My Green Manifesto (10 page)

Surprisingly, Berry's own literary godfather, Thoreau, is not quoted once in McKibben's book. Maybe he's trying
to avoid the old-fashioned, romantic associations of one of our most famous neck-bearded writers, but of course everything McKibben argues for can be found right there in Thoreau's
Walden
: commitment to the local, fighting against the destruction of the natural world, and the big question,
why not be happy with less
? By saying that McKibben owes debts to Berry and Thoreau I am not trying to diminish his book or argument. The book, I believe, is aimed at opening up more people to what until now has been the belief of a few. It tries to make us face the fact that the SUV and Trophy Home Party is almost over, and that morning in America is actually going to be one doozy of a hangover. Or to put it another way, it's time to face what we've put off. To put up or shut up. Pay the bill. All that. In contrast to Thoreau and Berry's more poetic means, McKibben's argument for less is straightforward. But for all the straightforwardness, when I finished the book, I was left with a simple question: will it work? Can a book like
Deep Economy
ever truly galvanize its readers? Are we ready for the ideas that Jimmy Carter tried to quietly sell us thirty years ago before he and his cardigan sweater were run out of town?

I'm not sure. Clearly McKibben has his facts straight, and his presentation of the Walmart-ization of America is compelling. In our quest to be bigger and richer, always bigger and richer, we have given the keys of the kingdom to the very few and—surprise, surprise—those few don't seem overly concerned with the common good. McOil and McFood serve up the slop and we line up at the communal troughs just like the cattle and chicken we're about to eat. It's a gruesome picture built on greed. Sadly, I'm pretty sure it's also an accurate picture. But I'm not sure if it's a picture most of us are ready to see, or to think about a lot, let alone
fight against. And I'm not so sure about the way McKibben presents it either.

Here is what is wrong and here is what we need to do to fix it
, he says very rationally.
Here is the virtuous course . . . here is what is
good
.
But doing what is virtuous has never been the world's greatest motivator. Our internal computers don't simply calculate what is right, and then act accordingly. Think again of those moments when Reagan came rushing in and swept Carter back off to the South. For the first (and maybe only) time a President mouthed ideas similar to Berry's and McKibben's: admitting doubt about our mania for growth, suggesting something as radical as a little restraint. And where did it get him? Carter's decline has become a cliché of our collective political memory: the dour little minister, shrinking every day in both political cartoons and the eyes of his countrymen, urging us to spend less on gas and turn down our thermostats. Our response? “How
dare
he?!”

If anything led to the orgy of consumption that followed it was the fear of being Carter as much as the love of all things Reagan. You think we should get
smaller
? Okay, then we'll build bigger cars and (much) bigger houses! You think we should lead a life, in Robert Frost's words, “of self-restraint for the common good”? Well, said most of my college friends, “Watch out Wall Street here I come!” We were so collectively frightened by the idea of restraint, of actually getting smaller, of running out of our great national abundance, that we, instead of meekly retiring, burst out into the world like a bunch of drunken frat boys, buying, eating, and drinking. The next Democratic President after Carter at least had the decency to be a bigeating, adultery-loving, excessive omnivore like the rest of
us. No talk of “restraint” from Slick Willy. He didn't want to just grow the economy; he wanted it to burst out and swallow the rest of the world. It's the appetite, stupid.

So here comes McKibben, well-armed with knowledge but somewhat Carter-like in approach, telling us to get small. Will we listen? Are we finally ready? We now have a President who seems able to present Carter-like ideas with a shinier varnish, but the environment continues to register dead last on the list of people's actual concerns despite all the hollering about the end of the world.

Still, there are a few reasons for hope. McKibben has increasingly catalogued compelling stories—emphasis on
stories
—of people who have gone small and lived to tell the tale. And, suddenly, a lot more people seem to know what global warming is, and many also seem to know that the solution has something to do with paring back, not just inventing new Jetson-like gizmos to save our future. It's true that a single terrorist attack might knock environmental concerns off the front pages, but
for now
. . . .

For now a lot of people have embraced McKibben's fellow rationalist, Albert Gore, and for a while seemed honestly responsive when he pointed at his charts and graphs and, like your eccentric uncle, insisted on showing off his slideshow. But the response to him wasn't just to his rational argument, it was an emotional reaction; to the fact he lost an election he won and then grew a beard; to the fact he got depressed and then came back from the dead; suddenly he was living the life he wanted to live, fighting his own fight. It's like this: If we want a majority of people to actually act, if people are going to do the next-to-impossible, which is to say,
change their behavior
, there always needs to be emotional content, strong emotional connection
to the appeal. Maybe that's why, despite our tendency to roll our eyes, it's not so awful to have Schwarzenegger on the cover of magazines or to rent a polar bear for photo ops or even to use the silly phrase “eco-warrior.” Gore himself seems to think that our tendency to have visceral reactions is a bad thing—the result of too much television—but it wasn't television that made England rally around Churchill. Would the phrase
It is in our best interests not to become extinct
have stirred people like Churchill's “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat”?

And what does Dan Driscoll have in common with Winston Churchill? What do little fights have to do with the bigger struggle? Well, maybe fights like Dan's are relevant because they incite on a personal level. We are Americans, after all, and, for better or worse, we're well trained to fight, to compete, for our personal and individual interests. Some of the best fighters for the environment—Roosevelt, Muir, Thoreau—have taken that same passionate individualism and fought to save the land. Maybe it's too much to ask for us to change our basic, excessive characters, but perhaps we can turn that aggressive nature toward something else and get competitive about, say, our car's mileage or saving yarn. Yes, what McKibben says is right—what Carter said so long ago was right, or at least the beginning of something right—but maybe the reason some are finally starting to react is that it is being presented not as a true fight to save the planet, but
as a fight to save our homes
. It's easy to laugh at this, easy to picture the blockbuster with Bruce Willis being called out of retirement to battle rising sea levels or changing weather patterns, but silly or not, it may be more
effective
for us to think this way. After all, who among us can change our obsession with the individual that
much, or that fast? If we are individuals and fighters, so be it. But one thing we can do is turn that energy toward a good fight, and we don't need to look farther than our own home to find one. In this sense I hope the glossy magazines keep plastering those eco-celebrities and polar bears on their covers. Anything that helps. Anything that ignites.

We may paddle fast but that does not seem to translate into boat speed. In one short day, I have managed to aid and abet in destroying Dan's cherished canoe, the one he paddled when he first explored and fought for the Charles. It is canoe-icide, plain and simple. And yet Dan and I are feeling guiltless. We keep laughing as we bail. It seems funny somehow to have almost destroyed our already limited adventure.

After awhile, the murky water inside the boat becomes too deep and we pull over for repairs and food. We find a beautiful sandbar in the middle of the current, and drag the boat and ourselves out of the water. After dumping the water, we eat a soggy lunch and drink a couple of beers. The sandbar is a small hump in the middle of a coppercolored section of river that is only a few canoe lengths wide; the battered watercraft itself rests next to us, like an injured friend, as we sip beers and stare at damselflies skitting above the river. I watch the current part around our little island. I feel adventurous, though I know the rapids we ran were relatively tame as whitewater goes.

Dan feels it, too. It isn't easy spending your life banging your head against a bureaucracy. It's important to get out once in a while to see what you're fighting for.

Which is a long-winded way of saying we are in pretty good moods while we eat lunch. This is why I do this shit. To feel like this. To eat lunch that feels like necessary sustenance and not a habitual point in the day. To spend a whole
day outdoors. To feel tired and free—to have these hours away from normal life.

For most of the morning the banks have been wooded, but now, across from our sandbar, a wide lawn rolls up to a gigantic new house. I worry that we are lunching on private property, but Dan assures me that while the riverbank may belong to the homeowner, the little island we are lunching on belongs to the state. Moreover, it is the property of the citizens of the state, which means us.

He points to the way the lawn has been mowed right down to the river's edge.

“We should get someone out here to sue their asses,” he says. He explains that the Wetlands Protection Act specifies that you can't cut riparian wetlands and that a setback of fifty to one hundred feet is required. I pull my tape recorder out of my backpack and ask him if he'd like to put his opinions on record.

“Yes, I'd be happy to,” he says. “You can quote me as saying that these people, by cutting the bank and creating lawn right to the edge, are definitely violating the law. And we hate them for the vermin they are.”

Then he points his beer at a statue of what appears to be a fox or coyote.

“The owners put them there to scare the Canada geese away, because they don't want the goose shit,” he says. “Of course they wouldn't have geese if they didn't mow their lawn like that.”

The main problem with the river, he explains, used to be water quality, but much has changed since the Clean Water Act. Now huge stripers chase herring eight miles upriver in the once-famously dirty water.

“The problem now is quantity, not quality,” he explains.
“The suburban towns siphon off the river so they can water their fucking lawns. It just makes so much more sense to let the native species grow. No need to water then. And it looks so much better.”

To his eye
, he doesn't add. He cracks open another beer and waxes eloquent for a while about the evils of mowing.

While he talks I think: If Dan is an admittedly limited, and hypocritical, environmentalist, then this wilderness he has spent the last two decades fighting for is certainly a limited wild. Before I moved back East I lived in Colorado for six years, and my Western friends would have a hard time imagining such a thing as a “wild Charles.” Both their idea of what wilderness is, and their politics, are more ambitious and extreme. They want big wilderness, and I'm with them in spirit. I want big wilderness too. But Dan's, and really the majority of human's wilderness at this point is, of necessity, a limited wilderness.

Something about the morning's adventure—maybe the
yee-hah
aspect—reminds me of my years in Colorado. It seems everyone I knew there was always biking and climbing up something or paddling and paragliding down. Though we are gliding through the most Eastern of wildernesses this morning, floating toward the snooty wilds of Harvard, my mind begins to migrate Westward. And I like it. “Go West, young brain!”

Dan lived in Colorado, too, and spent years camping in the West before heading back to fight for his first, Eastern wilderness. It occurs to me that one aspect of Dan's myth, and of my emerging picture of a new environmentalism, is the vital importance of the West, or at least something wild like the West. To paraphrase Gary Snyder: “The
West
is the place without fathers.” One of the reasons that
the West is so important to the language and psychology of environmentalism is that it is the one region that has managed to tell a more romantically compelling story about humans and nature. It is both a sexier, gun-slinging narrative, and a more free-spirited, radical story. Eastern environmentalism and global environmentalism could learn a thing or two from Western environmentalism. It's an environmentalism tinged with adventure, danger, boldness—the land is bigger and so are the fights. While environmentalism ultimately serves the conservation ethic of Aldo Leopold, and is more about the whole than about individuals, common sense suggests that it starts with individuals; individuals spur change and so it is necessary for those individuals to get excited and to take action. In general, the West frames this appeal better than the East: John Muir holding on to the top of a tree during a lightning storm trumps Thoreau taking tea at Walden.

I try to explain this to Dan as we sit on our sandbar, but my words trip over themselves. Still, he gets the gist of what I'm saying, bringing up one of his heroes, Bob Marshall, who, he tells me, managed to roam large swaths of the West and found the Wilderness Society before dying young at thirty-eight.

“He was a model for me,” Dan says. “Not the dying part, but the activism tied to actually getting out there. Getting outside. I try to do what he did. I mean, the Charles is not the Colorado. But he was still a model.”