“My father said, ‘Don’t do it. You’re running away. You’re not facing the world.’ ”
Left unsaid is that his father was dead wrong: This was exactly how Dan eventually faced the world. In fact, his rebellion from his father is an essential aspect of what I am coming to call, in my head, The Myth of Dan. Gary Snyder wrote that the West is a country of “men removed from the father image.” Substitute “wilderness” for West and you can broaden the meaning. Theodore Roosevelt, to name our greatest presidential conservationist, knew this first hand from his pilgrimages to the Badlands, the place that transformed him from a soft New York Daddy’s boy into something harder and wilder.
The Myth of Dan goes something like this: as a child, the Dan Figure (as we will call him) discovers something in nature, something he will lose along the way. Later, as a young man, he wanders aimlessly before returning to that childhood place away from society, into nature, a place of solitude, where he forms his vision. Part of this retreat involves a break from the parents. But retreat is not the end of it. Equally important is what the Dan Figure brings back from his retreat. He must return with something—a vision, a book, an idea—and then he must present that thing to the world.
So the short version is: Dan finds nature as child, Dan wanders lost, Dan breaks from his father, Dan retreats to nature, Dan returns to the world....
Let me add that I am aware that one of the reasons that I am attracted to Dan’s myth is narcissistic: His quest bears more than a little resemblance to The Myth of Dave. I wouldn’t be on this river at all if I hadn’t made the odd decision, after graduating from college, of heading, not to law school or Wall Street, but to a town not far from Dan’s stomping grounds on Cape Cod. I had only known that peninsula in the summers and decided, during my first year on my own, to live there in the off-season. I don’t remember how long it took me to realize that I had done a miraculous thing by moving to the Cape in September. The year startled me. The wind swept out the clinging heat and the tourists, and ushered in that clarifying light that made each and every object—each blade of eel grass or cormorant on a rock or outline of the gibbous moon—look like the only thing left on earth. I watched the leafy world redden, the sumac and poison ivy bloodying the bluffs right around the time of the cranberry harvest. I laughed as thousands of swallows gathered in groups, staging before their trip south, and speckle-bellied starlings lined the phone wires, and for the first time I began to learn the names of birds. Also, I began my first book and became more confident in my seemingly delusional decision to become a writer. Looking back, I sometimes feel that from that moment onward all my choices somehow spring from that first wild fall. Obviously my life did not begin at twenty-three, and the roots of what I did go back much further. But so much, for me, hinged on my decision not to advance but to retreat.
Since I’m telling the story of two Massachusetts boys, why not throw in a third? One reason so many of us turn to Thoreau, other than his great sentences, is that the allegory of his life provides the template for almost all who either write about, fight for, or simply love being in nature. Think of it as a deeper, much-bolstered Myth of Dan. In Thoreau’s case we have a profound childhood attachment to nature, to home, to Concord, followed by the adult wanderer who is perceived as lost, a town handyman, a Harvard graduate turned n’er-do-well who doesn’t embrace a real career, who has to answer the skeptical questions of his fellow townspeople. And think of the many levels on which Thoreau rejected the father: not only the mores of the Puritan community or the town’s patriarchy, but ultimately also those of his literary father, Emerson. Cynics like to mention that while at Walden Thoreau sometimes went home to eat at Mom’s on Sundays, but he broke away from the family in much deeper and more profound ways. Emerson couldn’t quite make sense of it, and that was partly because, in going to Walden, Thoreau practiced what Emerson preached. In spending his years by the pond, Thoreau lived out what has become the archetype of retreat. Finally, of course, there was what he brought back to the world: his resplendent, funny, and difficult book.
While the myth of retreat and return certainly isn’t the only model, it’s amazing how many who came after Thoreau played out variations on the theme. John Muir did so in bold, primary colors, famously and dramatically rejecting his abusive Calvinist father before leaving the farm to set out on his epic jaunts across the country, seeking out the wildest places. The theme plays out with more recent environmentalist heroes as well, with David Brower climbing his many mountaintops, and the members of Earth First!, led by Dave Foreman, retreating deep into the Sonoran Desert before emerging with a new and radical concept of what it means to be environmental.
Of course the word “retreat” takes on a whole new meaning in a time of war. There is the implication of running away. But one thing I find fascinating is how often retreat ultimately leads to its opposite: a political impact on the world. Again Thoreau serves as the most obvious and famous example, sending ripples from Walden Pond outward to, among other places, India and the American South, with both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. acknowledging Thoreau as a main, if not the main, influence on their work. More recently there’s Rachel Carson, who, by retreating to the Maine coast to closely observe her tidal pools and eel grass, gave us a book that led to some of the most significant environmental changes of the last century. Carson reminds us again of the necessity of retreat, and puts the lie to the more cowardly definitions of the word. She shows us that, by continuing to return to our most private places, we can deeply engage the world.
It’s important to emphasize one central truth in all of these myths: a deep love for specific landscapes. For Dan it all began out there roaming the marshes. When we are young we naturally seek out secret places: we build forts, find shortcuts through the woods, climb trees. This is not environmentalism but instinct. As it turns out, trying to teach kids a strictly “environmental” curriculum often backfires. As the writer and educator David Sobel points out in Beyond Ecophobia, children who are taught that the natural world is being destroyed, that the rain forests are being mown down, and that a boogeyman called global warming is coming, often withdraw and distance themselves from nature. In fact there’s no surer way to send them running for the TV or computer screen. Just as with other forms of abuse, children are hardwired to hide from abusive relationships with the world. It is better to simply introduce young children to nature by allowing them to play in the wild world.
Sobel writes of those formative years: “This is the time to immerse children in the stuff of the physical and natural worlds. Constructing forts, creating small imaginary worlds, hunting and gathering, searching for treasures, following streams and pathways, making maps, taking care of animals, gardening and shaping the earth are perfect activities during this stage.” Eventually, of course, they will learn about the death of the rain forests, but first comes a more direct, and playful, connection with the so-called environment.
We have lost something vital when we forget how to build forts in our backyard. While most of us have matured beyond our eleven-year-old selves, a similar logic of how we care applies to adults.
“How do you connect young people to nature?” I asked Dan before we portaged below the Cochrane Dam.
“Seriously?”
He thought about it for a minute.
“Mushrooms,” he said finally. “I don’t know if it’s possible without doing mushrooms.”
We laughed. This was a slightly different take on environmental education than David Sobel’s. Of course Dan was joking . . . or at least I thought he was.
But, joking or not, I took his larger point.
It doesn’t start with prescriptions; it doesn’t start with shoulds; it doesn’t start with finger wagging. It starts with fun, it starts with building forts in our backyards, it starts with animal explorations. And, it goes without saying—whether you have a taste for hallucinogens or not—it starts with joy and wildness. And it should never end.
Maybe, in
stead of building wonky policy initiatives, Nordhaus and Shellenberger should take some time off to build a tree fort.
A LARGER FIGHT
Below Cochrane Dam is a mile or so of river that my map designates as “whitewater.” That term might be a stretch, but for a beginning canoeist like me the fast water proves a challenge. Dan, more accomplished in a canoe, maneuvers the boat while my main job is to look for submerged rocks. I take this job seriously and it is exhilarating to be on alert, to call out to Dan when I see something, as he briskly steers the boat through the rocks. We are getting pretty good at it, a fairly competent team, but then, feeling cocky perhaps, we almost wreck the canoe on a sewer conduit.
The pipe, about five feet around, runs directly across the river, creating a three-foot mini-falls. We know we should get out of the boat instead of going over it, but we are both sick of portaging, and in truth it looks no more formidable than a speed bump. We circle above, sussing out ways to approach it, and then Dan opens the door, “What do you think?”
“Let’s go for it.” He nods and we paddle hard, I guess imagining that we will somehow be the first two people in the world to “jump” a canoe, leap the pipe, and heroically crash down below with the falls.
It doesn’t quite work out that way. The canoe makes it almost exactly halfway over the pipe before we are stopped cold. The boat is transformed into a seesaw: my end is up, Dan’s down. But then the seesaw concept gives way and suddenly my end is down, too, without Dan’s going up. In other words, the canoe is cracking in half. The boat moans and buckles.
Far too slow and too late we jump out into hip-deep water and wrestle the cracked canoe to shore. Water rushes in through the crack as we drag the boat up the bank, where Dan immediately sets to repairing the damage with duct tape. While he works, he talks about all the great times he’s had in that canoe over the years, the way you would talk about a friend at a funeral. I worry our spasm of exuberance has doomed the trip, but as Dan works his mood gradually lifts and it turns out the boat isn’t quite dead yet. Lacking fiberglass, Dan jams a sandal into the crack and duct tapes it into place. Good as new. A half hour later we are back on the river, the canoe leaky now and ankle deep with muddy river water, but functional.
When water starts pouring in faster around the jammed sandal, I call back to Dan.
“What should we do?” I yell.
He thinks for a minute.
“Paddle as fast as you possibly can,” he yells back.
Let’s leave Dan and me paddling down the river for a minute.
I didn’t want to rant at you in this book, though I’ve already failed. Like you, I often tune out or roll my eyes when my friends—particularly my less imaginative and more dogmatic friends—begin to talk politics. But I don’t want this to be just another pretty little nature book with pretty little moments. I don’t want to comfort you until you simply sigh “ahah” at the heron winging out over the river. I want to avoid giving you the payoff of a quiet lifting, a subtle glimpse into another, deeper, soul-stroking, natural way of being.
I want to shake you up, grab you by the lapels, take you to the woodshed, all that. I want to challenge you—to suggest that there is more to “living green” than recycling your cans or screwing in those damned light bulbs. I want to ask you to take seriously the proposition that many pay lip service to: The proposition that you are an animal living on a crowded planet with other animals and that, as such, you need to take some responsibility for being, what Emerson called, “a good animal.”8 I want to talk about the way that nature fits into this proposition, and not the nature one reads about but the nature I know, which is a good place for laughter, drinking, fires, and pine-duff-prickled sex. This version of nature is not technical or pseudo-groovy, and it certainly isn’t a place where every waking moment is spent inside a panic attack about THE END OF THE WORLD.
Maybe, however, you are seeing some flaws in my argument. You will rightly say that Dan Driscoll’s battle, and my battle with my neighbor on the Cape Cod bluff, are small, local fights. How do these relatively simple crusades stand up against enormous and complex problems like global warming, with that daunting adjective in its name, an adjective that emphasizes just how un-local the fight is? And though global warming has been presented as THE problem (when’s the last time you heard warnings about nuclear winter?) there are dozens of global problems that range from species extinction to the food crisis, all of them substantially tougher than writing an angry letter to a trophy-home-building neighbor or planting some shrubs along the banks of a river. Ultimately, what do the little fights have to do with this larger fight?
Bill McKibben is someone who has made those larger issues, particularly global warming, his own personal fight, someone who has fought longer and harder—my apologies to Al Gore and his Oscar—than anyone else in the climate change ring. I’ve known him since we worked on our college newspaper together; he was the editor-inchief and I the political cartoonist—positions that probably say worlds about our differences in temperament.9 In the years since college, McKibben has become the leading environmental writer of our generation; a status he has earned honestly by writing milestone books like The End of Nature, which detailed the dangers of global warming, twenty years before it was chic to do so.
Recently I read one of his newer books, Deep Economy—a sort-of treatise on how we need to transform our economy to meet the challenges of the future—and was, as you can imagine, strongly predisposed to liking it, and, in fact, did. It seemed to me a tight summation of where we need to go: away from our obsession with growth at all costs, toward a dependence on local economies, and obviously away from slurping down oil and gobbling resources like a bunch of drunken gluttons at a feast. Hovering over the book, or rooted below it, was the obvious spirit of the writer and farmer Wendell Berry, whom McKibben acknowledges by dedicating the book to him. I think it’s fair to say that Berry is one of the most influential environmental thinkers of our time, and to anyone familiar with the work of the Sage of Kentucky, the themes here will ring familiar: the need to return to caring for our local places; the need, in fact, to marry those places instead of having strip-mining flings with them; the need to live—and eat—from our proverbial backyard. It’s the opposite of globalization: it is localization, or at least regionalization.
Surprisingly, Berry’s own literary godfather, Thoreau, is not quoted once in McKibben’s book. Maybe he’s trying to avoid the old-fashioned, romantic associations of one of our most famous neck-bearded writers, but of course everything McKibben argues for can be found right there in Thoreau’s Walden: commitment to the local, fighting against the destruction of the natural world, and the big question, why not be happy with less? By saying that McKibben owes debts to Berry and Thoreau I am not trying to diminish his book or argument. The book, I believe, is aimed at opening up more people to what until now has been the belief of a few. It tries to make us face the fact that the SUV and Trophy Home Party is almost over, and that morning in America is actually going to be one doozy of a hangover. Or to put it another way, it’s time to face what we’ve put off. To put up or shut up. Pay the bill. All that. In contrast to Thoreau and Berry’s more poetic means, McKibben’s argument for less is straightforward. But for all the straightforwardness, when I finished the book, I was left with a simple question: will it work? Can a book like Deep Economy ever truly galvanize its readers? Are we ready for the ideas that Jimmy Carter tried to quietly sell us thirty years ago before he and his cardigan sweater were run out of town?
I’m not sure. Clearly McKibben has his facts straight, and his presentation of the Walmart-ization of America is compelling. In our quest to be bigger and richer, always bigger and richer, we have given the keys of the kingdom to the very few and—surprise, surprise—those few don’t seem overly concerned with the common good. McOil and McFood serve up the slop and we line up at the communal troughs just like the cattle and chicken we’re about to eat. It’s a gruesome picture built on greed. S
adly, I’m pretty sure it’s also an accurate picture. But I’m not sure if it’s a picture most of us are ready to see, or to think about a lot, let alone fight against. And I’m not so sure about the way McKibben presents it either.
Here is what is wrong and here is what we need to do to fix it, he says very rationally. Here is the virtuous course . . . here is what is good. But doing what is virtuous has never been the world’s greatest motivator. Our internal computers don’t simply calculate what is right, and then act accordingly. Think again of those moments when Reagan came rushing in and swept Carter back off to the South. For the first (and maybe only) time a President mouthed ideas similar to Berry’s and McKibben’s: admitting doubt about our mania for growth, suggesting something as radical as a little restraint. And where did it get him? Carter’s decline has become a cliché of our collective political memory: the dour little minister, shrinking every day in both political cartoons and the eyes of his countrymen, urging us to spend less on gas and turn down our thermostats. Our response? “How dare he?!”
If anything led to the orgy of consumption that followed it was the fear of being Carter as much as the love of all things Reagan. You think we should get smaller? Okay, then we’ll build bigger cars and (much) bigger houses! You think we should lead a life, in Robert Frost’s words, “of self-restraint for the common good”? Well, said most of my college friends, “Watch out Wall Street here I come!” We were so collectively frightened by the idea of restraint, of actually getting smaller, of running out of our great national abundance, that we, instead of meekly retiring, burst out into the world like a bunch of drunken frat boys, buying, eating, and drinking. The next Democratic President after Carter at least had the decency to be a bigeating, adultery-loving, excessive omnivore like the rest of us. No talk of “restraint” from Slick Willy. He didn’t want to just grow the economy; he wanted it to burst out and swallow the rest of the world. It’s the appetite, stupid.
My Green Manifesto Page 6
