So here comes McKibben, well-armed with knowledge but somewhat Carter-like in approach, telling us to get small. Will we listen? Are we finally ready? We now have a President who seems able to present Carter-like ideas with a shinier varnish, but the environment continues to register dead last on the list of people’s actual concerns despite all the hollering about the end of the world.
Still, there are a few reasons for hope. McKibben has increasingly catalogued compelling stories—emphasis on stories—of people who have gone small and lived to tell the tale. And, suddenly, a lot more people seem to know what global warming is, and many also seem to know that the solution has something to do with paring back, not just inventing new Jetson-like gizmos to save our future. It’s true that a single terrorist attack might knock environmental concerns off the front pages, but for now. . . .
For now a lot of people have embraced McKibben’s fellow rationalist, Albert Gore, and for a while seemed honestly responsive when he pointed at his charts and graphs and, like your eccentric uncle, insisted on showing off his slideshow. But the response to him wasn’t just to his rational argument, it was an emotional reaction; to the fact he lost an election he won and then grew a beard; to the fact he got depressed and then came back from the dead; suddenly he was living the life he wanted to live, fighting his own fight. It’s like this: If we want a majority of people to actually act, if people are going to do the next-to-impossible, which is to say, change their behavior, there always needs to be emotional content, strong emotional connection to the appeal. Maybe that’s why, despite our tendency to roll our eyes, it’s not so awful to have Schwarzenegger on the cover of magazines or to rent a polar bear for photo ops or even to use the silly phrase “eco-warrior.” Gore himself seems to think that our tendency to have visceral reactions is a bad thing—the result of too much television—but it wasn’t television that made England rally around Churchill. Would the phrase It is in our best interests not to become extinct have stirred people like Churchill’s “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat”?
And what does Dan Driscoll have in common with Winston Churchill? What do little fights have to do with the bigger struggle? Well, maybe fights like Dan’s are relevant because they incite on a personal level. We are Americans, after all, and, for better or worse, we’re well trained to fight, to compete, for our personal and individual interests. Some of the best fighters for the environment—Roosevelt, Muir, Thoreau—have taken that same passionate individualism and fought to save the land. Maybe it’s too much to ask for us to change our basic, excessive characters, but perhaps we can turn that aggressive nature toward something else and get competitive about, say, our car’s mileage or saving yarn. Yes, what McKibben says is right—what Carter said so long ago was right, or at least the beginning of something right—but maybe the reason some are finally starting to react is that it is being presented not as a true fight to save the planet, but as a fight to save our homes. It’s easy to laugh at this, easy to picture the blockbuster with Bruce Willis being called out of retirement to battle rising sea levels or changing weather patterns, but silly or not, it may be more effective for us to think this way. After all, who among us can change our obsession with the individual that much, or that fast? If we are individuals and fighters, so be it. But one thing we can do is turn that energy toward a good fight, and we don’t need to look farther than our own home to find one. In this sense I hope the glossy magazines keep plastering those eco-celebrities and polar bears on their covers. Anything that helps. Anything that ignites.
THE WILD WEST
We may paddle fast but that does not seem to translate into boat speed. In one short day, I have managed to aid and abet in destroying Dan’s cherished canoe, the one he paddled when he first explored and fought for the Charles. It is canoe-icide, plain and simple. And yet Dan and I are feeling guiltless. We keep laughing as we bail. It seems funny somehow to have almost destroyed our already limited adventure.
After awhile, the murky water inside the boat becomes too deep and we pull over for repairs and food. We find a beautiful sandbar in the middle of the current, and drag the boat and ourselves out of the water. After dumping the water, we eat a soggy lunch and drink a couple of beers. The sandbar is a small hump in the middle of a coppercolored section of river that is only a few canoe lengths wide; the battered watercraft itself rests next to us, like an injured friend, as we sip beers and stare at damselflies skitting above the river. I watch the current part around our little island. I feel adventurous, though I know the rapids we ran were relatively tame as whitewater goes.
Dan feels it, too. It isn’t easy spending your life banging your head against a bureaucracy. It’s important to get out once in a while to see what you’re fighting for.
Which is a long-winded way of saying we are in pretty good moods while we eat lunch. This is why I do this shit. To feel like this. To eat lunch that feels like necessary sustenance and not a habitual point in the day. To spend a whole day outdoors. To feel tired and free—to have these hours away from normal life.
For most of the morning the banks have been wooded, but now, across from our sandbar, a wide lawn rolls up to a gigantic new house. I worry that we are lunching on private property, but Dan assures me that while the riverbank may belong to the homeowner, the little island we are lunching on belongs to the state. Moreover, it is the property of the citizens of the state, which means us.
He points to the way the lawn has been mowed right down to the river’s edge.
“We should get someone out here to sue their asses,” he says. He explains that the Wetlands Protection Act specifies that you can’t cut riparian wetlands and that a setback of fifty to one hundred feet is required. I pull my tape recorder out of my backpack and ask him if he’d like to put his opinions on record.
“Yes, I’d be happy to,” he says. “You can quote me as saying that these people, by cutting the bank and creating lawn right to the edge, are definitely violating the law. And we hate them for the vermin they are.”
Then he points his beer at a statue of what appears to be a fox or coyote.
“The owners put them there to scare the Canada geese away, because they don’t want the goose shit,” he says. “Of course they wouldn’t have geese if they didn’t mow their lawn like that.”
The main problem with the river, he explains, used to be water quality, but much has changed since the Clean Water Act. Now huge stripers chase herring eight miles upriver in the once-famously dirty water.
“The problem now is quantity, not quality,” he explains. “The suburban towns siphon off the river so they can water their fucking lawns. It just makes so much more sense to let the native species grow. No need to water then. And it looks so much better.”
To his eye, he doesn’t add. He cracks open another beer and waxes eloquent for a while about the evils of mowing.
While he talks I think: If Dan is an admittedly limited, and hypocritical, environmentalist, then this wilderness he has spent the last two decades fighting for is certainly a limited wild. Before I moved back East I lived in Colorado for six years, and my Western friends would have a hard time imagining such a thing as a “wild Charles.” Both their idea of what wilderness is, and their politics, are more ambitious and extreme. They want big wilderness, and I’m with them in spirit. I want big wilderness too. But Dan’s, and really the majority of human’s wilderness at this point is, of necessity, a limited wilderness.
Something about the morning’s adventure—maybe the yee-hah aspect—reminds me of my years in Colorado. It seems everyone I knew there was always biking and climbing up something or paddling and paragliding down. Though we are gliding through the most Eastern of wildernesses this morning, floating toward the snooty wilds of Harvard, my mind begins to migrate Westward. And I like it. “Go West, young brain!”
Dan lived in Colorado, too, and spent years camping in the West before heading back to fight for his first, Eastern wilderness. It occur
s to me that one aspect of Dan’s myth, and of my emerging picture of a new environmentalism, is the vital importance of the West, or at least something wild like the West. To paraphrase Gary Snyder: “The West is the place without fathers.” One of the reasons that the West is so important to the language and psychology of environmentalism is that it is the one region that has managed to tell a more romantically compelling story about humans and nature. It is both a sexier, gun-slinging narrative, and a more free-spirited, radical story. Eastern environmentalism and global environmentalism could learn a thing or two from Western environmentalism. It’s an environmentalism tinged with adventure, danger, boldness—the land is bigger and so are the fights. While environmentalism ultimately serves the conservation ethic of Aldo Leopold, and is more about the whole than about individuals, common sense suggests that it starts with individuals; individuals spur change and so it is necessary for those individuals to get excited and to take action. In general, the West frames this appeal better than the East: John Muir holding on to the top of a tree during a lightning storm trumps Thoreau taking tea at Walden.
I try to explain this to Dan as we sit on our sandbar, but my words trip over themselves. Still, he gets the gist of what I’m saying, bringing up one of his heroes, Bob Marshall, who, he tells me, managed to roam large swaths of the West and found the Wilderness Society before dying young at thirty-eight.
“He was a model for me,” Dan says. “Not the dying part, but the activism tied to actually getting out there. Getting outside. I try to do what he did. I mean, the Charles is not the Colorado. But he was still a model.”
I mention my fondness for Ed Abbey. Abbey’s books, like Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, had meant a lot to me, in no small part because they suggested a different way of being “environmental.” While most environmental writing has overly proper manners, Abbey revived the old Western tradition of braggadocio and boastfulness, waxing poetic about a twisting desert juniper in one sentence and unleashing an anti-immigration tirade in the next that left your jaw dropping. On the one hand he wrote paeans to solitude; on the other, he told fart jokes. Though often poetic and high-minded, he seemed to embrace his own id; he was passionately lecherous, a desert Henry Miller. He kept his readers off guard, and until you figured him out, if you ever did, surprise was on his side: What would this hairy, bearded, cigar-smoking booze-swilling barbarian do next?
I try to explain to Dan how my own ethic changed during my years living in the West.
“It became bigger, feistier,” I say.
“That’s right,” he says. “We need more fight out here. We need to take something from the West. We need bigger stories.”
Dan is right. He—we—are on to something. Perhaps one of the most important contributions of Western environmentalism is to break us out of Walden and add an element of senselessness and outrageousness and humor to the fight. To add both a sense of individualism and its opposite, the sense of belonging to a small group fighting the bigwigs. And of course: to do all this, as Dan says, while outside. Maybe this is too romantic, but romanticism has its uses, and one of those uses is to excite people.
Dan tells me about a couple of his hiking trips out West, and then I tell him about a recent trip to Moab, Utah, to meet one of Ed Abbey’s oldest friends, a riverman who shared spirit, if not geography, with Dan. The drive west from Grand Junction, dropping down from Colorado into Utah is, for my money, the most beautiful in the world. Dan was obviously exaggerating earlier when he suggested that we should all take mushrooms, but if you want to get a taste of the experience without the fungi, I suggest the drive along the river into Moab, which provides a fairly reasonable simulation.
You descend into a strange red dream world of hoodoos and mesas and buttes, a world of twisted sandstone of such mystic power that that even multiple SUV commercials can’t desecrate it. As you drop off the highway and head south along Route 128, driving through canyons parallel to the twisting Colorado River, with barely another car in sight, it’s hard to build up too much ire about how tourists are overrunning the West. It becomes less hard forty miles later when you pass the spanking-new Sorrel River Ranch development, a theme park cluster of buildings that inhabit a place where I used to unroll my sleeping bag on a sandbar not too many years back. And it gets plain easy when you enter Moab itself.
It’s a town every bit as biblical as its name. Here is where the battle between the new and old West truly rages. Moab has ridden the highs and lows of both uranium mining and mountain biking, and if you wanted to stage a gunfight between an old timer and a fannypack-wearing bicyclist you could find no better setting than Main Street. Though, on second thought, there would barely be room for it. RVs rumble down the streets and a hundred gaudy signs try to draw in the tourists, like beckoning recreational prostitutes, selling, instead of sex, rafting and biking and jeep tours. Think Vegas for outdoorsmen. Beamed down onto Main Street, an extra-terrestrial could be forgiven for concluding that the word ADVENTURE was the most common one on our world.
Up above Moab, amid blazing yellow aspens in the La Sal Mountains, you can look down at multiple red-rock towers like a series of giant, misplaced chess pieces. There you will find the Pack Creek Ranch and there I found Ken Sleight, the eighty-year-old former river rafter and horseman who was the inspiration for Seldom Seen Smith, the wildly adventurous “Jack Mormon” who appeared in Ed Abbey’s best-known novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. I rented a cabin in Pack Creek for two nights, and discovered Sleight over by his truck the next morning. He was wearing jeans and two dungaree shirts, despite the early heat. I told him I was heading into town to get a cup of coffee—I certainly did not tell him that the coffee would be a soy latte, light on the foam—and asked if we could meet up later. He said sure and pointed to where he’d be—“My office”—an aluminum-roofed bunker above his horse pasture. Later, caffeinated, I sat across from him while he stretched his legs out and regaled me with stories of his early days as one of Utah’s original river guides. We had only talked for twenty minutes when he asked me if I wanted a beer. So I chased my latte with a Milwaukee’s Best while he told stories of floating down the river with Abbey.
“We both loved it all—the goofing off, the food, being part of the crew. Lots of good happens on those trips—they’re so spontaneous and joyful. It’s true: most campfires are very joyous. Very romantic. There’s a sense that everything is right in the realm.”
At one point I sheepishly confessed that I’d been a mountain biker, and asked him what he, having spent most of his life living near Moab, made of the biking craze.
“Well, I don’t think they hurt the land all that much. Mostly what they hurt is the spirit of the wilderness. I’ll be out taking a hike and they’ll come roaring down. Never one of them, of course. They run in packs in those colorful clothes. Anytime you bring fashion into wilderness I think you’re in trouble. I think I’d like to get on my horse and ride down into town all clad in Spandex. Just to show them how ridiculous they look.”
I laughed, picturing Sleight, grizzled with white hair and shining blue eyes below his shaggy white-gray eyebrows, decked out in skin-tight clothes.
“I’d do it too,” he said “I’d put the tight Spandex over my asshole body and get on my horse and boy, would I shine. It would just be a symbol of course, but there’s value in a symbol.”
He took a sip of his beer and leaned back.
“I have no problem making an ass of myself,” he said.
Which, I’ve come to believe, is a valuable tool. Ken Sleight, like his old friend Ed Abbey, still knew a thing or two about the importance of grand symbolic gestures, gestures that can sometimes make you look silly. When Sleight ran for the State Legislature a decade ago, registering hundreds of previously unregistered Native Americans in the process, he vowed to ride up the State House steps on his horse if he won.
Around that time he made a similar gesture when he discovered that loggers were deforesting the nearby Amasa Back wilder
ness, dragging chained trees over Native American archeological sites. What further outraged Sleight was the fact that the logging was going on without the required BLM (Bureau of Land Management) monitor. So he climbed on his horse and rode up the mountainside to confront the loggers.
“I pulled up in front of them so that they had to either stop or run me over,” he told me that morning in his trailer. “My horse bucked when they kept coming. But they finally stopped. We had a standoff until the cops came. I was hoping they would arrest me but they didn’t. You can say it was just a symbol but the next time they logged they had a BLM man with them.”
When I think about the state of the environmental movement today, this is what I think: Not only do we need more guys who stop the bad guy loggers on horseback but we need more stories about men and women who stop the bad guy loggers on horseback. That is, we need more eco-legends or, as the writer Jack Turner would have it, we need lore.
An obvious reason that the American West plays such a vital role in our current environmental thinking is that, as Dan said, the fights are starker there, the land bigger. There’s more to lose. The memory of the wild past is less distant. But lore may be another reason that the West is so important; not just its realities but also its language. I think of Terry Tempest Williams singing ecstatic praises of her red rock desert, but also working to pass the Escalante wilderness bill through Congress. I think of Dave Foreman who, influenced in part by Ed Abbey literary monkeywrenching, went on to found Earth First! And I think of Susan Zakin, an environmental journalist and novelist who would chronicle Dave Foreman’s exploits in her first book, Coyotes and Town Dogs. In that book Zakin, calling Foreman and his gang “buckaroos,” describes the origin story of Earth First! as a fateful trip away from civilization to the Pinacate Desert in 1980 during which the group decided that they would break from the more stodgy style of environmentalism that had prevailed in organizations like the Sierra Club. In other words, they decided to take matters into their own hands: advocating monkey-wrenching, disabling bulldozers, and cutting down billboards and spiking trees.
My Green Manifesto Page 7
