My Green Manifesto

by David Gessner

  Maybe the reason it’s hard to stop quoting him is that he seems to have been every place I go. Hell, he even wrote his own book about going down a river with a buddy, his brother, and that river, like mine, had its source in Hopkinton. Furthermore it was on this very same day of the year—July Fourth—that Thoreau moved into his cabin on Walden Pond just a short 156 years ago.

  But I am not a complete Thoreau groupie. We have our differences. As I cut across Mass Ave into Harvard Square, I remember that Thoreau, a thoroughly mediocre student, saw Harvard as a kind of prison, or at least half-way house, before he could head back to the wilds of Concord. For me, my brief stint as a lecturer in environmental writing here six years ago was one of the wildest times of my life. It wasn’t just the birth of my daughter, which served as a joyous confirmation of my suspicion that we are all animals. It was that I saw my time in the city as a kind of challenge. If I could find wildness here then I could find it anywhere.

  And I did find it, in the red-tailed hawks that hunted near the Johnson Gate and the straw and sticks of swallows’ nests that spilled out of the gargoyle lions’ mouths and every other architectural crevice and in the coyotes that I tracked through Boston’s suburbs. I don’t know that I have had a time when I ever felt quite so alive, though I suspect this had more than a little to do with the fact that my daughter was drawing her first breaths.

  She was born May seventh and Harvard Yard during those May days spilled over. As the buds on the fruit trees burgeoned, thoughts of birth, of potential, of early blooming exploded in my mind. I read up on the history of the place, too, and discovered that, in 1837, the year Thoreau graduated from Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the school’s Phi Beta Kappa address. For the occasion he composed a little essay called “The American Scholar” in which he wrote:Men, such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money,—the ‘spoils,’ so called, ‘of office.’ And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleepwalking, they dream is the highest. Wake them and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks.21

  No one knows if Thoreau, as a graduating senior, actually heard those words spoken, but there is no doubt he read them soon after. Imagine what that was like. Talk about lighting a fuse for a bomb. Talk about setting a young mind on fire.

  What we forget in these cynical days is that the same fuse can still be lit. We are so convinced that this sort of idealism is a mere historical relic. But I am not so sure. “Nothing is diminished,” wrote the poet A.R. Ammons. Okay, sure, yes, much is really diminished. The world is doomed, the world is crowded, we are up shit’s creek. But still, nothing is diminished. Every year the buds on these fruit trees fill, bulge, and burst. The birds fly over, the world waits.

  Let’s clear away the bullshit and cut to the chase.

  Let’s get down to a simple question, a question befitting an address to graduating seniors. Here it is: What is the meaning of life?

  Let’s start with one of Thoreau’s answers. It’s fairly straightforward: fall in love with the world. But how does this translate into practical action? Maybe through the oldest form of recreation, older even than jet skiing or poker. And what is that mysterious activity? I’m afraid my answer can’t help but be anti-climactic: it is the activity I am engaged in at this very moment. Walking.

  I’m sorry, but isn’t that where it starts? With apologies to the yogis who are reading this, most of us don’t have a taste for sitting still. We think better in movement, and in concert with the world. Wandering off for no apparent reason may not have the environmental zing of low carbon cars but it too serves a purpose, even if that purpose sometimes seems purposeless. First of all, it’s the best way to see the world. For us bipedal creatures, it has always been. It’s how we got from Africa to here. And I’m convinced that for most of us, it’s when we think best, with our feet connected to the ground. Thoreau said of going for a walk: “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”22

  What the hell does that mean? It means that we spend the better part of our lives trying to be logical, trying to be practical, trying to follow through on our commitments and checking things off our lists, but that sometimes, maybe once a day, we need to launch ourselves out the door and head to a place, both physical and mental, that we can call our own. Granted, that is a bit hard in a world with six billion people, but it still can be done. I live on a crowded beach that serves as the town’s promenade, but can still manage to find cracks in the day when I have it almost to myself. True, I grumble at the other people I run into who dare walk my beach, but more often I reach a feeling of being out on my own. And what does that get me? Well, practically speaking, nothing.

  I don’t want to wander too far down the Luddite road of my eco-brethren but I do need to suggest that the kind of walking I am talking about is best done devoid of cell phones and iPods. Yes, I know that this leads toward what is possibly the most terrifying of human paths: the one to boredom. But once we sink down below this uneasy sensation we may find that the world is distraction enough. Waves turn out to actually be kind of interesting. Pelicans, too. And watching northern gannets dive, well forget about it.

  It’s a great show—like some kind of hybrid of opera and ultimate fighting—full of contact and joy and immersion. A powerful bird dives down from the sky headfirst, and spears into the water, and then a hundred of its kind do the same, a dozen striking in a second.

  I suspect that ninety-nine percent of the people who walk the same beach never see this drama. This does not make them bad people. But if they took a break from their self-arguments and preconceptions, and simply stared out at the water for a minute or two, they might notice that there, out beyond the waves, is something even more dramatic than any popular distraction. They might experience a kind of wild delight as the birds plunge recklessly into the water.

  And so what? So nothing. So nothing practical maybe. But perhaps—and I admit this may be overreaching—perhaps the beginning of something, the stirring of sympathy with the world. And perhaps a moment when, however fleetingly, they step out of their own lives and into the lives of the birds.

  So walking, too, is part of my larger platform as I create my green manifesto. A good walk leads you to places you don’t expect. Most often, however, a good walk also circles back home. In our case, it brings us back to the idea of fighting for the world. It reminds us that we are not just fighting for an energy policy or parklands—though we are certainly fighting for those things too—but that what we are really fighting for is something irrational, something ineffable, something at odds with what most of us consider goals and ideals. The good news is that that something is still out there and that it is wild and that wildness is always changing. The good news is that, as a bonus, to fight for this nameless thing is fulfilling. The good news is that fighting for it—in one’s own way, a way one finds the way a writer finds a voice—is not a bad way to spend your time on Earth.

  But it can’t be that simple. Walking can’t be the answer to life’s primary question . . . Freud’s answer was Love and Work. Donald Hall, in his wonderful book, Life Work, suggests that the secret to life is absorption. To be fully absorbed in something. To find something you do well and throw your whole self into it. Even typing those words I get excited. To have a great and exciting project. One’s first instinct might be that the project should be manageable, small, achievable. But it turns out that, the way most of our minds work, it’s even better if the project is massive, deep, unachievable. It turns out that many of us like our challenges steep, and that it is steepness—even near-impossibility—that engages our imaginations in unexpected ways. When we last left Dan Driscoll on the Charles he was not merely “being in the present moment,” though h
e was certainly enjoying floating down the river, but was dreaming and scheming about what he would do next. And why not? Tell me to pick up one soda can and I may sulk, but suggest I clean the whole city and there’s a chance I will become engaged.

  A few pages back I vowed not to quote Thoreau, to put him aside. It’s a vow I haven’t stuck to very well, and now I’d like to abandon it entirely. What does Thoreau offer in way of answer to our big question? For one thing Henry David Thoreau, I contend, was a workaholic. The fact that he walked in the woods for four hours each day, or that he loafed by the pond doesn’t undermine but supports my thesis, since, I would argue, those activities were part of his job description. Most of us aren’t actually very good at loafing; our brains won’t have it. We stay still, but our minds don’t. They fly this way and that, hungry, searching, never quite satisfied. What are they looking for? I’ll suggest that one answer might be an all-consuming project. That’s certainly what Thoreau had in Concord. A love affair with his hometown, but also a great project, a mission, to know that place as deeply as he could, to walk it and learn it and survey it and record it and talk it and smell it and really truly know it. The fruits of this project weren’t just Walden or his journals, but the fact that his observations of the phenology of his place—the return of birds, the flowering of the plants, for instance—were accurate enough to still be used by scientists today to plot the changes that global warming has wrought. The old cliché about Thoreau was that he grew dry and uninspired in his last years, that he forsook his early romantic ardor for more clinical observations of the succession of trees and other scientific matters, but that was just a part of his larger project, too, his job description changing slightly, and I think the project would have carried on for many, many years had he not died young.

  Thoreau is also often portrayed as the prophet of sacrifice, of “doing without.” Yes, he sacrificed and simplified, but he did it in service to his larger project, and that makes all the difference. Too often environmentalism gets tarred with the same brush: it is seen as a philosophy of renunciation, of living a drab dull life. But sacrifice toward creating something larger isn’t dull, it’s exciting. Mere renunciation, on the other hand, mere doing without, has got about the same chance of success, and the same appeal, as the Pope’s abstinence argument. In fact, the great flaw of the abstinence argument is the flaw of many environmental arguments: asking humans to be something they are not. Of course there has to be some sacrifice but the sacrifice has to be in service of something, some idea of where we are headed. And it would help greatly if that idea were exciting.

  Excitement is a concept that some environmentalists are quite down on, associated as it is with so-called unnatural diversions like video games and porn. But excitement also means a life of goals and energy, of disputes and vows, of dreaming and scheming, of competition and revenge, of magnanimity. I’d like an environmentalism that embraces that kind of life, not one that is always seeking to convert us all into St. Francis of Assisi. An environmentalism that insists we be something other than what we are, something new-and-improved, something beyond human, will not succeed. But an environmentalism that draws on what we are has a much better shot.

  Remember Henry Moore’s reply when Donald Hall asked him what the meaning of life was: “It needs to be something that you spend your whole life trying to do but can’t possibly achieve.” It is true that the stock market might provide deep immersion for some, and crossword puzzles for others. But what Thoreau discovered with his project was that there is nothing more exciting than having the outside world as the object of your affection. Why not have a love affair with the world itself? Everyone likes to quote Thoreau and he gets pulled in a hundred different directions by a hundred different groups until he finally looks like the scarecrow after the flying monkeys got hold of him, his stuffing pulled out. But those who try to make him into a purely political figure forget what a small part of his life that was. The political element, the small moments of activism, were mere outgrowths of the larger project of both immersing himself in the world and creating a self. Salvation, Thoreau taught, begins at home. Yes, his night in jail inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but here was a man whose great passionate project was the individual self, living as well and honestly and nakedly as he could, and who found a match for that self in the physical world, the world of animals and trees and water and plants. And as it turned out his discovery of the world was what unlocked a greater self. As it turned out the world was exciting enough to make the sacrifices worth it. As it turned out the world wasn’t just interesting but thrilling.

  HEY, HEY WE’RE THE MONKEYS

  Dan Driscoll has little use for Harvard. The school, and the others like MIT and B.U. that like to feature the Charles on their brochure covers, don’t have a lot of interest in returning a varied ecosystem to the river.

  “They reap the benefits of a revitalized river but you can’t get a cent out of them,” he said not long before he climbed out of the canoe. “You’d think they’d want to spend a little of that zillion dollar endowment. Not a chance.”

  When Dan was invited to speak at the school, he found that it only brought out the contrarian in him. He repeated for his learned crowd what he had said to me on our first day on the river:

  “Real environmental awareness may not be possible without hallucinogens,” he told them.

  Maybe the audience laughed; maybe they thought him silly. Dan claimed not to care.

  “I believe in anything that turns us away from the virtual world to the real one,” he said.

  I understand Dan’s antipathy toward Harvard. But during my single term teaching here, between births and coyotes and birds and happily engaged students, I can’t say I share Dan’s assessment.

  I walk up to Adams House, where I wheeled Hadley over the cobblestones during her first weeks, loudly lulling her to sleep. Sean Palfrey, who is Teddy Roosevelt’s great grandson, was the Adams House “master” when we were there, and he showed me the crib the young TR was rocked in. Hadley’s was a rare, poetic beginning, as we were renting a room that was usually occupied by the poet Seamus Heaney. “All children want to crouch in their secret nests,” Heaney once wrote. We found the poet’s things-to-do lists and notes on how to program the VCR and took them as a blessing.

  It was during that luscious spring that I became, for the first time, a teacher as well as a father. In the years since I have become the sort of animal known as a professor, but from the beginning I vowed that I would bring wildness into the classroom. I brought in coyote skulls and bird feathers, and tried to keep in mind that most of the time when I was a student I’d been bored to death, and to remember just how dead the assigned reading often felt to me. Early on I learned that one good way to break students out of the deadly apathy of the classroom is to literally break them out. Taking classes outdoors, really outdoors, does wonders, and I’ve made it a staple of my teaching for years. It’s amazing how much more animated grad students become about books, for instance, when they discuss them after a couple of drinks around a bonfire, after kayaking out to a deserted island where they will spend the night in a tent. I can’t legally recommend skinny dipping at midnight with those same students as a pedagogical tool, but, theoretically at least, it is not ineffective. The point is to get outside, to engage, to make some kind of contact.

  Last fall I taught a class of both grad students and undergrads called “When Thoreau Met Darwin.” The two men may seem strange bedfellows at first, but there is more overlap than you might think. Of course Thoreau and Darwin never actually met, but their great books, Walden and The Origin of Species, were published within three years of each other, in 1856 and 1859, respectively. And while it is unlikely that Darwin ever read a sentence of Walden, Thoreau read The Voyage of the Beagle with keen interest. Then in 1860, two years before he died at forty-four, Thoreau got his hands on Darwin’s Origin.

  Many once believed that Thoreau’s last years were wooden ones, his transce
ndental fervor having died out. Thankfully Robert D. Richardson, the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, came along to overturn this misinterpretation. In fact, reading Darwin sparked Thoreau to a massive study of the leafing of Concord’s trees and the blossoming and fruiting of plants, a comprehensive phenological chronicling of his hometown that promised a new beginning in Thoreau’s writing, a movement away from the more personal focus of Walden and toward a wider, biocentric view of nature. It was a movement that mirrored Darwin’s ideas, ideas that transformed Homo sapiens from the central role in the world’s drama into just another player.

  One of the real pleasures of reading the two men at once was the way that both of their minds wandered freely over disciplines. For instance, Darwin, as well as studying ornithology, geography, history, and a dozen other fields, was also a hell of a writer—amiable, straightforward, and as clear as he could be given that he was trying to explain something fairly technical and entirely new. It doesn’t hurt that when he needs to he can draw on his seven year study of barnacles and drop a mean crustacean reference. Or that he can reference fantails or short-faced tumblers or pouters from his decades-long study of pigeons.

  Like Darwin, Thoreau was immensely curious. Richardson writes of Thoreau’s inspired reaction to reading Origin: “That his interests were still expanding, his wonder still green, his capacity for observation, expression, and connection still growing is the most impressive evidence that his spirits this January were still on the wing.”23 But while Thoreau wrote constantly, he shied away from the professionalism that the title of writer implied. Writing was part of a larger project called living. “The head is an organ for burrowing,” he writes. His was a lifelong experiment in burrowing, working his way down through the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that allusion which covers the globe.”24 For his part, Darwin was perhaps history’s greatest connector, his interests extending from barnacles to pigeons to how “the presence of feline animals in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!”25 For many years Darwin was, like Thoreau, a reporter to “a journal, of no very wide circulation.”26 This last quote is Thoreau’s punning reference to the fact that he was the only one who read most of what he wrote. And while Thoreau had his journals to report to, Darwin had his private notebooks, which for twenty years kept the secret of natural selection to themselves while the world waited. It is there he pieced together the great puzzle, a puzzle that would forever change how human beings thought of themselves.