My Green Manifesto

by David Gessner

  The students in the class were very sharp and you could see the electricity in the air as they made unexpected connections between science and literature. While they had to labor their way through Walden, you could watch the impact that Thoreau made, particularly with his pronouncements of nonconformity, about living a life different (and perhaps better!) than the life expected of them. Yes, you could almost see the kids thinking, there are other choices, other ways. As much as I liked my grad students, it was the undergrads who were the real pleasure, watching them come to terms with what these strange ideas might mean for their lives.

  I don’t want to stretch the term “wildness,” to make its meaning too elastic, but certainly one of the things they were thinking about was how they might live a wilder life—a life less predictable, less standard issue, less like the life they were expected to live. Would they end up going through with it? Who knew? But at least it was a possibility, part of the equation, and at least some new ideas were at play in their minds. That was enough. One night we gathered around one of those bonfires out on a nearby island and I was amazed, and impressed, when, rather than devolving to topics like sports or the latest party, the students kept talking late into the night about Darwin and Thoreau.

  One thing the students kept mentioning, and one thing that wound its way like a stream through everything we talked about in the class, was that both books, in their different ways, reinforced the fact that human beings are part of the animal kingdom. You are an Animal might as well have been the course’s subtitle. At least that was what everything we read during the term seemed to shout at us. And what good does it do to admit to this wildness, this animality? Well, maybe it doesn’t do much good but maybe there’s this: Maybe it’s healthy to have our definitions come in line with our reality. And maybe there is another reason that understanding that we are animals is vital. Maybe we need to keep reminding ourselves that, as John Hay said, we are still part of this world.

  Reading Thoreau and Darwin back to back certainly helps reinforce this fact. Obviously Darwin’s way of reminding us of our animal natures is more overt, if more polite. Um, excuse me. Did you notice this little remnant of a tail we all have, and how it just so happens that these bones suggest that we might have common ancestors? Stephen Jay Gould, in the first essay of his first collection, Ever Since Darwin, quotes what he calls a “remarkable epigram” from one of Darwin’s notebooks: “Plato says in Phaedo that our ‘imaginary ideas’ arise from the preexistence of the soul, and are not derivable from experience—read monkeys for preexistence.”27 Read monkeys! Of course Darwin was never so direct in his great book, only hinting that this whole evolution thing might actually apply to humans. “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” is about as far as he would go.28

  Thoreau, with little patience for evidence early in his career, was more brash. He points to the effluvia of what we call society and shows how we, by considering ourselves above the natural world, have diluted and perverted our natural strengths. As an essayist, Thoreau begins with Montaigne’s central assertion of humility that we are “just another animal” and that, even on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our asses.29 He reminds us that, at core, our main challenges on Earth remain the getting of food and fuel and fire, something many of us are now remembering again as such things become scarce.

  What does it really mean to say, through science or art, that we are just another animal? Different things to different people. Some see it as sacrilege, others as a way to justify our aggressive or territorial impulses. Maybe a better use of this information is in moving toward a greater humility, and an ability to see beyond our own merely anthropocentric needs. Maybe this can lead to not taking ourselves quite so seriously. After all, DNA puts the lie to our myth of specialness. If it is trite to say that we are brothers and sisters with other members of the animal world, all united, then it is also simply and biologically true. But an acceptance of our own animal nature is just a starting place, and from that base base we can build upward. Our reaction needn’t be, “Hey, we’re animals, don’t expect much of us.” For along with humility, we can also feel some deserved confidence, since the animals we happen to be have developed not just enormous brains and opposable thumbs and complex languages, but an inherent and dazzling ability to be flexible, to adapt almost from minute to minute. Gould goes so far as to crown flexibility our defining trait, saying that it “may be the most important determinant of human consciousness.”30 We change therefore we are.

  What thrills me here is the yolking of the base to the sublime, the animal to the intellectual. It’s easy for our thinking to grow thin and brittle when we philosophize, to forget that we are creatures who shit and fuck and die. On the other hand, as animals we are capable of doing things like developing theories of evolution and writing books about going to live in the woods. For me the acknowledgment that we are just another animal is no less than the foundation of what it means to be human. Some may see this idea as a celebration of the anti-rational, but I don’t think this is so. It is reasonable to understand that we are not rational, to understand that instinct, emotion, and dreams drive us, and I would argue that this acknowledgment of what we are, far from being anti-rational, can lead to a much greater reasonableness. It is when we make false claims to rationality, when we stuff down that which is deemed irrational, that things start to go haywire. Montaigne wrote that “supercelestial thoughts lead to “subterranean conduct.”31 It is the reasonable human being who acknowledges that a streak of unreason is part of what makes us who we are.

  Some might say this is a reductionist view of man that stamps out spirit and hope and beauty. I don’t think so. Evolution does not deny the miracle. Evolution is the miracle.

  Let’s say for a minute that we actually take this notion that we are animals seriously. Let’s say that we don’t just pay it lip service, but follow through and ask: If we are animals how might we live well as animals? Be a “good animal” Emerson said. But Ralph didn’t leave an instruction manual. How exactly do good animals live?

  I would suggest that one thing a good animal might do is explore his or her territory. Explore it, prowl it, walk it, swim it, smell it, and even occasionally mark it. Get to know it at night, in all seasons and in all weathers. As we consider this question more deeply, it’s worth looking again at what Wendell Berry called his “governing ambition.” He writes:That summer I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here. That is still my ambition. But now I have come to see that it proposes an enormous labor. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by nature, but as man I can belong to it only by understanding and by virtue. It is an ambition I cannot hope to succeed in wholly, but I have come to believe it is the most worthy of all.32

  Berry is discussing his river home in Kentucky, and perhaps the tone here is a little ministerial, even grand, given our current theme of a limited wild. But let’s take what Berry says seriously for a minute. How would we act if we were to really go along with Berry and make belonging to our homes our governing ambition? Well, first we might think about where to live, considering, as much as it is practical, how we could live near places and creatures, including humans, who we actually care about, or might grow to care about through “labor.” Then, once we have selected our place—our territory let’s call it—we would think about how we will choose to inhabit that place.

  Thoreau answered this question by moving to Walden and then setting up a daily regimen that consisted of four hours of walking in the woods. Of course not all of us have a pond to go live at for free (squatting on Emerson’s land) or an ancestral family home to return to like Berry’s, and the effect of these grand visionaries, and their grand actions, may be to make us run away and hide, or at least to claim, defensively, that what they d
id has no bearing on us, or on the “real world.” After all, when we get done with work, with playing with our kids, with eating and drinking and sleeping, most of us don’t have a four hour chunk of time left over for frolicking with the muskrats. But, I would argue, if we return to the idea of a limited wild, and take what these thinkers say seriously, but also with a small grain of salt, we might find that there are cracks in the day, limited times when that limited wild can sneak in. And I would suggest that it is possible and even crucial to regard the place where you live, be it urban or rural, as your first wilderness, and as such more immediately vital and relevant than the national park you drive or fly to.

  I have meandered again. But it seems only right to let Thoreau and Darwin have the last word of this chapter. What follows are the final four sentences of Walden and the last line of Origin of Species:The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.33

  There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.34

  FIREWORKS

  Back to my walk back down Harvard Square to the river. It’s a walk I took a hundred times during the months I waited for my wife to give birth. For the record, Dan isn’t the only one who found something in the sight of hundreds of night herons roosting along the Charles. And he isn’t the only one who took some solace in daily trips to the river.

  In fact, it got to the point where my wife started teasing me about it.

  “Your beloved Charles,” she called it.

  Soon I am back on that beloved river. Cambridge is a strange town, in many ways more complex than its cliché image as the People’s Republic of Cambridge. Yes, it is crammed with PhDs, and is the home of Harvard and MIT, but it is also the most racially (and internationally) diverse of Boston’s cities, and despite the gaudy prices of Brattle Street real estate, it actually has a median household income closer to Waltham’s than Wellesley’s. As I figured, it is not too hard to bum a ride, what with everyone heading downtown to see the fireworks, and, for the small price of the six pack of Harpoon IPA, I am now riding in luxury, barely lifting my arm to paddle, carried forward like an emperor in the canoe’s middle.

  I float the last section of the Charles in a canoe with some MIT grads. It has been my experience that writing a book is sometimes a bit like being a healthy schizophrenic, that when it’s going good every person you meet, or book you read, seems to fit perfectly into your larger symbolic world. True to this, the woman paddling next to us, in a small, handmade wooden kayak, turns out to be engaged in an environmental battle of her own. Her name is Sandy and she is an MIT scientist, and for years she has been working to help clean up the outfall pipe, a controversial experiment in treating Boston’s sewage and dumping it in the sea. She is fascinating and I nod from my canoe, but what I am really thinking is that I need to take a leak. I eye a patch of willows, which seems to me the last private spot before the esplanade. Meanwhile the whole town seems to have emptied out onto the streets. Hordes head down to the Hatch Shell to watch the fireworks.

  While the women in my canoe sip cherry beer home brew, I give up all pretense of helping and put down my paddle. Lindsay, the girl in the back, is talking nervously, using words that are rarely found outside of the SATs, but I am focused on the view. This section of river inspires a regional chauvinism in me. I stare up at the MIT bridge and then down at the Prudential and Hancock buildings. Then there’s the Citgo sign above Fenway which says Boston to me almost as much as the next sight I see: a car being towed.

  The section we are paddling was once a tidal river and the banks where people walk were marshland. The river was dammed and the marshes filled in, which makes this section of the Charles about as “natural” as a ride at Riverworld. But, having spent some pages extolling Dan Driscoll’s work to alter the river, I can hardly flip hats and come out against this artificial section of the Charles. The Basin is often said to serve the same purpose of Central Park in New York, and during my own years in Boston I took solace in getting out here whenever I could. But compared to the section I just paddled with Dan it feels like a city park, which is what it is after all. It may be the lack of trees, or just the crowds both on and off the water, but I suddenly feel ready to quit the river. My canoe hosts kindly deposit me by the willows where, after making use of the natural facilities, I walk the final half-mile downtown.

  Storrow Drive is shut down to cars, just like in Dan’s fantasies. “Too bad it’s not permanent,” he’ll say later. Yellow-slickered state police try to keep some order but it is useless. There are hotdogs and tents and cranes and cops and people in biking hats and boats tied up and, by the way, over four hundred thousand people. Powerboats fly up the river and helicopters buzz overhead. There’s still an hour before I’m supposed to meet Dan again. I buy a hotdog and find a spot by the river to sit that is, if not quiet, at least private, tucked behind some bushes. From my pocket I pull the wet, rumpled notes that I have been working on during the trip.

  It occurs to me that, after spending the last few days squabbling with Nordhaus and Shellenberger, I am ready to reach a sort of truce. The two men do have something important to offer to the picture of a “new environmentalist” that has been emerging from my notes. While at first I didn’t like their idea of environmentalists as “chipper entrepreneurs,” I am starting to see that, if you strike the word “chipper,” there is something to this notion.

  In the end I’m willing to give an inch. My definition of this “new environmentalism” is wide, and since it is wide it can accommodate the new entrepreneurial model, albeit an entrepreneurial model that is rooted in the wildness of given places we inhabit. This expanding picture fits my idea of a less pure, less clean environmentalism. And it fits my picture of human nature. After all, Dan Driscoll’s vision isn’t a simple one. It’s not a passive one either. He decided to use his energy, his ambition, his goals, his know-how, his persuasive abilities, everything he had to make this vision come to pass.

  What is Dan Driscoll if not an entrepreneur? Though fired by idealism, my theoretical eco-being is essentially pragmatic: he or she will wing a deal to save some land, even if it means giving something up. That is because actually getting something done in the world always trumps theory. The fact is I like this picture of the new environmentalist—eco-fighter as hustler—that is emerging. Not some guy wearing a bearskin and speaking in hushed tones but someone common-sensical, smart, hard-headed. Someone who understands that for most of us the wild we fight for is a limited wild and that we fight it with an imperfect, limited environmentalism. This new picture is that of a man or woman who knows how to get things done, who understands the value of momentum, of focus on a particular project. Not a shrill or dry or particularly flowery environmentalism or environmentalist. Someone willing to get in a fight and “Sue the bastards.” Someone willing to stick their nose in there and feel what it’s like to get bruised. And someone willing to stay locked in that fight for years, even if it costs them emotional as well as actual capital. I remember walking through the woods as a teenager and ripping up a dollar bill, fancying myself a new Thoreau. It’s time to store that romantic model in mothballs and remember that the real Thoreau, as the writer Robert Sullivan has recently pointed out, was at least in part a hard-headed entrepreneur working at innovation in the family pencil business.

  Finally my fantasy eco-fighter would have a virtue that has fallen out of favor in recent times even, and perhaps especially, amongst environmentalists—a virtue that Emerson and Thoreau once held in high esteem: nonconformity. I suppose you could say that what is required is a way of looking at the world somewhat at odds with the way that most people look at it. In fact, it may be that an underrated
aspect of committing to nature is the willingness to be considered strange. Or, at the very least, unconventional. To be a true environmentalist is, even within the current vogue, often to invite social ridicule. Go ask someone not to toss their cigarette on the beach and see what happens. Some bravery is required. There is a possibility of conflict. Nonconformity, as necessary as it is to accomplish new things, isn’t easy. Seeking approval is encoded in most of us, a basic component of being a social primate. What could be easier and more natural, and sensible, than to please the parents, to become the doctor or lawyer or whatever? There’s got to be something wrong in the kid who doesn’t, something a bit off.