My Green Manifesto

by David Gessner

  If we don’t acknowledge this, if we don’t believe this, then there is no real reason to stop stamping out the wild. There is no reason not to continue to make our world as predictable, efficient, virtual, and calculated as possible. And there’s no argument against the logic of the assembly line or the music of automation. If we don’t believe this then taking any action to protect the wild is just another logical decision: Why, yes, I think it makes good sense to save the rainforest just in case there are unknown plants there that could provide medicines to cure human illnesses.

  Screw that. Of course there isn’t anything wrong with finding medicines, curing illnesses, recycling aluminum cans, twisting in light bulbs, attending meetings, putting a stop to the local cement plant, and printing on both sides of the paper. In fact there’s a whole lot right about these things, and they are necessary in this time of crisis. All I am really saying is that there is something else that is important as well, something deeper, something not just right but joyous.

  When we set out this morning, Dan thought the land next to Long Ditch would be a good spot for the night’s camping. Long Ditch is an artificial tributary of the Charles which was excavated by citizens of Dedham in 1654 in an effort to reduce flooding of the town’s lowlands.12 As we approach, the ditch looks, to my eye, very ditch-like: The mucky banks lead up to chest high grasses, which I imagine are filled with ticks.

  I suggest we camp in the woods nearby.

  “The woods aren’t safe once you get this close to the city. We’re better off on state land—no one comes here.” He explains that the land is owned by the DCR, the Department of Conservation and Recreation, the organization that he works for, and is separated from the parklands by the moat of the ditch itself. Then he adds: “This grass is too high for ticks.” I’m not so sure about that but we tie up our boat to the root of a willow tree and then Dan charges into the grasses using his oar as a machete to hack clear a place for our tent.

  We set up camp and celebrate with beers in the matteddown front yard of our temporary home. The beer works its everyday magic. We lie back on the grass despite my worries about ticks and an odd rustling sound nearby in the higher grasses.

  Dusk is approaching and, with our camp set up, we climb down the muddy bank to our boat. Our first job is bailing and we scoop out the stinking water. Then we climb back into the stinking boat in our stinking clothes and we paddle out of the ditch and onto Cow Island Pond. We work our way east across the pond, into the wind, toward the far end where the river intersects with Route One. The work is somewhat grueling, after a long day already, but the destination is a noble one: The Olde Irish Alehouse, a rickety wooden building. As we approach, it looms above us like a decrepit barge, seemingly ready to tumble into the river. The building is a kind of kitschy monument, dotted with leprechaun trinkets and crowned by a wooden sculpture of two swans that appear to be making out, but at least it, unlike so many of the nearby buildings, has not entirely turned its back on the river. The people dining two floors above us look down through the window and wave. We tie up to a tree root and scramble up a dirt bank near a dumpster and into the parking lot, observing multiple signs of civilization, including several gas stations, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and an “Entering Boston” sign. We enter the building in our mucky clothes, but no one knows we have come by water. Inside we devour mashed potatoes and dangerously undercooked steaks and top it off with vodka gimlets.

  I like traveling with Dan. He is a good guide and a lot of fun, but there’s something else that puts him above other co-pilots. He provides a relief, maybe even an antidote, to the tone of environmentalism that makes me want to thumb my nose and turn away. What continues to bug me, when it comes right down to it, is the sheer earnestness of environmentalism, the conviction that the world is doomed and the compulsive need to share this cheery news. If there were environmental weather reports, they would go something like this: “Gloom expected today . . . more doom tomorrow.”

  Of course the world is doomed. Human beings cover the earth like maggots, species are wiped out daily, land is gobbled up by developers, the great migrations are dying out, the world is warming, sea level rising. All true. And then throw in the fact that while all this is going on most people seem less concerned with the fate of the world than with the fate of the latest starlet to enter rehab. Nature writers are accused of being apocalyptic, but the facts themselves are pretty dire.

  Which tends to have this result: Human beings, most of whom are not really very good at dwelling in hopelessness, turn away. Maybe it’s just too much for the human mind to live in a constant state of world anxiety. It not only doesn’t help the mind much; it only rarely helps the world. Yes, there are some great, galvanizing, world-saving personalities—we live in desperate times and it’s true that desperation can sometimes energize. But hopelessness, as a rule, does not inspire. We are not very good at fighting apocalypses. We are better at fighting for our neighborhoods or for sections of river we’ve grown up on. And most of us need at least a dollop of hope to nudge ourselves into action. Again, I’m not talking about Disney hope here but a practical hope, hope in the face of reality.

  It does seem hopeful to me that, paddling into a city of over four million, we can still see a deer on the banks, a sharp-shinned hawk in the canopy, stripers swimming below. And it does seem hopeful that imperfect human beings, crazy eyed, former deadheads like Dan, have fought to correct our mistakes and redeem something that seemed unredeemable, like this river. It’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s something. The beginning of something. Something to create momentum, to fight inertia.

  Whenever I think of small fights, I think of the writer Joy Williams, and what she did with her home in Key West. She bought a house there decades ago but before long a suburb sprung up around her: manicured lawns, sprinklers, the works—all very “civilized.” Joy, however, let her plot of land grow wild, as it always had, with vines and trees and lizards and snakes and ferns. When the neighbors started to complain she simply built a fence around it, making her last stand there, letting her tiny ecosystem thrive. When Joy and I first met she was staying at a beach house on an overdeveloped coastal town in North Carolina near where I teach, and sitting on the front porch of that house, I noted that there was a single undeveloped plot across the street where green herons had clustered at dusk. It might have been the very last undeveloped plot on the whole island, the last bit that wasn’t concrete, and I started to make a point of studying it, noticing that migrating birds seemed to know just where it was; this was their stopover point. It occurred to me that while we need people to fight for millions of acres in Utah, we also need people to fight to save that single plot, that tiny wilderness.

  I know that while a glimpse of a leaf through the bars of a jailhouse may be a form of wilderness, it is not one that would satisfy many of us. But I also find it hopeful that even in this wounded landscape there are still delights to being alive.

  After more gimlets and dangerously raw meat, we finally pay the bill and say goodbye to the Alehouse. Sliding down the muddy bank, slightly unsteady, we clamber back into the canoe and paddle home drunk to our murky campsite lit with fireflies in the ditch. More lights come next. We stare off toward town, where someone has decided to set off a fairly impressive display of fireworks one day early. “A warm up,” Dan calls it.

  We sleep well despite a strange rustling from some creature in the tall grass that brings the movie Alien to mind. I wake early and discover that someone has left a huge hobnailed boot on our campsite doorstep, footwear that looks part angler’s wader and part hooker boot. I am not sure when or how it got here, but I know it was not here when we arrived. We have truly entered the urban wild.

  This is my wildness. A trashy ditch with a hooker boot for flora. Maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes I don’t think people value wildness because they believe they have to hike to the top of a mountain in Alaska to find it. I have traveled all over the world to experience the wild, but some of my
wildest moments have been closer to home. On Cape Cod, on the same domestic beach I’ve returned to all my life—where the summer is all kids, umbrellas, and beach balls—the winter cold clears it of people and its character changes. From the rocks at the end of the beach I once watched hundreds of snow-white gannets dive from a hundred feet in the air, plunging into the freezing winter ocean like living javelins. Then, as the birds dove down, something else dove up: a breaching humpback whale rising as it herded the same fish the gannets were diving for.

  “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Thoreau, but as many others have pointed out, people often get the quote wrong and use “wilderness” instead.13 While wilderness might be untrammeled land along the Alaskan coast, wildness can happen anywhere. Wildness is unplanned, unpredictable. You can’t put a fence around it. It can happen in the jungle or on a city river. It rises up when you least expect it.

  It is of vital importance that we not define this wildness as wilderness, that we not construct intellectual walls between the natural and the human. In fact, it was while observing my own species, my own family, that I experienced the two wildest moments of my life.

  The first came while holding my father’s hand while he died. I listened to his final breaths, first deep and then gasping and fish-like, and I gripped his hand tight enough to feel the last pulsings of his heart. Something rose in me that day, something deep, animal, unexpected, something that I didn’t experience again until my daughter Hadley was born nine years later. Before her birth everyone warned me that my life was about to change, the implication being that it would become tamer. But there was nothing tame about those twenty-four hours in the hospital, or that indelible moment, after the C-section, when the doctor reached into my wife, up to his elbows, and a bloody head emerged, straight up, followed by Hadley’s full emergence and a wild squall of life as her little arms rose over her head in victory. Sure the surge was physiological—goosebumps and tingling scalp and a hundred other physical symptoms—but it was more than that, too, a wild rush, both a loss of and a return to self.

  These moments of death and life, as much as any moments in pristine nature, reconnect us to our primal selves, remind us that there is something wilder lurking below the everyday, that, having tasted wildness, we return to our ordinary lives both changed and charged. So while I will continue to seek out and protect wild places, I do so knowing that I don’t need to travel to the Amazon or Everest to experience the ineffable. It is on that same Cape Cod beach where I first walked holding my mother’s hand, near the waters where I later spread my father’s ashes, that I learned that my wildest moments are often closest to home. And it is there that I now bring Hadley each summer, secretly hoping that the wild will rise up in her when she least expects it.

  III. TRANSFORMATION

  THE VISION THING

  Dan snores in the tent while I read, taking breaks to listen to the orchard oriole that sings in the willow tree above our tent, offering a sweet accompaniment to Dan’s glottal savagery. For most of the night I had been frightened for my life, but the rustling alien creature is apparently nocturnal—the grasses are now quiet. I wonder if it could have been a fisher. Whatever the case, it is a relief to no longer be stalked.

  In fact it is a beautiful morning and if not for my lack of caffeine, and the book in my hands, I might feel quite peaceful. I look up again from Break Through, contemplating whether drowning or fire would be a better fate for these pages. It is sad that we have become so specialized that someone who writes about nature can feel so distant from someone responsible for writing the laws to save nature. We are separate tributaries off of the main Thoreauvian river, and we have branched off long ago and in separate directions.

  I remember something Dan said to me last night, while we sipped our vodka and ate our steaks.

  “I think of myself as a common, modern-day visionary,” he said. “Understand that the emphasis is on common. The only reason I seem extraordinary is that in a business like mine, in any kind of government business, there are so few of us. In general the visionaries are cut out of the process. Instead you get little visionary blips like what I’ve done out here. But to make it happen I’ve had to leverage federal funds and get corporate help and convince people to give me their land.

  “I’ve found that what Carnegie said is true. There is more money than there are good ideas. Get a good idea and the money follows.

  “Of course, even when I pull in outside money I get crap for it. Here is what one of the administrators actually said: ‘I’m tired of Dan Driscoll trying to leverage outside money to control what the state is going to do.’ So if I said to him, ‘I just got a four million dollar grant for us—and fourhundred thousand dollars of our funds will go to restoring this corridor.’ But he feels like I’m forcing him to spend fourhundred thousand on something he didn’t want to spend it on. And I’m saying, ‘you don’t want to spend it on anything good because you don’t know anything good.’ You’re a bean counter. You shouldn’t be involved in policy decisions. And people sit in rooms and people make decisions about how to spend billions of dollars. And they have no plan, no vision.”

  It was me, the choir, he was preaching to, but this morning his words also bear down on the book I’m reading. I can’t help noticing the antipathy that Nordhaus and Shellenberger feel toward visionaries, and toward artists in particular. While they really don’t seem to like nature and environmentalists that much, it’s nothing compared to what they have to say about us poor writers. They’ll quote Thoreau—who won’t?—because he’s safely dead and canonized. But the rest of us had better watch out. Most writers focusing on nature, according to the authors, go around claiming that nature is “above mankind.” Artists believe, according to Nordhaus and Shellenberger, that anyone jimmying around with nature represents a kind of biblical fall (apparently they think our tribe doesn’t use flush toilets or electric screwdrivers). They also politely lecture us, telling us—lo and behold, trumpets here please—that human beings are actually a part of nature too. What they might find if they picked up a book or two is that those who write and think about nature do so in a myriad of ways, just as people think about policy in different ways. They might find that there are ideas, outside of affluence and abundance, that move human beings.

  Disdain might be too strong a word for how the authors feel about artists, but it’s pretty close. I remember reading an interview in the online environmental magazine Grist with these two where they were asked why they’d exhaustively interviewed leading activists but not a single visionary thinker or writer—someone, for instance, like Wendell Berry. Nordhaus replied, “We interviewed the people in the environmental movement who are deciding how to spend tens of millions of dollars annually.... I’m sorry, Wendell Berry isn’t the person deciding how the enviro movement is going to construct its campaigns to address global warming.”14

  And there it is. When it comes to their number one priority, forming a vision of a new environmentalism, Wendell Berry is not relevant. Wendell Berry, who has spent the last forty years or so fashioning an original, idiosyncratic, and brilliant body of work that often focuses on committing to, and fighting for, the places where we live. Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue against the false separation and specialization of different groups, but they apparently think they have nothing to learn from a mere writer. Which is more than a little problem. After all, if you are going to construct your argument around the need for a “vision,” can you really ignore visionaries? Can’t they acknowledge that inspired words and inspired politics often go hand in hand? Art isn’t a box you can pack in the attic, far away from another box called politics. Clearly a compelling vision, one that calls us back to the natural world, is required before we get down to the business of saving it.

  I like arguing with Nordhaus and Shellenberger so much that it’s hard to stop but I finally put the book down. The truth is that, for all my antipathy, we have more in common than I’m admitting. They too want
to create an environmentalism that goes beyond the name, one that is included in a larger politics. They are at their best when they apply the principles of ecology to the wider political landscape, when they connect the economy to national security to energy independence. This is the landscape they know well, the ecotone of pragmatism and passion, and like naturalists they make connections within that ecosystem. Their point is a good one. You can’t look at “the environment” alone; you need to see it, as any good ecologist will tell you, in its greater ecosystems. I admire this. My only complaint with their politics of inclusion is that they have excluded two important elements: the storytellers, and nature.

  I should add that Nordhaus and Shellenberger are not entirely anti-artistic. They are fond of one form of art: the hour-long TV drama. At the book’s conclusion they cite the inspiring 2002 season of The West Wing, where the fictional President wins reelection “on an Apollo-type clean-energy investment platform.”

  Dan wakes groggily and soon we are paddling again across Cow Island Pond. Hungover after our evening at the Irish Alehouse, we approach the morning’s task like two blearyeyed galley slaves. Our moods are not aided by the wind, which blows directly in our faces. After twenty minutes of hard paddling, I stare at the shore and swear we are still directly across from the same branch of the same gnarled oak tree. After a while we start to move. Sirens go off as we pass by Millennium Park, providing a strange soundtrack to the beauty surrounding us: black willow trees, a downy woodpecker, and little pink-purple cups of wild petunia. After a good stretch of paddling we reach Nahantan Park. Dan is talking again but the wind blows the boat and his sentences backward. Here in the bow I catch about every third or fourth word. If I am getting what he is saying, the park coming up on our right was once known for its high frequency of homosexual “encounters.” The problem reached such proportions that a special city government meeting was called, and Dan was asked to join the group. They should have thought twice before they sent that invitation. Always an innovative thinker—a minor visionary as he himself suggested—Dan had a novel solution: they should create a new park in the city that would provide what Nahantan was already known for. In other words this new park would have a place designated for “encounters.” Then everyone would know what was what and if that wasn’t your scene you’d move on to another park.