Anthill

by Edward Osborne Wilson

  Raff, in short, was a sharp contrast to the puerile sweat-shirted Californians who regarded themselves as the inner council and fighting vanguard of Gaia Force. He had the look of a leader, and maybe people like him, she thought, were what the group needed most. Being largely the offspring of the 1970s New Left, the other force members considered themselves keepers of the true faith of the new socialist revolution, which they were certain to begin as soon as a few wrinkles from the last time, such as the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and erection of the Berlin Wall, were ironed out. Meanwhile, no deviation from the articles of faith was permitted. They were committed to an ideology in which the chairpersonship was passed around, alternating gender and minorities to sustain ideological purity. That was of little consequence in practice, as it turned out--all decisions were made by the group at meetings.

  The goal of Gaia Force was to tear down the old order to build a correctly engineered new one. What the new order would be was up for discussion, and more discussion, and more on into the future, in order to get everything right this time. The only principles solidly established thus far were two in number: the complete equality of gender and race, and freedom of sex among Gaia members, which in common parlance is called promiscuity.

  Inevitably, as things go, Raff was attracted to JoLane. He couldn't help but take an interest in any attractive girl who singled him out so confidently. He assayed her as every heterosexual male does every good-looking young woman who comes into view, however fleetingly. The saccade proceeded in the usual, genetically programmed sequence. The specimen before him was, first, almost as tall as Raff; young, almost adolescent in overall aspect; thin, too much perhaps, but in concert with a quick, excitable demeanor. JoLane had a keen, intelligent face and two of the traits scientifically considered beautiful, small chin and wide-spaced eyes, but not the third, high cheekbones. Her dark brown hair was cut too short, whether for revolutionary unisex or a distaste for feminine adornment could not be divined. Nothing on the ring finger. Finally, from multiple signals in her tone of voice and body language, he presumed she was not gay.

  And, of greater importance to Raff as to most intelligent men, they were both highly alert and goal-oriented. They were each anxious to tell the other about their childhood, and they could comfortably mock and laugh about their upbringing. That evening their private conversation went on for half an hour, and then after the meeting another half hour, drawing looks from other Gaia Force members, until finally the group began to dissolve. Raff was relieved that no male friend of JoLane's intruded in the conversation, and in the end none came up and said, Come on, JoLane, I'll take you home. Only later did it occur to him that lack of intervention by a possessive male might be evidence of a taboo on sexist displays, based in turn on the belief that testosteronic behavior was a defining trait of environmental evildoers.

  Two days later they met for coffee at the student center in the basement of Memorial Hall. There was more talk, this time getting into serious matters of environmental activism and world affairs. Still no sign of Gaian male rivals. The next Saturday, a walk over to the Law School, a tour of the premises by Raff, more talk. The following weekend, with Raff's roommate at Richards Hall away at a Gabonese freedom rally, bed and pillow talk.

  Prior to his arrival at Harvard, Raff had, unlike most of his fellow students at FSU, no experience with sex. He was too small physically and immature in physical appearance to attract even the casual attention of most girls. Further, he was shy in temperament, afraid of impregnating a girl or forming any relationship serious enough to deflect him from his planned career. In any case, he could not drive a car, a prerequisite for romance in most of America.

  At Florida State University he nevertheless dated several girls with dinner, conversation, a movie in or as close as possible to the FSU campus. And twice he engaged in moderately heavy petting outside the girl's dormitory when he and his date saw other couples doing it. These encounters he frequently reviewed in his mind, and elaborated them into fantasy. He dreamed of more, but resigned himself to waiting.

  Raff was totally unprepared, then, for the physical attentions that JoLane showered upon him. They were a quantum leap from anything he had dreamed he might one day experience. The young ladies of his acquaintance at FSU had been basically very modest, and monogamous. They wished to form sexual relationships with one or a very few partners, leading to a husband or at least what is euphemistically called a boyfriend--in either case, the love of their life. Raff had the same domestic concept.

  JoLane, in contrast, aimed to wring from sex every pleasure it had to offer. Hers was an experimental and fearless attitude born of radical feminism. It was less raw physical desire than a political statement. With the certification granted her by ideology, she erased the very idea of limits. She approached sex with the casualness of pouring morning coffee. A wildness consumed her, as she set out to try every position, engage every orifice.

  JoLane dragged Raff beyond the limits of his own fantasies. She was Lilith, Aphrodite, a force of nature. He had no way to fold their adventure into his logic-dominated worldview. A normal young male, he released himself and joined JoLane's free-form experiments, wondering where they might ultimately lead.

  An affair in a major university like Harvard is like no other, independent of the magnitude of its sexual energy. Raff and JoLane were happily lost in the great brainy anthill, weaving their way through a constantly changing labyrinth of classes, study sessions, meetings with friends separate and mutual, and, whenever they could find an hour or two of privacy, or even semiprivacy, exhausting sessions of lovemaking.

  Both discovered a new allure, with deepening satisfaction, in the life of Harvard and the surrounding venues of Cambridge. During a lecture by a Supreme Court justice at the Law School entitled "The Constitution and International Negotiation," she started to giggle and he hushed her. They spent an hour at the Fogg Art Museum peering at Rembrandt sketches and Byzantine iconic art. Raff was thinking about the sex to come later, but he also promised himself he would study art history when he found time--a commitment he knew would be forgotten by the following day.

  The couple devoted two hours to a concert of atonal music. Raff didn't understand it at all, but everyone else seemed to, including JoLane, so he kept silent afterward. They held hands through a lecture at Science Center A entitled "Origin and Phylogeny of the Flowering Plants: A Mystery Solved," by a renowned and incomprehensible botany professor from Peking University. They attended a Free Burma rally, and wondered later what the military junta was doing with the rain forest. Both agonized over the Twin Towers attack but also hoped the people of Afghanistan would not suffer unduly. Together, the two sampled Ethiopian cooking in a small restaurant off Harvard Square, both first time, last time.

  They laughed over the Harvardian eccentricities all around them. Visiting professors from the University of Oxford speaking with Oxford accents and publishing in the New York Review of Books, and American professors also speaking with Oxford accents but publishing in the London Review of Books. The forced enthusiasm of the university's official Harvard Gazette for Harvard football. The rareness of Harvard students wearing Harvard insignia on their sweatshirts and jackets, instead preferring, in egregious reverse snobbery, Georgia Tech University and Slippery Rock College.

  It bothered Raff a little that no one he met, other than JoLane, had ever heard of Admiral Raphael Semmes, and she only vaguely and dismissively. But this minor insult was soon forgotten in the magical ambience of Harvard Law School. By the end of the first semester, with new friends and the rapidly evolving affair with JoLane, his life was as complete and balanced, he thought, as it might ever be. He even sometimes imagined idly what it would be like to give everything up and become a Harvard bum. Audit courses for free, slip into the back rows for big lectures and events. Crash a few receptions for drinks and hors d'oeuvres, maybe even the Faculty Club when a packed room there was partly filled with students. Live on odd jobs. Have a constant lov
er, maybe JoLane. Pass on into middle age with a speckled beard and ponytail. Be one of the semiprofessional chess players in Harvard Square ("Play chess with an expert, $5"). Learn enough classic chess moves to knock down the amateurs fast, and have dinner that evening in a good restaurant somewhere around the square. But it was just a fantasy. Raphael Semmes Cody soldiered on.

  The interests of Raff and JoLane were broadly overlapping, but a difference in their temperament divided them. It emerged disturbingly on the key issue of environmental activism. JoLane wanted a juggernaut, and she thirsted for a revolution. Her preferred strategy was bombardment with propaganda followed by frontal assault by means of public protest and riot. She could not abide Raff's cautious, law-abiding approach.

  JoLane tried to avoid the tension between them. In private conversation it diminished the freedom with which they expressed ideas. They softened some opinions and detoured around a few altogether, including race and economics. Raff worried that their conjugal intimacy was putting an edge on some of their intellectual talk, making sex less spontaneous than it had been when they were near-strangers.

  Finally, one evening, when he started to talk about the methods of conflict resolution and litigation, she exploded.

  "The developers are too powerful, Raff! You cannot compromise with these people. They've got the money, they've got the politicians, and not only that, they like to say what they're doing is good for the country. And then if nothing else works, they tell you it's God's will. God the Wildlife Manager, no less. How can you deal with that? You can't compete with them, Raff. You can't reason with them. They'll run over you every time. The only thing to do is to go right at them, believe me. I've learned a few things from my father. Passion and guts, Raff, you gotta have them, and you gotta leave some bodies on the field. We haven't got a lot of time either, Raff."

  He did not like being pushed like this, as though his manhood were in question. "I think you want me to be a courthouse lawyer, JoLane, and keep Gaia Force members and other hard chargers out of jail. I have other plans in mind."

  "What plans?" she asked, turning suddenly quiet.

  "I'll tell you someday, darling." He just didn't want to prolong the argument.

  JoLane was stung. She was not used to being cut off in the middle of rhetorical flight. But she too let it pass.

  Raff could not offer more. He was not used to aggressive polemics, and the idea of eco-war repelled him. Above all, he could not bear the thought of breaking the law. It wasn't lack of courage. It was an understanding of how the consequences could be severe and counterproductive. He thought that surely JoLane knew that much. Driving nails in Douglas fir trunks to wreck chain saws--no way. Lying down in front of bulldozers, tearing up injunctions, risking prison, and shouting defiance at the television cameras as you're led out of the courtroom--not for him.

  Civil disobedience and even occasional violent resistance might be necessary once in a great while. He understood the heroism of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Minutemen who died at Lexington and Concord. But this was not his way. He had a deeper philosophical problem with the approach favored by JoLane and the other Gaians. He just could not equate the crusade for the environment with that for civil rights. This was America, not some benighted revolutionary state. Trees and bears were not disenfranchised people. Somehow the prize could be, had to be, won within the law.

  Raff began looking for intellectual and emotional support to help close the rift opening between him and JoLane Simpson. He searched about and found it in an interview with Russell Jones, the Joseph Bullard Professor of Environmental Law.

  They met in Jones's office, a large rectangular room overlooking the Cambridge Common. One wall was lined with books and in a frieze above them were nineteenth-century prints of West Indian and South American birds. A second wall held award certificates and photographs of Jones with President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and other pioneers of Latin American environmental reform.

  Jones was a tall man of about sixty, still trim, and fit enough to take long bird-watching trips. He had a poet's thatch of tousled medium-length snow-white hair. Before being called to Harvard (as they used to say of professorship offers in the days of Eliot and Lowell), he had served in the Department of State as an expert on Latin American environmental and trade policy. He was fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese.

  They took two chairs, each displaying the Harvard seal in gold against a black background and appropriately uncomfortable, and settled them loudly scraping on the bare pinewood floor next to the single window.

  "As an environmental lawyer, I don't get a lot of requests from students for interviews," Jones said. "They all seem more interested these days in working at one or the other of two extremes, pro bono for civil liberties, or making a lot of money on Wall Street."

  Raff thanked him for agreeing to the meeting, then described the situation at Nokobee. It looked, he said, as though the developers might win, and the priceless heritage would be destroyed. "I'd like to be an environmental lawyer myself someday, but right now I just want to help save Nokobee and as many places like that in the South as I can. We're losing a lot down there. There's just no time left."

  "Well," Jones said, "you certainly are a different kind of truth-seeker from the usual law student here. So my answer is, that kind of situation is difficult, all right, and particularly in your part of the country. But you're right, it can be managed within the law."

  "Which law, though?" Raff asked. "Suppose a company owns a piece of land that ought to be a nature reserve, and it's remote and out of sight--what's to stop that company from clearing it?"

  Raff was a bit irritated with himself as he asked the question. He'd noticed lately that he had begun to lose some of his Alabama accent, especially around figures of authority. He was unconsciously speeding up his speech, and clipping short the last syllable of some of the words. He didn't want that to happen. But when he tried to change back, he couldn't help exaggerating the Southern softness. He sounded, he thought, like someone from South Carolina.

  "There are laws," Jones said, "and different ways to interpret laws." He paused to let that sink in. "If certain interpretations have a strong moral premise, and pick up public support, they can win in court even if precedents seem to point the other way. That's what you're in law school to learn, I hope. There are a range of legal arguments that can be made to protect the land. And they can prevail, even if the case has to go to appellate court, and, at least theoretically, all the way to the Supreme Court. It's a lot like appealing a criminal conviction."

  "Lord help us," Raff said. "It's a pretty terrible thing when we have to protect nature in court like it was some kind of a criminal."

  "Well, remember you're dealing with common law here, which is always complicated and always based on moral reasoning to some degree. And in the kind of case you're describing, that's particularly true. The reason is that the disputes of your sort come out of the conflict between two sacred precepts of the Republic, private property rights and America's natural heritage. If you own a piece of land, you can do with it what you please--but only up to a point. You can't change it in a way that harms the public good. You can't bury spent uranium fuel there, you can't dam a river there. If the land is important for conservation, that's a public good that could be harmed by development. So you have to make the case on behalf of the Nokobee tract that developing it would be harmful to our natural heritage, to a degree that more than offsets the public good from the increase of jobs and income that might come from developing it."

  "That's very subjective."

  Jones agreed. "Yeah, I'll grant it's very subjective. And, you know, it's sticky in an area that's been slow on conservation, like Alabama. And it gets harder when you've got an organization like the Gulf Gateway Coalition that pushes development as a primary public good. The bottom line is, I don't envy you."

  "I don't envy me either," Raff said.

  He rose, thanked his host, and wa
lked to his room in nearby Richards Hall. His Gabonese roommate was out again. He and some of his countrymen seemed to be almost living in the Kennedy School of Government these days. Maybe plotting a revolution, who knew? Raff lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling for a while, musing on the conversation he'd just had. Well, he thought, I'm going to have to study some new subjects.

  He decided to search for cases solved by conflict resolution, especially the kinds that had been decided by federal and state law. He devised what he thought would be a powerful methodology. It was to seek influence through challenge and conflict resolution. Achieve conservation while at the same time satisfying--if at all possible--the interests of the property owners and developers. If satisfying them wasn't possible, fall back to an alliance with the green warriors like the Gaians. Be prepared then to use protest and class-action suits to turn up the pressure. But however a particular case unfolded, never, ever willingly give up any of the few precious scraps of wild land still left.

  One evening at Lowell House, Raff decided to describe his philosophy to a group of Gaia Force members. He knew he was taking a chance by suggesting negotiation and compromise to the self-described commandos of environmentalism. It was like throwing snowballs at the devil, but he was interested in seeing how they would take it, and, he had to admit, he wanted to impress JoLane.

  It was the wrong move, clearly. He could tell that the listeners were restless. Before he could finish his lecture, one chinos-clad Californian, sprawled on a chair in the front row, loudly interrupted him.