbirds, proud of their blazing orange epaulets, cluck at me, scolding. They let go with their three-word song, the last note like a punchline. Calmer now, I return to the ideas that spooked me an hour ago. It would be mauling a metaphor to say that water grounds me, but at the very least all this sweating and sun and full-on weather helps me consider the prospect of our environmental annihilation without risking another panic attack. I know I can offer no global theories, but maybe I can do something more modest: offer examples of people, like Dan, who have made nature—and fighting for nature—part of their lives and seem the better for it. This may not be much help in the face of the greater gloom and doom, but it’s really all I’ve got.

  I suspect that this is something like the way Dan felt when his superiors first sent him off to work on the river, almost as a prank. He must have been overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible problem of greening the Charles. Why impossible? Because the land he needed, if he were to re-plant the river’s banks, had been owned or appropriated by individuals and corporations, and had been for decades. How could he possibly convince them that they should relinquish something they thought theirs? Did he glimpse right away that this would be his life’s work, did he follow the vision from the start? No, it would have seemed preposterous. And if he had allowed himself to get excited, it would have led to excitement’s opposite: panic and despair.

  I wonder when it started to change for him. When did the fear and anxiety turn into something else? When did that frozen feeling in his brain begin to melt into momentum? Because, that is the thing about impossible tasks. Yes, they are intimidating; yes, they are daunting; yes, they can paralyze us. But they also can excite us, challenge us, enlarge us. What if I can really do this? he must have thought at some point. Anyone who has tackled anything big—building a house, fighting a battle, writing a book—knows the joy of the moment when the tide finally turns. And if the task is Quixotic, all the better. In his book, Life Work, the poet Donald Hall records the moment when he asked the sculptor Henry Moore what “the meaning of life” was. Moore replied: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing—it must be something you cannot possibly do!” Exactly! Perhaps there was even a point where Dan started to relish how absurd, how huge, the task at hand was.

  Tell me to save the world and I will panic. Some jobs are simply too big, too daunting. Too much for one individual. But tell me to save a chunk of that world, a river say, and I might just become engaged. Give me something to work at, to work with, outside myself, and I will.

  FIGHTING WORDS

  I’ve always liked the word “turtle.” Like “boing” or “scrotum” it seems innately comic. Today turtles, specifically painted turtles, are my companions; over the course of the afternoon I see hundreds of them. Almost despite myself, I’m getting to know their yellow and dark-green striped heads, the orange under their shells, the glistening water on those shells before they plop into the water. It’s a beautiful sight, but let’s face it: This marsh is not exactly pristine and in the black banks of muck I see tennis balls and beer bottles and, mysteriously, dozens of orange golf balls. When I finally emerge from the marsh, I pass a dock with a large American flag, unfurled for the coming holiday, and, next to the dock, a massive fire pit on the riverbank.

  It isn’t until mid-afternoon that I pass the first human being I’ve seen since leaving Dan this morning. This is an amazing fact considering I’ve been paddling through the suburban towns of Medfield, Millis, and Sherborn. It’s a guy about my age fishing under a bridge. He claims to have caught eighteen fish—most recently a catfish and a bass. The Charles, I know, used to be a dead place. “Dirty Water,” as the song went, so even the possibility that he has caught this many is reassuring. The guy asks me to look for a lure he lost downstream and I do after shouting goodbye.

  Late in the afternoon I see another kayaker. Strangely though, rather than a feeling of companionship, I experience a prickly irritation, something maybe not too dissimilar to the way the great blue heron feels upon seeing me. What is this guy doing on my river? Of course I shout hello but it might be more honest to emit a heron-like sproak! The moment passes soon enough, though, and I am alone again. I paddle below a railroad trestle, navigate a field of sunken logs, and enter the Rocky Narrows Reservation, where I will camp for the night. Rocky Narrows is conservation land, owned and protected by the Trustees of Reservations.

  I set up camp on a little ledge of grass a few feet above the river. Here the water pivots around my campsite and the little beach where I pull up the kayak. Nearby, a large willow kneels, dipping its hair in the river. Once I feel organized, I grab my pack and pull out a beer and a sandwich and sit with my legs hanging over the ledge to drink my beer and listen to the kissy noise of a chipmunk. A Baltimore oriole flashes by.

  After I finish the beer, I reach deep into my dry bag, uneasy about the shameful task I have to perform next. Dan and I have agreed that I will call him to fine tune the morning’s meeting, which means this is officially my first camping trip armed with a cell phone. But when I pull the phone out I discover that it is dead. Not just a little dead either—there is nothing that says “No Service” or “Dead Battery” or even “Alltell.” No, this is utter death. I shake it a little and push a few of the buttons in simian fashion and then think about slamming it on a rock or something. What follows is a strange moment of panic: egads, I’m disconnected. I can feel my mind beginning to obsess over the problem, and can imagine spending the next couple of hours trying to resuscitate the machine. Not wanting to go down that ugly route, I jam the phone back into the dry bag and open a second beer. To my surprise, it doesn’t take but a minute to move beyond the phone crisis. So strange that even just turning off a cell phone, or being unintentionally disconnected from one, is a step into a wilder world.

  I sip the beer and watch a long finger of light shaft down through the pines. It occurs to me that this would be a good spot to have sex if I were traveling with, say, my wife. I scribble down notes for an essay about wild sex in the wild—anything to help jazz up Nature’s dowdy reputation. Meanwhile, streaks of sunset bleed into the river as a beaver plows by, heading back upstream. A barred owl lets out a series of classic whoos. Solo camping can be both thrilling and terrifying. I remember the first time I spent a couple nights alone in California’s Lassen Park; I was sure the deer grazing outside the tent were killer bears. Over the years, I’ve become gradually less nervous. The woods behind me feel substantial and it seems I have the place to myself, at least until I hear a loud stomping and yelling coming down one of the paths. W
hat enemy tribe is this? Three joggers and two dogs crash their way toward my campsite and suddenly my patch of wildness feels a little tamer. When they see my tent they grow quiet, and while they stop to let their dogs splash in the river I tell them about my trip. To my own surprise my voice sounds excited, almost overly so, and I realize I am already turning the day into a story.

  I have always enjoyed spending days alone—solo days carry a special thrill—but for me, as a writer and storyteller and human animal, there is something else going on during these trips. I am readying my narrative, preparing to tell someone, itching to recreate my day. Pity the poor innocent who is the first person I bump into after these trips—the unlucky woman, for instance, who sat next to me at the coffee shop counter in Chester after my trip into Lassen—who gets her ear talked off.

  I ask the runners how they happen to have come this far into the woods, and learn that I’m not quite as secluded as I hoped: there’s a trailhead and a road a couple of miles away. After they leave it quickly grows dark. I urinate around the camp’s perimeters to ward off other visitors and return to my ledge over the water, waiting for the moon, breathing in the slightly skunky smell of the river. I consider smoking the cigar I’ve stuffed in my dry pack, but when the moon doesn’t show up, I climb into my tent. The night is quiet enough, despite the steady highway howl in the background. I settle in my sleeping bag with a book and flashlight.

  I’m reading a book called Break Through, written by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two lifelong environmental advocates best known for releasing an attention-grabbing essay called “The Death of Environmentalism.” That paper, which sparked a lively debate, advocated breaking environmentalism out of its granola ghetto and tackling global warming head-on, which, according to the authors, and contrary to most conservatives, would actually create jobs and help the economy. I thought I’d pick up the book because it seemed to fit my present mood, and I’d heard that Nordhaus and Shellenberger, like me, have grown tired of both musty mysticism and hysterical apocalypse-ism, favoring a more practical, hard-headed brand of environmentalism. I find myself nodding through their initial arguments as the authors criticize yet another manner of speaking about nature, that of the technocrat.