I close my eyes and picture Dan floating down from Waltham to Watertown. He navigates our leaky canoe through a wilderness partly of his own making. Maybe, I suggest to Dan from the front of the canoe, maybe fighting for a limited wilderness is the most vital fight of all, since most of us won’t ever go to Everest or the Amazon. Maybe the most important wilderness is the one closest to home.
“Maybe,” Dan half-agrees. “But maybe it doesn’t have to be so limited. I see this as just a start. What if we connect this green corridor to the Mystic River and connect that to the Neponset? What if we have all these wild paths connecting all through Boston?”
What if?
I take in the world that Dan once envisioned, enjoying the light pulsating on the under branches of the maples. Meanwhile Dan’s mind races elsewhere, no doubt imagining weaving greenways all through the Boston area and beyond. As we drift toward the city, he plans and schemes and dreams.
This is my manifesto. My attempt to nudge people toward something, or back toward something. Toward what? An understanding that most of us already have on a deeper level. That a world exists outside of us. A world that reminds us that we are animals, too, animals who have evolved along with other animals on this earth. Thinking, planning, scheming, talking, writing animals, but animals nonetheless. This is an idea that, when we acknowledge it, may at first make us feel smaller, but that ultimately feels right, feels like it fits, because it has the advantage of being honest. And while it may initially be depressing to admit that we live in a world where we decompose in the ground, just like other animals, ultimately it is freeing: a world full of possibilities, of wildness, of hope. A world that I, personally, find it a joy to inhabit.
Of course it’s a world worth fighting for, we’ve gone over that. But it’s also more. Because in the end we all have concerns that are deeper than politics, even deeper than the urgency of saving the world. These concerns are also deeper than words. It is hard for a writer to admit that words can’t escort us to where we finally need to go, that they can only walk beside us for part of the trip. But words point beyond words toward the mystery of being alive in this confused place, a mystery that each of us tries to solve in a different way. Part of the mystery we are trying to answer is “how to be in this world.” I accept that there are a thousand answers to this question, to this essential query. But what I don’t accept is any answer to that greater question that doesn’t include nature. Because it has always been part of the answer, and it always will be. Because my love for nature is not the result of my post-materialist affluence but something encoded in me. And because you can put me in a spacesuit in a condo on Mars and I’ll still dream of a rocky bluff back on Cape Cod.
POSTLUDE: THE END OF THE WORLD
It’s the end of the world, they say, but my response is the usual one. I’m paddling out to the island again. It is a little past dawn, almost exactly three years after my river trip with Dan Driscoll. Solstice was a couple of days ago and July Fourth is a few days off. Over the past month, I’ve been kayaking out here, to this empty barrier island, at least a couple times a week, leaving from the dock near our new rental house along the Carolina coast. If I hit the tide right, low enough so the motor boats can’t get into the creek but high enough so I don’t have to pull the kayak through the thigh-deep muck, à la the African Queen, then I have a world to myself. Myself and the birds. Specifically, egrets and pelicans and ospreys and oystercatchers and skimmers and herons of all stripes and, my new favorite, the ibises. The ibises spend their days literally poking around, that is poking crazy curved orange-red bills into crab holes in the marsh muck.
One of the best parts of this trip is slipping into the sinuous tidal creek that winds into the marsh, getting down low enough below the marsh grasses and oyster beds, and moving quietly—which is easy in a kayak—so the birds barely pay any attention, going about their business as I go about mine. Another of the best parts is landing here on Masonboro Island, which is populated only by birds, beach grass, elder bushes, sea oats, ghost crabs, a few trees that weren’t taken out by hurricane Hazel, and lately by a fox family that has a den to the north on the wider part of the island. After I pull the kayak up on the backside marsh, I get to walk over the small hump of island’s middle toward the ocean’s roar. Which is really the best part of the best part, hearing that roar and then, a few seconds later, seeing the heaving waves of the Atlantic. Today, through dint of my relatively minor effort of paddling, I have the whole eight mile island to myself, which seems close to miraculous in these crowded times. This morning the water has taken on a green-blue Caribbean look, which makes me laugh out loud, and I think, looking down at the crescent of beach curving off miles to the north, that it is like having my very own desert island. When I am feeling dramatic, which is often enough, this seems fitting: It is here that I have found myself thrown up on the beach, Crusoe-like, forced to start a new life in a strange new place. I’m almost ready to plant a flag and claim it as my own.
I didn’t expect to land here, in North Carolina, but I have tried to make the best of it. We all need to find our Waldens, wherever we are. Our own forts in the woods even if we are (somewhat) grown up. When I look back on my green manifesto, I see it as a kind of young adult or children’s book. It is naïve and goofy and overly romantic, but isn’t that where we need to start from if we have any shot of connecting to the world? There’s plenty of time later for buttoning down and improving your portfolios. I now see the trip down the Charles, and the thinking that went with it, not so much as a pivot point in my life but the beginning of a deepening of commitment. The last I heard, Dan had fulfilled his dream of connecting the greenways on the Charles to those of the Mystic and Niponset Rivers. The world may be going to hell—and I am told tarballs may be hitting these beaches soon—but I believe in my small patch of wild, however limited. It is vital for me to get out here, even if my place is not a pristine place or an ideal place.
Or even a solitary one. Today as the waves crash in and slide back, and as the sun rises higher in the sky, I notice something quite strange on the slope of half-wet intertidal sand. Small footprints. A little child—six or seven—has been walking here. There’s no one around for miles—I can look up and down the beach and see it’s empty—but there they are. The prints would have been erased at high tide, which was about five hours ago at two in the morning. So . . . was there a child out here roaming the island in the middle of the night? I have no idea. What I do know, or assume, is that they are the footprints of a little girl. “Do you have daughters?” asked a beleaguered and crazed King Lear, assuming that his situation was reflected in the world’s. If I ran into Lear right now I would answer his question with an emphatic yes. I have a daughter, though I am pretty sure that these prints are not hers and that she is home asleep at the moment.
But she has walked this island plenty. Often Hadley has paddled out here with me, sitting in the front of the kayak, better company even than Dan Driscoll. As soon as we land on this beach, she is off and running, collecting shells and chunks of conglomerate and running wild on an island she thinks of as her own. Back home she has made maps of Mucky-Gucky land, Oysterville, and Egret Island, all names of her own creation. And we have seen some sights here, sights I hope she will remember. One day we saw an osprey with a fish in its talons sitting atop an oyster bed like an ancient conqueror on a hill of skulls. Another, we saw what I am almost certain was the same bird flying with an eel in its talons, a great silver strand hanging down three feet or so. We have watched dozens of egrets out on the mud flats, like a field of white flowers, and they barely budged when we paddled up to them. And we have learned about the strange ibises, how they eat fiddler crabs in the salt marshes all year long, except after their young are born when they fly inland to gather non-brackish crayfish to feed their nestlings who are not yet able to digest salt.
As wonderful as those times were, I don’t make any claims for the permanence of the pastoral. In fact, if my geologist
friends are right, this island itself will be under water by the time Hadley is my age. During moon tides it’s just a sliver of sand, and so at best it’s a temporary Walden. But I will take it while I’ve got it. The island is doomed, they say, and so is the world. Screw that. This morning, out just beyond the mysterious footprints, black skimmers mow the surf and I am thinking about my little girl, experiencing this world anew, and I am full of love. And hope, too. Don’t forget hope. Of course there is every reason to be hopeless but what fun is that? I embrace the still-wild world.
ENDNOTES
1 Ed Cobb, “Dirty Water,” in Dirty Water (Los Angeles: Capital Records, 1966).
2 Charles D. Elliot, “Somerville History,” in Somerville Past and Present: An Illustrated Historical Souvenir, eds. Edward A. Samuels and Henry H. Kimball (Boston: Samuels and Kimball, 1897), 25.
3 “A Backyard Wilds” is dedicated to Amy, as promised.
4 William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874–1932 (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1983), 6.
5 Ibid.
6 Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 25.
7 Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., vol. 3 (Philadelphia, 1825), 165.
8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1983), 515.
9 In those days, McKibben seemed to me a powerful and slightly remote figure, tall and thin and archetypal, someone who, as another classmate recently put it, always looked a little like Abe Lincoln. The one time we actually interacted in college was when he supported me during the controversy that followed the publication of my cartoon, The Trickle Down Theory, which was a picture of Ronald Reagan urinating on an unemployed black man in the gutter.
10 Wallace Stegner, “Variations on a theme by Crèvecoeur,” in New West Reader: Essays on an Ever-Evolving Frontier, ed. Philip Connors (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 105–124.
11 Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), 150.
12 Duane Hamilton Hurd, History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts (Philadelphia: J.W. Lewis & Co., 1884), 42.
13 Henry David Thoreau, The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Lewis Hyde (New York: North Point Press, 2002), xii.
14 Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, interview by Amanda Little, “An interview with the authors of the controversial essay, ‘The Death of Environmentalism,’” Grist, January 13, 2005. http://grist.org/article/little-doe/
15 William Broyles Jr., Castaway, DVD, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Universal City, CA: DreamWorks, 2000).
16 James C. O’Connell, “How Metropolitan Parks Shaped Greater Boston, 1893–1945,” in Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and its Surroundings, eds. Anthony N. Penna and Conrad Edick Wright (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 168–197.
17 To confuse things more, the MDC has recently morphed into the DCR, or “Department of Conservation and Recreation.”
18 Richard Higgins, “Gradually, MDC gets back land along Charles,” Boston Globe, August 10, 1997.
19 Joel Myerson, The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 96.
20 Jack Turner, Abstract Wild, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 99.
21 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar: Self Reliance and Compensation (New York: American Book Company, 1893), 40.
22 Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York: Elibron Classics, 2006), 624.
23 Robert D. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: a Life of the Mind (London: University of California Press, 1986), 376.
24 Henry David Thoreau, Walden: an Annotated Edition, ed. Walter Harding (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 94.
25 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1909): 88.
26 Henry David Thoreau, Walden: a Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven: Yale University, 2004), 17.
27 Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1977), 25.
28 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1909), 527.
29 Henry David Thoreau, Walden: a Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven: Yale University, 2004), 12.
30 Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1992), 257.
31 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. Donald M. Frame (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1958), 856.
32 Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), 150.
33 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1950), 440.
34 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1909): 529.
35 Wallace Stegner, “Wilderness Letter” in Wilderness Reader, ed. Frank Bergon (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980), 315–333.
David Gessner is the author of several books of literary nonfiction. His writing has been recognized with numerous awards, including the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay, and has been selected as Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he founded the award-winning journal, Ecotone.
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� 2011, Text by David Gessner
Parts of My Green Manifesto were published in a different form in Ecotone, OnEarth, and Orion magazine.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gessner, David, 1961–
eISBN : 978-1-571-31836-7
1. Environmentalism. 2. Environmental protection.
3. Environmental protection—Massachusetts—Charles
River 4. Environmentalism—Massachusetts—Charles River.
5. Charles River (Mass.)—Description and travel. I. Title.
GE195.G47 2011
304.2—dc22
2011012994
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
My Green Manifesto Page 18
