Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Mr. Haven interviewed half a dozen other candidates before Walter,” Lalitha said. “Some of them stood up and walked out on him, right in the middle of the interviews. They were so closed-minded and afraid of being criticized! Nobody else but Walter could see the potential for somebody who was willing to take a big risk and not care so much about conventional wisdom.”

  Walter grimaced at this compliment, but he was clearly pleased by it. “Those people all had better jobs than I did. They had more to lose.”

  “But what kind of environmentalist cares more about saving his job than saving land?”

  “Well, a lot of them do, unfortunately. They have families and responsibilities.”

  “But so do you!”

  “Face it, man, you’re just too excellent,” Katz said, not kindly. He was still holding out hope that Lalitha, when they stood up to leave, would prove to be big in the butt or thick in the thighs.

  To help save the cerulean warbler, Walter said, the Trust was aiming to create a hundred-square-mile roadless tract—Haven’s Hundred was its working nickname—in Wyoming County, West Virginia, surrounded by a larger “buffer zone” open to hunting and motorized recreation. To be able to afford both the surface and mineral rights to such a large single parcel, the Trust would first have to permit coal extraction on nearly a third of it, via mountaintop removal. This was the prospect that had scared off the other applicants. Mountaintop removal as currently practiced was ecologically deplorable—ridgetop rock blasted away to expose the underlying seams of coal, surrounding valleys filled with rubble, biologically rich streams obliterated. Walter, however, believed that properly managed reclamation efforts could mitigate far more of the damage than people realized; and the great advantage of fully mined-out land was that nobody would rip it open again.

  Katz was remembering that one of the things he’d missed about Walter was good discussion of actual ideas. “But don’t we want to leave the coal underground?” he said. “I thought we hated coal.”

  “That’s a longer discussion for another time,” Walter said.

  “Walter has some excellent original thoughts on fossil fuels versus nuclear and wind,” Lalitha said.

  “Suffice it to say that we’re realistic about coal,” Walter said.

  Even more exciting, he continued, was the money the Trust was pouring into South America, where the cerulean warbler, like so many other North American songbirds, spent its winters. The Andean forests were disappearing at a calamitous rate, and for the last two years Walter had been making monthly trips to Colombia, buying up big parcels of land and coordinating with local NGOs that encouraged ecotourism and helped peasants replace their wood-burning stoves with solar and electric heating. A dollar still went fairly far in the southern hemisphere, and the South America half of the Pan-American Warbler Park was already in place.

  “Mr. Haven hadn’t planned to do anything in South America,” Lalitha said. “He’d completely neglected that part of the picture until Walter pointed it out to him.”

  “Apart from everything else,” Walter said, “I thought there could be some educational benefit in creating a park that spanned two continents. To drive home the fact that everything’s interconnected. We’re eventually hoping to sponsor some smaller reserves along the warbler’s migratory route, in Texas and Mexico.”

  “That’s good,” Katz said dully. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Really good idea,” Lalitha said, gazing at Walter.

  “The thing is,” Walter said, “the land is disappearing so fast that it’s hopeless to wait for governments to do conservation. The problem with governments is they’re elected by majorities that don’t give a shit about biodiversity. Whereas billionaires do tend to care. They’ve got a stake in keeping the planet not entirely fucked, because they and their heirs are going to be the ones with enough money to enjoy the planet. The reason Vin Haven started doing conservation on his ranches in Texas was that he likes to hunt the bigger birds and look at the little ones. Self-interest, yeah, but a total win-win. In terms of locking up habitat to save it from development, it’s a lot easier to turn a few billionaires than to educate American voters who are perfectly happy with their cable and their Xboxes and their broadband.”

  “Plus you don’t actually want three hundred million Americans running around your wilderness areas anyway,” Katz said.

  “Exactly. It wouldn’t be wilderness anymore.”

  “So basically you’re telling me you’ve gone over to the dark side.”

  Walter laughed. “That’s right.”

  “You need to meet Mr. Haven,” Lalitha said to Katz. “He’s really an interesting character.”

  “Being friends with George and Dick would seem to tell me everything I need to know.”

  “No, Richard, it doesn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t tell you everything.”

  Her charming pronunciation of the O in “no” made Katz want to keep contradicting her. “And the guy’s a hunter,” he said. “He probably even hunts with Dick, right?”

  “As a matter of fact, he does hunt with Dick sometimes,” Walter said. “But the Havens eat what they kill, and they manage their land for wildlife. The hunting is not the problem. The Bushes aren’t the problem, either. When Vin comes to town, he goes to the White House to watch Longhorns games, and at halftime he works on Laura. He’s got her interested in seabirds in Hawaii. I think we’re going to see some action there soon. The Bush connection per se is not the problem.”

  “So what is the problem?” Katz said.

  Walter and Lalitha exchanged uneasy glances.

  “Well, there are several,” Walter said. “Money is one of them. Given how much we’re pouring into South America, it would really have helped to get some public funding in West Virginia. And the mountaintop-removal issue turns out to be a real tar baby. The local grassroots groups have all demonized the coal industry and especially MTR.”

  “MTR is mountaintop removal,” Lalitha said.

  “The New York Times gives Bush-Cheney a total free pass on Iraq but keeps running these fucking editorials about the evils of MTR,” Walter said. “Nobody state, federal, or private wants to touch a project that involves sacrificing mountain ridges and displacing poor families from their ancestral homes. They don’t want to hear about forest reclamation, they don’t want to hear about sustainable green jobs. Wyoming County is very, very empty—the total number of families directly impacted by our plan is less than two hundred. But the whole thing gets turned into evil corporations versus the helpless common man.”

  “It is so stupid and unreasonable,” Lalitha said. “They won’t even listen to Walter. He has really good news about reclamation, but people just close their ears when we walk into a room.”

  “There’s this thing called the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative,” Walter said. “Are you at all interested in the details?”

  “I’m interested in watching the two of you talk about them,” Katz said.

  “Well, very briefly, what’s given MTR such a bad name is that most surface-rights owners don’t insist on the right sort of reclamation. Before a coal company can exercise its mineral rights and tear down a mountain, it has to put up a bond that doesn’t get refunded until the land’s been restored. And the problem is, these owners keep settling for these barren, flat, subsidence-prone pastures, in the hope that some developer will come along and build luxury condos on them, in spite of their being in the middle of nowhere. The fact is, you can actually get a very lush and biodiverse forest if you do the reclamation right. Use four feet of topsoil and weathered sandstone instead of the usual eighteen inches. Take care not to compact the soil too much. And then plant the right mixture of fast- and slow-growing tree species in the right season. We’ve got evidence that forests like that might actually be better for warbler families than the second-growth forests they replace. So our plan isn’t just about preserving the warbler, it’s about creating an advertisement for doing things right. B
ut the environmental mainstream doesn’t want to talk about doing things right, because doing things right would make the coal companies look less villainous and MTR more palatable politically. And so we couldn’t get any outside money, and we’ve got public opinion trending against us.”

  “But the problem with going it alone,” Lalitha said, “was that we were either looking at a much smaller park, too small to be a stronghold for the warbler, or at making too many concessions to the coal companies.”

  “Which really are somewhat evil,” Walter said.

  “And so we couldn’t ask too many questions about Mr. Haven’s money.”

  “It sounds like you’ve got your hands full,” Katz said. “If I were a billionaire, I’d be taking out my checkbook right now.”

  “There’s even worse, though,” Lalitha said, her eyes strangely glittering.

  “Are you bored yet?” Walter said.

  “Not at all,” Katz said. “I’m frankly a little starved for intellectual stimulus.”

  “Well, the problem is, unfortunately, that Vin has turned out to have some other motives.”

  “Rich people are like little babies,” Lalitha said. “Fucking little babies.”

  “Say that again,” Katz said.

  “Say what?”

  “Fucking. I like the way you pronounce it.”

  She blushed; Mr. Katz had gotten through to her.

  “Fucking, fucking, fucking,” she said happily, for him. “I used to work at the Conservancy, and when we’d have our annual gala, the rich people were happy to buy a table for twenty thousand dollars, but only if they got their gift bag at the end of the night. The gift bags were full of worthless garbage donated by somebody else. But if they didn’t get their gift bags, they wouldn’t donate twenty thousand again the next year.”

  “I need your assurance,” Walter said to Katz, “that you won’t mention any of this to anybody else.”

  “So assured.”

  The Cerulean Mountain Trust, Walter said, had been conceived in the spring of 2001, when Vin Haven had traveled to Washington to participate in the vice president’s notorious energy task force, the one whose invite list Dick Cheney was still spending taxpayer dollars to defend against the Freedom of Information Act. Over cocktails one night, after a long day of task-forcing, Vin had spoken to the chairmen of Nardone Energy and Blasco and sounded them out on the subject of cerulean warblers. Once he’d convinced them that their legs weren’t being pulled—that Vin was actually serious about saving a non-huntable bird—an agreement in principle had been reached: Vin would go shopping for a huge tract of land whose core would be opened to MTR but then reclaimed and made forever wild. Walter had known about this agreement when he took the job as the Trust’s executive director. What he hadn’t known—had discovered only recently—was that the vice president, during that same week in 2001, had privately mentioned to Vin Haven that the president intended to make certain regulatory and tax-code changes to render natural-gas extraction economically feasible in the Appalachians. And that Vin had proceeded to buy large bundles of mineral rights not only in Wyoming County but in several other parts of West Virginia that were either coalless or had been mined out. These big purchases of seemingly useless rights might have raised a red flag, Walter said, if Vin hadn’t been able to claim that he was safeguarding possible future preserve sites for the Trust.

  “Long story short,” Lalitha said, “he was using us for cover.”

  “Keeping in mind, of course,” Walter said, “that Vin really does love birds and is doing great things for the cerulean warbler.”

  “He just wanted his little gift bag also,” Lalitha said.

  “His not-so-little gift bag, as it turns out,” Walter said. “This is still mostly under the radar, so you probably haven’t heard about it, but West Virginia’s about to get the shit drilled out of it. Hundreds of thousands of acres that we all assumed were permanently preserved are now in the process of being destroyed as we sit here. In terms of fragmentation and disruption, it’s as bad as anything the coal industry’s done. If you own the mineral rights, you can do whatever the fuck you want to exercise them, even on public land. New roads everywhere, thousands of wellheads, noisy equipment running night and day, blazing lights all night.”

  “And meanwhile your boss’s mineral rights are suddenly a lot more valuable,” Katz said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And now he’s selling off the land he was pretending to buy for you?”

  “Some of it, yeah.”

  “Incredible.”

  “Well, he is still spending a ton of money. And he’ll be taking steps to mitigate the impact of drilling where he still owns the rights. But he’s had to sell a lot of rights to cover some big expenses that we were hoping not to have, if public opinion had gone our way. The bottom line is, he never intended the true cost of his investment in the Trust to be as big as I’d originally thought.”

  “In other words, you got played.”

  “I got played, a little bit. We’re still getting the Warbler Park, but I got played. And please don’t ever mention any of this to anyone.”

  “So what does this mean?” Katz said. “I mean, besides my having been right about friends of Bush being evil.”

  “It means that Walter and I have become rogue employees,” Lalitha said with her strange glittering look.

  “Not rogue,” Walter corrected quickly. “Don’t say rogue. We’re not rogue.”

  “No, in fact, we are fairly rogue.”

  “I like the way you say ‘rogue,’ too,” Katz remarked to her.

  “We still really like Vin,” Walter said. “Vin’s one-of-a-kind. We just feel like, since he wasn’t entirely straight with us, there’s no need for us to be entirely straight with him.”

  “We have some maps and charts to show you,” Lalitha said, digging in her briefcase.

  The early crowd at Walker’s, the van drivers and the cops from the precinct house around the corner, were filling the tables and laying siege to the bar. Outside, in the durable late-winter light of a February afternoon, streets were clogging with Friday tunnel traffic. In a parallel universe, dim with unreality, Katz was still up on the roof at White Street, flirting purposefully with nubile Caitlyn. She seemed hardly worth the bother now. Although he could take or leave nature, Katz couldn’t help envying Walter for taking on Bush’s cronies and trying to beat them at their own game. Compared to manufacturing Chiclets, or building decks for the contemptible, it seemed interesting.

  “I took the job in the first place,” Walter said, “because I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t stand what was happening to the country. Clinton had done less than zero for the environment. Net fucking negative. Clinton just wanted everybody to party to Fleetwood Mac. ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow?’ Bullshit. Not thinking about tomorrow was exactly what he did environmentally. And then Gore was too much of a wimp to let his green flag fly, and too nice a guy to fight dirty in Florida. I was still halfway OK as long as I was in St. Paul, but I kept having to drive all over the state for the Conservancy, and it was like having acid thrown in my face every time I passed the city limits. Not just the industrial farming but the sprawl, the sprawl, the sprawl. Low-density development is the worst. And SUVs everywhere, snowmobiles everywhere, Jet Skis everywhere, ATVs everywhere, two-acre lawns everywhere. The goddamned green monospecific chemical-drenched lawns.”

  “Here are the maps,” Lalitha said.

  “Yeah, these show the fragmentation,” Walter said, handing Katz two laminated maps. “This one is undisturbed habitat in 1900, this one’s undisturbed habitat in 2000.”

  “Prosperity will do that,” Katz said.

  “The development was so stupidly done, though,” Walter said. “We still might have enough land for other species to survive if it wasn’t all so fragmented.”

  “Nice fantasy, I agree,” Katz said. In hindsight, he supposed it was inevitable that his friend would become one of those people who
carried around laminated literature. But he was still surprised by what an angry crank Walter had become in the last two years.

  “This was what was keeping me awake at night,” Walter said. “This fragmentation. Because it’s the same problem everywhere. It’s like the internet, or cable TV—there’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it’s all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.”

  “There’s some pretty good porn on the internet,” Katz said. “Or so I’m told.”

  “I wasn’t accomplishing anything systemic in Minnesota. We were just gathering little bits of disconnected prettiness. There are approximately six hundred breeding bird species in North America, and maybe a third of them are getting clobbered by fragmentation. Vin’s idea was that if two hundred really rich people would each pick one species, and try to stop the fragmentation of their strongholds, we might be able to save them all.”

  “The cerulean warbler is a very choosy little bird,” Lalitha said.