And of course, inevitably, they indulged in that greatest of Western eco-obsessions: battling against the building of dams. Dams, from Hetch Hetchy to Dinosaur Canyon to Glen Canyon, are central to the eco-myths of the West. John Muir set the tone when he famously employed biblical language to rail against the developers who would build a dam that would flood his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley: “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.” Ed Abbey kept the invective up when he railed against the flooding of Glen Canyon, calling it the “damnation of a canyon.”
For Ken Sleight the death of Glen Canyon and the creation of Lake Meade by the Glen Canyon Dam was almost unbearable.
“I’d been thinking about it for a long time before it happened,” Sleight said to me. “I loved those side canyons and those arches and couldn’t imagine them buried in a big bathtub. The total realization of the enormity of it all didn’t hit me until they started building the dam. It was physically painful. I felt rage. And deep sadness.”
Fittingly, the Glen Canyon Dam was Earth First!’s first strike. This act was a symbolic one, when, with Abbey himself in attendance, they unfurled a giant three hundred foot sheet with an illustration of a crack on it in front of the dam, making it appear the dam itself was splitting. It was, as I say, a symbolic event, with no policy repercussions, and in truth a large part of Earth First!’s importance over the next decade was symbolic. But that is not to say it wasn’t effective. Symbols, like the image of Ken Sleight stopping the loggers on horseback, play an import role in environmental fights and what Earth First! symbolized was a new kind of environmentalism, something more dangerous, and more fun, than old school environmentalism. Of course Earth First! would soon enough be tarred with the brush of terrorism, and the FBI would crack down and the party would be over. But before the party ended the organization opened a window into which some could peek and maybe get an idea of what a future environmental movement might look like. That movement would be kind of wild, kind of fun, and would have a communal sense of a band of fighters, of merry men and women, fighting against the powers that be. Thumbing their nose, giving the collective finger, all that.
I am aware that these buckaroos and nose-thumbers only make up one front in the overall environmental war. The Nordhauses and Shellenbergers make up another, a very necessary front, pushing policy through and working in the bureaucratic mines. Furthermore, there are plenty of big problems with the Ed Abbey mythology, even beyond the obvious one that his macho rants take occasional detours into the sexist and xenophobic. As much as I may like the idea of the environmental fighter as a Rooster Cogburn character, taking the reins in his mouth and his six-guns in hand, after yelling out to the enemy, “Fill yer hand you son of a bitch,” I must admit that the cowboy myth has some serious limitations.
Which is not to say it should be tossed out altogether. It just needs some revision. Ken Sleight himself seemed surprisingly receptive to this idea, surprisingly ready to acknowledge his own hypocrisy and contradictions. Ken had grown up in a conservative Western home, but had, in his words, “evolved.”
He, too, worried about a distortion and oversimplification of the standard Western myths. He admitted that despite his own bursts of civil disobedience, and the fact that some people thought he was “way out there,” he had actually spent the better part of his life in the tourism business running his rafting company and felt some culpability in Moab’s recreation boom.
“When I went down the river with Abbey we were both kind of like double agents. We both loved the wildness of it all, but at the same time we had our uses for the thing. He was always writing and thinking about the places and people we were with. He was doing it with his writing and I was doing it with the trips. ‘Come with me and I’ll show you Cathedral in the Desert.’
“I remember when I was living down in Escalante, taking trips down Escalante Canyon to Coyote Gulch. When I first went there the place was empty and I would put out these little mimeographed sheets in town, trying to drum up business. But then I took some reporters from Sunset magazine down the river and they wrote an article on me. A few weeks later I saw people hiking in the canyon and when I asked them they said yes, they had read the article. And people led to more people. I began to see you had to be careful. Began to see you could love a place to death.”
His motivation for taking the reporters along had been a simple economic one—“Heck, I could do a little better”—and Sleight admitted he had had his hand in how things ended up going. What he was admitting to, in effect, was being one of Dan Driscoll’s hypocrites. But he had also tried to slow things down, fighting to regulate and keep roads out of Moab. In fact, many of Sleight’s battles over the last four decades had been, despite his cowboy image, efforts at restraint.
Perhaps this is where the revision of the cowboy myth begins. For years now the free market de-regulators, with Ronald Reagan as their hero, have claimed the cowboy as their own. But there are other uses of that myth. Think of those who have gone wild in the West, then turned around—wildly, romantically—and spread the word that the West was a place for inspiration, though also a place that could not hold too many people.
“Lawlessness, like wildness, is attractive, and we conceive the last remaining home of both to be in the West,” wrote Wallace Stegner.10 Yes, we come West for that feeling of wildness, of lawlessness too, the sense that we can do what we want and on our own. But in these days of crushing numbers, one person’s freedom impacts the freedom of a hundred others.
Even though the idea of a conservationist cowboy may be confusing, it’s also useful. If we are looking for stories that spark, this is a good place to start. When I lived in the West, I watched with my own eyes as formerly un-environmental friends read Abbey and changed. So I know it can happen. Absorbing the romance of Abbey’s wildness doesn’t mean you need to be yet one more Patagonia-clad emigrant in one of a million over-populated, under-watered cities. It is a question of spirit, not style.
After leaving, Ken I also spoke with Kristin McKinnon, a modern day Ken Sleight and the owner of Wild Rivers Expeditions. “The river corridors are being used like never before,” she said. “But with care and effort you can take people to still-wild places. There’s still a lot here. The important thing is to make our impact minimal. I like to think that people will return home more inclined to protect the places they live in. Spending time outside in a beautiful place will trigger this.”
In the end, the cowboy myth is just a kick-start, something that, with any luck, will get us thinking. We may love the wild myths but the larger reality is that it will require some restraint if we are to preserve these final wild patches. There is no reason the cowboy myth of Bush and Reagan can’t turn back into the cowboy myth of Teddy Roosevelt. Maybe the work ahead, as Ken Sleight has discovered, is the work of reigning in as much as letting—yeehaw —loose. And maybe, paradoxically, restraint—an uncharacteristic but evolved restraint—is the road to preserving what freedom is left in the not-so-wild West.
If it is true that the greater Western fight is sometimes more complicated than I have made it out to be, that policy and regulation and restraint are a large part of that fight, it is also true that we can still take from those old, complicated Western myths a dash of romance. In short, I don’t want to throw the cowboy out with the bath water. For the moment I want to keep my focus on the more romantic stories—keep the focus on Ken Sleight sitting on his horse in front of the loggers—and I do this for a practical reason. I am interested in what makes someone, particularly a young someone, begin to fight for the environment. If we are looking for stories that ignite, that engage, there is no better place. The West still offers us a greater sense of adventure, of outrageousness, of fun. And daring. All these qualities will come in handy in making the environmental vocation not just something more rounded, but something that people
may actually want to do.
THE IRISH ALEHOUSE
Dan, as he admits, has borrowed freely from Western myths, and has brought many things back East with him. But his sense of fun, of wildness and humor, is balanced by a sort of stolid common sense. He isn’t Ed Abbey sawing down billboards or walking for days alone in the canyons. And he knows he isn’t about to create a great trackless wilderness in the Boston suburbs. As it was, the legislature scoffed at his early attempts to create a nature preserve along the Charles. Here common sense kicked in. To get his limited urban wildness, his practical political choice was to push for the creation of bike paths.
“Bike paths, you can get funding for,” he explains as we lounge on the sandbar. “They don’t give a shit about ‘wilderness.’ But bike paths they kind of understand. So you try to use federal money creatively by calling things ‘bikeways’ but you’re really trying to establish a connection with nature. They don’t review the grants that closely. I’ll sneak in a hundred thousand dollars for native plantings and they will say okay.”
As someone who commuted daily to work by bike, Dan knew the practical value of these paths. I remember the two years that I lived car-lessly and commuted in and out of work in Colorado, and I know that I lived differently during that time. Groceries became provisions and I thought hard about what I could carry, how much energy I would put out and take in.
For Dan, the paths were just a means to an end. It was through the funding for the paths that he would get what he really wanted. It didn’t sound as romantic as “nature trails” but no one was about to give him money for those. Bike paths became his Trojan horse. They allowed him to re-plant the banks and return some wildness to the river.
It would be nice to simply sleep here on our sandbar. Right in the rich guy’s backyard, with nothing he could do about it. But we have places to be, and so, finally, reluctantly, we stand up and push off. The mansions of Wellesley and Dover are behind us, and, as we enter Needham and Dedham, the river takes a decidedly urban turn. We are in a kind of transition zone where the household incomes will be half of what they were where we started. If the Charles has a St. Louis Arch of sorts, letting you know you have entered new territory, it is Route 128. We cross quietly, unseen, under the unending roar of the highway’s six lanes, moving through the gateway to the city river.
The sight of it sets Dan off on another tirade.
“Each of these bridges costs millions to maintain and it’s where most of our public money is going. Right now we are spending over a hundred million on the Longfellow Bridge. Maybe there are enough bridges into the city already. What if we just didn’t fix it? What if we made it into a walking bridge? There are enough roads in the city already.”
He is quiet for a minute but clearly not done.
“Give me a third of what it takes to fix one bridge and I’ll make a complete circuit of paths of all of Boston’s rivers.” He is excited now and he could go on . . . of course he could . . . but soon, the urban landscape rising around us distracts him.
“The strange thing is that folks in the suburbs place great value on this land along the river,” Dan says. “But once you get here, in the city itself, it is devalued.”
The places we pass prove his point: industrial parks, car lots, chain link fences right on the river. After its stately ramble through the large-lawned suburbs, the Charles turns gritty.
“Of course the land should be more valuable here, where it’s the only contact point with nature,” he adds. But for one reason or another, it’s not. Dan plans to change that. He has vowed to revitalize this area as well. He points out that even here people are already trying to connect to the river: a hole in the fence yawns and someone has plopped an old, stuffed chair above the riverbank where they can creep down during their lunch break to watch the river flow; workers sneaking out the factory’s back door for lunch or a cigarette or maybe, on Fridays, a beer; looking down at the river and seeing where it had come from and where it was flowing; a place to briefly escape their jobs, sure, but also a point of contact.
True, it isn’t the nature you find in Sierra magazine. It is not distant, pristine, and pure. It is not the nature of the national park, the nature you need to drive or fly to see. Instead it’s the nature of the creek that runs through your neighborhood, the nature of the abandoned lot, the nature of the small secret patch of beach protected by rocks. I understand that there are those who would scoff at my trying to make claims of wilderness for Needham. But I think we are making a deadly mistake if we ignore the smaller, more compromised patches, since that is what so many of us are left with.
Even though my feelings about wildness and wilderness are instinctive, my ideas about wildness have evolved. Back in the spring of 2001, I began paying visits to an old man named John Hay. At the time I was still living on Cape Cod, just down the street from Hay, but this man, regarded by many as our greatest living nature writer, was no ordinary neighbor. He was eighty-six, and still had the energy to hike through the trees and walk the beaches around his home on Dry Hill in Brewster, where he had lived for sixty years. He liked to pluck a leaf or flower and jam it under my nose and order me to smell it before identifying it for me. Though I’d been writing about the natural world myself for over ten years, it would not be going too far to say that my visits with John began to deepen, if not change, the way I thought about nature.
John deeply believes that there isn’t one box called NATURE and another box called HUMAN BEINGS. “Many people write about saving the environment,” he said in a 1978 speech to the Cape Cod Museum of History. “But you can’t save a thing unless you feel you are a part of it.” Even in this increasingly fragmented and specialized age of cell phones and online gratification, this is true. But to understand this, to really believe it and feel it and live it, is a hard task.
Wendell Berry once wrote that his greatest ambition was to belong to the place he lived, the way the local muskrats might. To many of us, this might seem to be going a little far, but I like the way the word “ambition” is lodged in the middle of his statement. If we environmentalists try to re-make humans as ambition-less, floating Zen-like creatures, we are doomed. Humans are always driven and prodded by goals, by curiosity, by pushing forward to new places. But as Berry says of his own ambition to belong to a place, “. . . I have come to see that it proposes an enormous labor. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness.” 11 In other words it isn’t easy to belong to a place, to accept that we are part of a larger animal world, but the fact that it isn’t easy doesn’t make it any less vital to try. As it turns out gaining humility is not always a humble enterprise. Berry, for instance, has spent a lifetime stumbling toward his goal. He’s never fully succeeded, but in his trying he’s found new depths of living well in the world.
My own goal is slightly different than Berry’s and Hay’s. Unlike them, I have not spent a lifetime committing to one place. For instance, I left Cape Cod five years ago and now live in coastal North Carolina, where I teach at a university, so I can’t very well claim that I will “marry” my home place. But what I can claim is this: I will work to keep my life wild. Not frat boy wild, mind you, even if there is the occasional beer, or four, consumed. But wild as in spontaneous, creative, and open. Wild as in spending a part of each day on the beach or in the woods or in the mountains.
Wild as in joyful. Which may be why I so object to an environmentalism that focuses on the merely tragic—the photos-of-clubbing-baby-seals approach. When we talk about nature it doesn’t have to sound like socialist propaganda. It’s strange really, that so much writing about the natural world should leave us feeling so dour when, for the most part, the overwhelming experience of wildness is fun. This is the part that people forget when they get all do-gooder-y about the environment. Thoreau the environmentalist was just Thoreau the man after all. And though he was many things, I like him best when he was the man who said this: “I would like to say a word in favor of wildness.” Wildness. Not really the kind of
value you find on many political agendas, but one you do still find on human agendas.
I am not taking anything away from environmentalists or environmental policy. I’m just saying that there’s a deeper story here, a deeper level below the merely “environmental,” I’m saying that this deeper story is the one that those who we consider the fountainheads of environmental thought—Muir, Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson—learned and then brought back to the world. These stories begin not with ideas but with joy. With a kind of primitive delight in the world. With the mad fact of the world—aspen leaves fluttering, copper creeks flowing, waves crashing again and again forever, sunsets dipping down nightly, gaudy and overdone. And the deeper story begins not with theory but with particular places—a cove in Maine, a canyon in California, a pond in Massachusetts—particular places that particular Homo sapiens fall deeply and strangely in love with. Later all this becomes laws and rules and books and essays. But it begins well before and well below that. What later becomes words begins with wordlessness.
Which is why I continue to stress the word wild in these decidedly un-wild times. I stress it because it is vital, because without it all is lost. It is the wellspring, the unnamed, the ineffable, the slightly crazy, the fickle, the joyous, the strange, and the creative force behind so much of what we feel and do. I stress it because, no matter how we plan or make things-to-do lists, and no matter how we try, valiantly and importantly, to control events, every great act depends on something beyond our control, something unpredictable and wordless. In short, something wild.
My Green Manifesto Page 8
