I think back to the osprey flying through the dusk over the Alehouse, and I think of the way ospreys have lifted my life. Again, I’m resisting the idea of a “totem animal,” but if I were ever to cave to that groovy notion, the osprey would be mine. Last night’s bird rose and hovered, like a muscular hummingbird, decked out in feathers of dark brown and white, and I, looking up, could sense its tension, and yelled to Dan right before it dove. It missed its target but the sport of it was enough, at least for me.
I love the directness of ospreys, the way their whole lives depend on this simple and savage getting of fish. Back on Cape Cod I studied the way they dove: the hover, the reading of the water, the initial dive, the adjustment, the final abandoned plunge, the popping of the last-second wheelie, the stabbing for fish with their great talons.
Birds are my soft spot. Friends mock me for it but I’m a sucker for anything with feathers that flies. In particular, anything that flies with a black bandit mask and that has an insatiable hunger for fish. Ospreys are my weakness. John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Ospreys are hitched to the world in unexpected ways.
Large, nearly eagle-sized raptors with five-and-a-half to six foot wingspans, ospreys are known for their swashbuckling dives and are distinguished by their dark brown masks and vivid brown-and-white wing patterns. Before I got to know the birds, I never considered myself much of a birder, let alone an ornithologist. My early encounters with them on Cape Cod were casual, but then I became curious about their behavior and that curiosity gradually transformed into obsession. Watch these birds a while and it’s hard not to get excited. The first time I saw an osprey hit the water, after pulling in its wings and hurtling down from fifty feet in the air, I literally jumped for joy. I did this more as a sports fan than a birder, and, like a fan, I immediately wanted to grab someone else and tell them about it: After all, what I had witnessed was supremely athletic. But as well as being spectacular athletes, ospreys are gregarious and extroverted—their open ways seem to invite you into their lives. At some point I took that invitation. I am forever glad I did.
One thing led to another. One fall I decided to follow the migration of some Cape Cod ospreys as they made their way down the East Coast to Cuba and then down to South America. There were great pleasures in watching the birds but these were rivaled in watching the people who watched the birds. I met dozens of other bird people, my fellow tribesmen and women, who spent the better part of their lives studying ospreys. I am not going to make a grand claim that this somehow made them better people than the rest of us, but I do think there is something encoded in human beings that gives us pleasure when we spend a good part of our time outdoors watching animals. “Joy is the symptom by means of which right contact can be measured,” wrote Joseph Wood Krutch in his biography of Thoreau. And there was something joyous about this bird tribe that I had stumbled upon. Not perfect, not content, not morally superior, just joyous.
It was during this trip that I visited Cuba and met Freddy Santana Rodriguez. Freddy’s life changed one day in 1996 when he discovered a dead male osprey with a band on his leg in the area near his home in Santiago, Cuba. Through the information on the osprey’s band, Rodriguez got in touch with Keith Bildstein, the director of conservation science at Hawk Mountain, a well-known site for watching raptor migration in Pennsylvania. Freddy’s find would lead to his becoming the first Cuban intern at Hawk Mountain, and when he got home to his country he would establish a site for observing migrating ospreys on La Gran Piedra, a rock outcropping in the Sierra Maestra mountain range in eastern Cuba. From then on he tied his life to the birds, and his happiest moments were watching the annual river of ospreys, shining black and white above, as they flowed overhead through the mountains each fall. Naturally he began, not just to study, but to protect the birds; working to educate his countrymen about them; coming out against hunting and the destruction of the natural places in Cuba that served as pit stops on the bird’s migratory route. But the activism came later. First was the joy in seeing the wild and beautiful athleticism of the birds in flight.
That’s a nice story, you say. But isn’t it a bit off point? This is still a manifesto after all. How is an osprey or some herons going to SAVE THE WORLD? How are they going to STOP GLOBAL WARMING?
Well, because everything’s hitched to everything else, let me try another story on you, this one also involving ospreys. I’ll warn you going in that this is the sort of hoary sixties era environmental chestnut that so grates on the nerves of the Nordhauses and Shellenbergers of the world. But I like it. And it fits well, in my mind at least, with Dan’s story and the story of the sort of environmentalism that appeals to me. It’s the story of two friends on Long Island, Art Cooley and Dennis Puleston. These two start going bird watching together in the fifties. At that time, Art is a middle school science teacher—a hearty, energetic young man fresh out of college—and someone tells him about Dennis, who is already a kind of local legend who has sailed around the world, written books, and, during World War II, invented the famous amphibious duck boats. “Oh, you’re interested in birds,” another friend says to Art, “then you’ve got to meet Dennis Puleston.”
Dennis, it turns out, is an osprey freak. He is also an artist, and one of the subjects for his art are the ospreys that he observes regularly on Gardiners Island, off the northern end of Long Island. After Dennis and Art have gone out birding a couple times on the weekend, heading, with binoculars in hand, to some marsh or beach or woods, they notice they have a lot of extra room in the car, and, being natural educators, they start inviting along kids from Art’s middle school, teaching them about birds. They do this pretty regularly until Art goes off to fight in Korea, and then when he gets back, they start up again.
By this time—it’s the early sixties now—Art has gotten a job as a high school biology teacher and Dennis has begun to notice that the osprey population on Gardiners Island is plummeting. Then Dennis reads Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and it’s all over. His mind starts buzzing with connections. Carson explains how DDT, sprayed to kill insects, has permeated ecosystems with deadly results, especially for animals, like the osprey, on the top of the food chain.
A couple of more year pass and Art is teaching a marine science class. He teaches this class at the high school but also, to help make ends meet, he teaches it as an adult education course, and in both courses he always uses local issues to illustrate his points. In the night school class, he has the students chart how duck farms pollute Long Island Sound. Then he takes the class to Mt. Sinai Harbor where Art points out the dredging that has been going on—pretty common stuff in those days—wetlands dug up and the muck from the marshes, the fill, dumped to create land to build houses on. Art bemoans this practice, but leaves it at that, at least until the next night when a student from the class calls him at home.
The student has been talking to another student and they have a question for Art. “What are you going to do about this?” they ask Art. “What are you going to do about the duck farms and the dredging?” Well, it’s a good question. Art teaches full time, and he teaches the night school class, and of course he’s got a wife and kids, too, and it really isn’t his job to save the world. But he starts asking questions and one thing leads to another. The two adult students get involved, and so does Dennis Puleston, his bird-watching partner, and then some other people do too.
Which is to say that Art does something very important. He forms a group. It’s hard to express how much this changes things. Individuals, artists like Rachel Carson for instance, might bring back something, a vision, a book, that inspires. But groups get things done. This group has a name (the Brookhaven Town Natural Resources Committee or BTNRC) and annual dues (one dollar per year for mimeographing) and Art is elected chairman. Art, it turns out, has a talent for running the meetings, maybe learned in his years of teaching high school students; he is burly with a deep voice, good at
telling people to shut up and get started, and also at summarizing what they’ve discussed and then assigning people tasks to get done by the next time the group meets. It’s a surprisingly effective strategy: Tell yourself that you will get something done and you may, but there is no one to report back to. That is quite different than reporting back to a group, specifically to a man as big and forceful as Art Cooley, and saying, “Um . . . sorry, I failed.” The word people from that time often used to describe Art is “energetic,” but “tough” gets in there fairly often, too. You didn’t want to come back to Art and tell him you didn’t get your job done.
Different words are used to describe Dennis Puleston, for instance “gentle” and “brilliant”—but that is the beauty of a group: it can contain multitudes. Different people bring different skills to the party. Other group members include George Woodwell, head ecologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Charles Wurster, a biology professor at Stony Brook University and an expert on chemical pesticides. But to ignite these more serious scientific personalities, a spark is needed. Art, with his energy and bouncer’s brawn, provides the organizational spark, but another spark comes uninvited in the personage of Victor Yannacone, a flamboyant local lawyer.
It is said of Yannacone that “the only thing silent about him was the final ‘e’ in his name,” and when he reads a local editorial written by Wurster, decrying the use of the chemical DDT in spraying local marshes, he wastes no time filing a suit against the local Mosquito Commission, the sprayers of the chemical. Yannacone then approaches the BTNRC, and it is here that the individual talents of the group came to the fore. “Do you have any evidence?” Yannacone asks. Well, yes, it turns out they do. Dennis Puleston draws on his studies of the Gardiners Island ospreys, where he has been noting the number of nests and birth rates, and where only fifty nests remain from the original three hundred he began studying. In fact there are only three chicks this year, and from the failed nests he brings the too-thin eggshells to Charles Wurster’s lab, where Wurster confirms they contain DDT. George Woodwell, not to be outdone, writes a brilliant paper on biomagnification, describing the process by which DDT rises up the food chain, increasing in toxicity in larger species. In court Yannacone presses the point that the chemical is threatening the community, and Art Cooley testifies in his usually emphatic manner. Dennis Puleston provides beautiful drawings of ospreys, and his charts of the falling osprey population are exhibit A, which means that the osprey, hitched to everything, finds itself smack in the middle of the country’s first cases of what will soon come to be known as “environmental law.”
Things speed up after that. The judge delays but then agrees to grant a stay that stops the Mosquito Commission from spraying. In the meantime public opinion turns against DDT, and the local extermination companies bow to public pressure, switching to more organic pesticides. When the judge’s decision comes back, months later, he decides not to decide, acknowledging the danger of DDT but saying it is not in his powers to judge, an issue for the legislature. By then it doesn’t matter. Art and company are off and running. There is a wonderful moment in any project, any great effort, when impotence transforms into potency. When an individual, or group, suddenly realizes, “Hey, I actually can do something.... I can impact the world.” This is why Derrick Jensen and the anti-hope gang are dead wrong. Suddenly “I did something” transforms into “I can do more?!” Suddenly momentum takes over and energy surges.
“What you’ve got to understand is that we were all friends,” Art will say later, trying to explain the intoxicated mood of the time. “We all liked each other. Many of us were naturalists and birders. For years we had felt pushed around by big companies, the chemical people. And suddenly we realized that we might actually be able to push back. It was terrifically exciting.”
There are some within the BTNRC who feel they have done enough, but there are others who believe they are just getting started. Those others—including Art, Dennis Puleston, George Woodwell, Charles Wurster, and Victor Yannacone—form another group, which they called the Environmental Defense Fund. The EDF is incorporated as a nonprofit organization with a mission to “encourage and support the conservation of the natural resources of the United States of America.” The first thing the group does is file a suit against the Michigan Department of Agriculture, trying to stop the spraying of DDT and the use of pesticides around Lake Michigan. That case is thrown out on a technicality, but the next case, in neighboring Wisconsin, is not. Thanks to the Environmental Defense Fund, DDT is soon banned in that state. A few years later, in June of 1972, the chemical will be banned throughout the country by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency. People will point to both the Environmental Defense Fund and the writing of Rachel Carson as prime movers behind this law.
If there was a sense of momentum after the Long Island court case, imagine the sense after Wisconsin, or after the national ban. Imagine the sense of “we did something” transforming into “let’s do more!” Imagine the ice breaking and the floes beginning to steam downstream. Oh, and remember, by the way, it began with bird watching.
Today Art Cooley sounds positively jolly when he recounts the EDF’s motto, at least their private motto, during those heady days.
Their motto was this: “Sue the bastards.”
ANTAEUS
Sue the bastards!
Think of the life in those words. So much better than “The World is Doomed.” Even if it is.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. As with the results of Dan’s fight—the green banks we have been paddling by—the results of Art Cooley’s and Dennis Puleston’s are there for anyone to see. For the ospreys, the effects of the DDT ban were immediate and dramatic: the coast quickly filled again with brown-and-white wings and wild, shaggy nests. In 1960, thirteen pairs of ospreys nested in Massachusetts while today we have well over three hundred. But the story itself is as important as the results. In the face of the familiar litany of environmental pessimism—not just global warming but depleted resources and the intractable crush of population—it is easy to close down. But I am energized by the fact that a few people took action and actually affected change, or, to put it another way, it is thanks to the fact that some Long Islanders sued the bastards that we now have ospreys on Cape Cod.
I believe that the osprey story, like Dan’s story, is worth repeating in these embattled times. It seems a vital puzzle piece as I try to fit together my own green philosophy. One lesson, arguably the biggest lesson, we can take from it is how small, local change can have large, global results. “It all began in our backyard,” is how Art Cooley recently put it. And it ended as one of the biggest and most successful environmental organizations of the twentieth century. Of course the technocrats would love to put Art’s story permanently on the shelf with the rest of the cobwebbed old stuff. They would prefer to replace it with a “vision of affluence.”
For my part I don’t get excited by the idea of humans turning into a band of chipper entrepreneurs. “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind,” said Thoreau.19 A great life can be a different life, a new life. For the last thirty years we have told ourselves tales of affluence without sacrifice, of big cars and big houses—but there are other stronger, deeper myths that can guide us in the future which have also guided us in the past.
In a quest for newer, shinier ways to save the world, influenced, no doubt, by our belief that we can Google our way to any solution, we forget that stories matter. They may be chestnuts, but Dennis Puleston and Art Cooley’s story, and Dan Driscoll’s story for that matter, are ones that should be told and re-told, repeated around campfires. We don’t need more theory, disembodied from the world. We need stories, told outside, told in a way that links activism to beauty, wild beauty. (And yes, there are beautiful places, countless beautiful places, near Boston and on Long Island—still.) They should be told in the open air so that we remember that loving and fighting aren’t two specialties, but one thing
, or at least two things that are part of a whole, connected through the pumping blood of a single circulatory system.
I can see why Nordhaus and Shellenberger consider Art Cooley’s story outdated. For one thing it starts with Rachel Carson. Oh god not Rachel Carson again, you hear them moaning, please not again.... The Carson model, remember, is that of an artist retreating to nature, then returning with a vision and that vision influencing the world. For another it fits what Nordhaus and Shellenberger call “the pollution paradigm,” the old model of environmentalism that they claim we will all have to give up now that we are fighting a new fight against a colorless, odorless gas in this age of global warming. But it could be that what they like least of all about the story is the simple fact that a large national fight, a fight with global consequences, began as a local battle over disappearing ospreys and some duck crap in a few Long Island ponds.
Because, to put it as simply as possible, Nord and Shell don’t get places. Yes, it’s true, believe it or not. They like the world, or at least they claim to, but local places, actual neighborhoods or street corners or copses of trees with squirrels in them strike them as, well, kind of yucky. You can see them up there on the shiny, clean bridge of the Enterprise, Kirk and Spock, or maybe, in their case, Spock and Spock, gazing placidly at a planet on the view screen but never quite wanting to beam down and leave their antiseptic ship.
For these two Spocks, one of the great culprits of modern environmentalism, one of the reasons it needs to die, is NIMBY-ism, or the famous “Not-In-My-Backyard” syndrome.
For an example of why fighting for one’s backyard is so bad they point to a battle that has been raging for almost a decade in my former home. The controversy began when an entrepreneur named Jim Gordon proposed satisfying the Cape’s ever-increasing energy needs by erecting 130 wind turbines out in Nantucket Sound, and the issue gained national prominence for the usual Cape Cod reason: As it turned out the wind farm, as it came to be called, would be in the Kennedys’ watery backyard, and the family trumpeted and harrumphed about this. Cape residents were split on the issue and I, a Cape resident, was split too, unsure what was right. But Nordhaus and Shellenberger, looking down from outer space, were not split. Of course they had good points to start with. Yes, Robert Kennedy was a hypocrite for supporting wind power everywhere but where he could see it (though he is clearly one of Dan Driscoll’s good “fighting hypocrites,” having done much to clean up the Hudson and other rivers), and, yes, we of course needed to start exploring alternative energy. The problem, you see, isn’t that Nordhaus and Shellenberger support Cape Wind, which is something that I, and most Cape Codders, have also ultimately come to do. The problem is that they, as usual, go too far, taking Cape Wind as their jumping off point to blame NIMBY-ism for all that is wrong with environmentalism. According to the authors, caring about one’s backyard is synonymous with small thinking, an irrational prejudice comparable to racism.
My Green Manifesto Page 11
