Yes, they really say this: “We no longer believe it is justified to confine our affections to or reserve our loyalties for a particular race. Why then do we believe we are justified in reserving our loyalties for a particular place?” The real problem, according to the dynamic duo, is good old “place-based environmentalism,” and those narrow-minded, old-fashioned “place-based” environmentalists who fight for their own places.
True, NIMBY-ism can certainly be narrow-minded and class-based, but, far from being a snobby evil, it is actually where a lot of environmentalism is born. Think Dan Driscoll. Think Art Cooley and the beginnings of the EDF. Think of Diane Wilson, the down-on-her-luck shrimper who went from being just another fisherwoman to singlehandedly fighting off multinational chemical companies because they fucked with her backyard: the Gulf of Mexico. What Nord and Shell neglect is the fact that almost all environmentalism grows out of places, and that most of it grows out of home places. As I mentioned earlier, my own first small burst of activism came when a trophy house was built, quite literally, in my backyard. If you aren’t going to fight for your home you aren’t very likely to fight for any place. And if you don’t have a connection to a particular place, and to particular animals, humans and otherwise, who dwell in that place, then you don’t fight. It’s that simple. The Spock twins argue just the opposite. We need to think of policy not place. We need to think internationally, not locally, and we are bigots if we favor one place over another.
If they and their ilk don’t like place, then please oh please don’t talk to them about actual animals. When Jim Gordon first introduced the idea of erecting wind turbines off the coast, I was at the height of my love affair with Cape Cod. Like a lot of people I was more than a little apprehensive about what the turbines might do to the birds. Furthermore, I had some scary insider information. My work with ospreys had led to my getting to know two Scottish ornithologists who worked as consultants to wind farms in Europe.
“The machines don’t do too much damage unless they are in migratory routes,” they told me, off the record. “But put them in migratory routes and they can kill a lot of birds.” And Cape Cod is dead in the middle of one of the world’s biggest migratory routes: A million birds a night migrate over the peninsula at the height of the fall season.
But when Nordhaus and Shellenberger consider this issue from the deck of the Enterprise, anxieties about migrating birds and other wildlife are quickly and easily dismissed. They write: “Studies of wind turbines in Europe similar to the ones that are planned for Cape Wind have found vanishingly few bird deaths annually.” Vanishingly few! Whatever the fuck that means. If one follows the footnote of this statement it will lead to two sources, one a BBC news report and the other an article in a local glossy tourist magazine, Cape Cod Today. This is in line with their other research. For instance, countering Robert Kennedy’s extensive early objections to the wind farms, the authors write: “Indeed we were able to debunk most of them in just forty-five minutes of fact-checking on Google and the Nexus news database.” Apparently the line is written without irony.
As for the birds and animals of Nantucket Sound, they are reduced to a minor role in the drama. It’s about saving the world, after all, not saving birds. They quickly dismiss worries about local wildlife, referring to them as “photogenic animals.” Any claimed concern with non-human life, after all, is part of the old fashioned “grand environmental narrative” and not au courant. This makes sense within their overall logic since individual animals, including human animals, are all of and from a place. That is, they grow somewhere. The trouble again is that without knowledge of particular creatures that live in particular places, it is hard to actually care.
In the end, after much soul-searching and teeth gnashing, I came out in support of the Cape Wind project. I did so after meeting and walking the beach with Jim Gordon, and I did so with anxiety about the animals and worries for the water, and with fears that I was acting as an avian Judas. And finally I did so hoping that I was not merely being swayed by the times and our current wind-mania. In short, after a lot of brooding, I decided that the wind machines were the best of some bad choices. It is, after all, a time of tough choices, and common sense dictates that some of our eco-choices aren’t going to be “pure” ones. But I also supported the wind farm knowing that each place must start to make an accounting of the energy it uses and have an awareness of where that energy comes from. As with so many things, better that it comes from close to home.
So, if I have come to the same conclusion as Nordhaus and Shellenberger, why all the fuss? Other than coming around more slowly, and grudgingly, how am I any different? Well, for one thing, it has been a hard decision. For another it has been a grounded decision.
I, for one, don’t think my love of one place makes me a racist. In fact I believe that it is precisely my love of place that allows me to think deeply about non-local issues. Nordhaus and Shellenberger write: “Those who have a hard time accepting, nay (nay?), embracing windmills in Nantucket Sound or high-rise buildings in urban centers will not be able to create a politics capable of helping countries like China (not to mention the United States) meet their energy needs in a more ecologically sound way.” Well that’s easy for them to say. But while the national media portrayed anyone who opposed Cape Wind as a Thurston Howell the Third wearing pants with whales on them who only cared that the wind turbines would spoil the view during the regatta, the truth was more complicated. The truth was that many of us wrestled with the issue, and that wrestling was just another way of being deeply involved with one’s home. My old backyard is a complicated place and it includes Buzzards Bay where I have seen wind’s alternative, oil, cover the wings of shorebirds during a recent spill. The decision on whether or not to support Jim Gordon may be easy from the outside but from within it is a hard decision, made harder and more complex by local knowledge. From the great heights of placelessness it’s easy to smooth over the complexities of an issue that, like all issues, even global warming, is local as well as global.
In the end any talk of policy must incorporate this sort of local knowledge or be, of necessity, disconnected and brittle. Yes, policy is important, indisputably important. But what is policy other than shackles if it does not come from some place, and speak to the particular people rooted in that place? Is it really possible to have sweeping environmental changes without acknowledging that you are an animal that comes from a particular animal territory? Is it possible to have policy that ignores this or that ignores the other animals you happen to share your place with?
The most startling thing about Cape Wind was not that people behaved so badly but that so many Cape citizens, in the end, thought out and fought out the issue, and ended up supporting the project. That is they decided, finally, that we must provide our own power and that it is worth seeing where that power comes from.
I support the wind project, but due to my fear for the birds I still do so reluctantly. Perhaps I should more enthusiastically accept—nay, embrace!—the wind farm. But for the moment the best I can do is back it.
In a way, Dan Driscoll’s story is the opposite of NIMBY-ISM, since, ultimately, he ended up trying to take people’s backyards from them. But he wouldn’t have been involved in the fight in the first place if he hadn’t fallen for his own backyard. Perhaps the larger point is that there is nothing wrong with our environmental ethic beginning in our own backyards—just as long as it doesn’t end there.
I believe that Nordhaus and Shellenberger are making a grave mistake when they try to separate environmentalists from the ground they walk on. I still say that a fighter for the earth, new model or old, must have some rooted attachment to the earth he or she is fighting for. Consider, for instance, the way that Nordhaus and Shellenberger end their book by turning to Greek legend. It isn’t that the legend they choose to allude to is strange, just the way they use it.
They break out the oft-repeated story of the inventor Daedalus, who created wings for his son Icar
us, and then warned the boy not to fly too close to the sun. As most of us know, Icarus does just that, and the wax that held his wings together melts so that he crashes down into the ocean and a watery death. The story is usually told to warn of hubris, but Shellenberger and Nordhaus see it differently. In their version Icarus is the chipper new eco-entrepreneur, daring to dream, someone who represents “the aspiration to imagine new realities, create new values, and reach new heights of human possibility.” Hubris, it turns out, is not so bad. We need it if we are to “overcome our lower needs and values” and transform into our gleaming new selves.
Why do their sentences, and sentiments, make me so uneasy? Why does it make me want to launch a defense of my own “lower needs”? It could be because down here on planet Earth we get uncomfortable with talk about the perfectibility of humankind. Maybe they’re right. Maybe we can be shiny and new . . . maybe we can change and reform . . . maybe. But maybe not.
One of the more basic problems with using Icarus as an environmental model, as a story, it seems to me, is that he ends up plunging to his death. But that isn’t the only problem. There’s also the fact that it was his ambition, quite similar to the authors’, to leave the messy earth behind. He wants to fly up above it all and look down at the world as if it were a map.
They can have their myth. I’ll stick with another one. Not Icarus, but an old school myth, favored by many before me: Antaeus, son of Poseidon and Gaia. Why Antaeus? The reason his myth has long appealed, and continues to appeal, is not because of who he was (a somewhat murderous giant) but because of the source of his strength. While Icarus flew toward the sun, Antaeus drew his power from the ground. He could not be defeated in battle as long as his feet kept contact with the earth. It’s true he was illtempered and that he was eventually lifted off the ground and crushed by Hercules. But the point remains. He was only strong when he was rooted. That, to me, seems a better myth for our current battles. Better, I think, to keep in contact with this sloppy earth than to aspire to fly above it.
ISLAND BOYS
One thing I’m trying to do in this little book is to tell Dan Driscoll’s story. But through that story, I’m also trying to explore the idea of being an environmentalist in a new light. I’ll come right out and admit that this book is aimed squarely away from anyone that feels certainty about their place in the world and squarely toward those people on the cusp of adulthood who are scratching their chins and wondering just how they should spend the next fifty years or so of their lives. It has been my experience that people often get ideas stuck in their heads pretty early on, and spend many years following those ideas. What I am trying to suggest, what Dan’s story suggests, is that they don’t have to be purists, prophets, or righteous believers. Their fight can be intertwined with the things they are fighting for—the things that they love, or the things that bring them joy—that is that they, like their heroes, might actually spend some time in the woods, or in the mountains or on the rivers or by the sea. That they might have some fun, believe in some legends, fall in love, and then fight, joyously, for what’s good in their world. This is not a trite greeting card sentiment. It is a way to see and be part of what we are fighting for. And what we will see, I think, is that we are not fighting for an energy policy or even a wilderness bill, though we are certainly fighting for those things too. What we are really fighting for, I want to suggest, is something irrational, something deep and wordless, something at odds with what we consider “goals,” both our own and society’s.
Dan and I are reluctant to leave our little island. We know we need to push off soon but still we sit. I finish my cigar and crack another beer. It is July Fourth, and though we have a profound story to tell you, at the moment we are content to be just two partying Massachusetts guys. Maybe it’s wrong to revel in this fact in this day and age, but revel we do. We toast and clink bottles and smoke and rant. We are too old to be doing this, we understand, but we do it anyway.
We settle back on our respective chairs, me on my pillow—Wilson—and Dan on his soil—unnamed—and talk leisurely. Of course we have been talking for the last two days, but a lot of it has been shouting from bow to stern or stern to bow. Now we let things unravel.
We talk about Boston for a while and my desire to move back here, and then we find ourselves talking about Boston accents in movies, which it turns out, is a joint pet peeve.
“Who do you think has the worst Boston accent of all time?” I ask.
“I don’t know. There are so many bad ones.”
I nominate Robin Williams from Good Will Hunting.
“Oh, yah, he was the worst. And he won a fucking Academy Award!”
The conversation wends onward from there. We start talking Ultimate Frisbee, a sport about which our regrets are exactly opposite: Dan’s that he hadn’t started playing when he was younger, and mine that I had committed too much of my life to it, wasting my twenties and my early thirties hurling myself into a sport many found ridiculous, and trying to win a national championship, which kept eluding me.
We should get going, we really should. But we babble on.
For the last couple of days I have been throwing around the word “wild” quite a bit. But during our paddle I’ve also been thinking about what the hell it really means. Dan, for instance, works for the state, hardly a wild profession. And as for me, I’m no wild man. Or, at the very least, my wildness is of a mild variety. I do not roam the woods naked, spear in hand, a pelt covering my loins. I go for walks and I bird-watch a little. I prowl a limited wild and I prowl it with a limited wildness. But this, too, I find encouraging in a way, the fact that, despite all my timidity, I can still receive, in return for mild exertion, so many wild moments. By wild I don’t mean an extra tequila shot (though certainly that doesn’t hurt now and then) or cracking stupid jokes. I mean, quite simply, regularly reaching out to a world that involves lives-other-thanhuman and doing so in a way that entails some physical contact with the world (not just watching Animal Planet).
I don’t want to overstate the meaning of Dan walking down to the river and seeing the herons when he felt defeated, but I do think it is important. If I am ever going to cobble these stray thoughts into a green manifesto, then I will need to include Dan’s herons. But manifestos are meant to be prescriptive, and, if I were to complete one, what would I prescribe? Explore your territory, I’ve said already. What else? “First, be a good animal,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Look at the nonhuman creatures in your neighborhood. Go for walks now and again, walks when, for at least short periods, you think about things other than your private ambitions and your things-to-do list. Try brief experiments in caring about the world. And what else? Well, I have to admit that, for all my protestations of modesty, my ambitions for wildness are slightly wider and deeper. In his book The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner explains Doug Peacock’s rituals among the grizzly bears as follows: they are an “attempt to fill a void in our traditions, an attempt to integrate the wild and the self by myth.” Turner sensibly admits that Peacock is “not a shaman” and admits that he lacks a tradition for his rituals, but the deeper point is one worth considering.20
Now, it is not wise to wander into mystic caves unless armed with a working bullshit-detector, and yet . . . and yet, I can’t help but wander in. So many of even the most basic traditions have been left behind long ago, and any tradition related to wildness was likely left behind long before that. Maybe this is why people like Nordhaus and Shellenberger have such a hard time connecting with place or animals, we’re all so afraid of mysticism we can’t see that a tradition of wildness doesn’t have to be mumbo jumbo. It can just be checking in, seeing how the animals are doing, how our home is doing. I can’t help but try to create some ritual in my life and so, while I’m not a religious man, I do observe one holiday quite religiously. Every year on the summer solstice I try to get out to the beach, or to the woods or mountains.
Though I am middle aged now, and though I have a little child, and though my wif
e does not like spending nights in our house alone, I often spend solstice nights in a tent my parents gave me twenty-five years ago, a tent named, poetically “Clip Flashlight.” I don’t do this because I think camping is morally superior to sleeping in a bed and I don’t do it because I have attained “post-affluence,” whatever that is. I do it because I find that the summer solstice is a day that is more extraordinary than other days. Not simply because it is the longest day of the year—though that is important—but because it is the day of each year when the sun stops its progression into the northern sky and the one day I reliably spend the better part of outdoors (and then spend the night that way too).
My Green Manifesto Page 12
