My Green Manifesto (16 page)

He takes a long pull on his beer.

“That lifted me. To tell you the truth the animals were my key to support at the beginning. When I wasn't getting a lot of human support.”

Corny? God yes. But what does that matter in the face of results? Of course, I love the fact that birds were at the bottom of things. It makes me want to run and find Shellenberger and Nordhaus, wherever they're hiding, and tell them that
this
is the way things really work.

Whatever the motivation, Dan kept his birds and mysticism to himself and set about trying to convert both his neighbors and his neighborhood. The mob he'd faced was ugly, but he found that his neighbors, as individuals, were less so. By all accounts it was his affable straightforwardness, as well as his stubborn streak, that allowed him to win over angry residents, like those 130 Newtonians. Often he would seek out the residents by knocking on their doors
and showing them his plans, inviting them down to the river so he could give them a tour and describe his vision. He did this for three years. And despite the characteristic litigiousness of the American people, the
Boston Globe
would write: “What is remarkable is not that the MDC finally retook its own land, but that it has resolved the vast majority of the encroachments without a single lawsuit.”
¹⁸

This was miraculous. People agreeing to give up something they believed was theirs for the common good.

“We kept pushing the idea that the river belonged to the people,” Dan says. “That the people could be its stewards.”

As it turns out, many of those who opposed the idea are now its greatest backers. So far the paths haven't brought crackheads to Newton. Instead the banks flower with viburnum, berrying shrubs, native blueberries, and white pines, while supporting an ecosystem of increasingly varied animal life: roosting herons, fox, muskrats, white-tailed deer.

I am trying to be hard-headed and practical in the sort of environmentalism I'm putting forth here, but birds keep getting in the way. I like the fact that Dan's fight was intertwined with birds and in this he doesn't seem too different than many who fight for the wild.

I think back to the osprey flying through the dusk over the Alehouse, and I think of the way ospreys have lifted my life. Again, I'm resisting the idea of a “totem animal,” but if I were ever to cave to that groovy notion, the osprey would be mine. Last night's bird rose and hovered, like a muscular hummingbird, decked out in feathers of dark brown and white, and I, looking up, could sense its tension, and yelled to Dan right before it dove. It missed its target but the sport of it was enough, at least for me.

I love the directness of ospreys, the way their whole lives depend on this simple and savage getting of fish. Back on Cape Cod I studied the way they dove: the hover, the reading of the water, the initial dive, the adjustment, the final abandoned plunge, the popping of the last-second wheelie, the stabbing for fish with their great talons.

Birds are my soft spot. Friends mock me for it but I'm a sucker for anything with feathers that flies. In particular, anything that flies with a black bandit mask and that has an insatiable hunger for fish. Ospreys are my weakness. John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Ospreys are hitched to the world in unexpected ways.

Large, nearly eagle-sized raptors with five-and-a-half to six foot wingspans, ospreys are known for their swashbuckling dives and are distinguished by their dark brown masks and vivid brown-and-white wing patterns. Before I got to know the birds, I never considered myself much of a birder, let alone an ornithologist. My early encounters with them on Cape Cod were casual, but then I became curious about their behavior and that curiosity gradually transformed into obsession. Watch these birds a while and it's hard not to get excited. The first time I saw an osprey hit the water, after pulling in its wings and hurtling down from fifty feet in the air, I literally jumped for joy. I did this more as a sports fan than a birder, and, like a fan, I immediately wanted to grab someone else and tell them about it: After all, what I had witnessed was supremely athletic. But as well as being spectacular athletes, ospreys are gregarious and extroverted—their open ways seem to invite you into their lives. At some point I took that invitation. I am forever glad I did.

One thing led to another. One fall I decided to follow the migration of some Cape Cod ospreys as they made their
way down the East Coast to Cuba and then down to South America. There were great pleasures in watching the birds but these were rivaled in watching the people who watched the birds. I met dozens of other bird people, my fellow tribesmen and women, who spent the better part of their lives studying ospreys. I am not going to make a grand claim that this somehow made them better people than the rest of us, but I do think there is something encoded in human beings that gives us pleasure when we spend a good part of our time outdoors watching animals. “Joy is the symptom by means of which right contact can be measured,” wrote Joseph Wood Krutch in his biography of Thoreau. And there was something joyous about this bird tribe that I had stumbled upon. Not perfect, not content, not morally superior, just joyous.

It was during this trip that I visited Cuba and met Freddy Santana Rodriguez. Freddy's life changed one day in 1996 when he discovered a dead male osprey with a band on his leg in the area near his home in Santiago, Cuba. Through the information on the osprey's band, Rodriguez got in touch with Keith Bildstein, the director of conservation science at Hawk Mountain, a well-known site for watching raptor migration in Pennsylvania. Freddy's find would lead to his becoming the first Cuban intern at Hawk Mountain, and when he got home to his country he would establish a site for observing migrating ospreys on La Gran Piedra, a rock outcropping in the Sierra Maestra mountain range in eastern Cuba. From then on he tied his life to the birds, and his happiest moments were watching the annual river of ospreys, shining black and white above, as they flowed overhead through the mountains each fall. Naturally he began, not just to study, but to protect the birds; working
to educate his countrymen about them; coming out against hunting and the destruction of the natural places in Cuba that served as pit stops on the bird's migratory route. But the activism came later. First was the joy in seeing the wild and beautiful athleticism of the birds in flight.

That's a nice story, you say. But isn't it a bit off point? This is still a manifesto after all. How is an osprey or some herons going to SAVE THE WORLD? How are they going to STOP GLOBAL WARMING?

Well, because everything's hitched to everything else, let me try another story on you, this one also involving ospreys. I'll warn you going in that this is the sort of hoary sixties era environmental chestnut that so grates on the nerves of the Nordhauses and Shellenbergers of the world. But I like it. And it fits well, in my mind at least, with Dan's story and the story of the sort of environmentalism that appeals to me. It's the story of two friends on Long Island, Art Cooley and Dennis Puleston. These two start going bird watching together in the fifties. At that time, Art is a middle school science teacher—a hearty, energetic young man fresh out of college—and someone tells him about Dennis, who is already a kind of local legend who has sailed around the world, written books, and, during World War II, invented the famous amphibious duck boats. “Oh, you're interested in birds,” another friend says to Art, “then you've got to meet Dennis Puleston.”

Dennis, it turns out, is an osprey freak. He is also an artist, and one of the subjects for his art are the ospreys that he observes regularly on Gardiners Island, off the northern end of Long Island. After Dennis and Art have
gone out birding a couple times on the weekend, heading, with binoculars in hand, to some marsh or beach or woods, they notice they have a lot of extra room in the car, and, being natural educators, they start inviting along kids from Art's middle school, teaching them about birds. They do this pretty regularly until Art goes off to fight in Korea, and then when he gets back, they start up again.

By this time—it's the early sixties now—Art has gotten a job as a high school biology teacher and Dennis has begun to notice that the osprey population on Gardiners Island is plummeting. Then Dennis reads Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
and it's all over. His mind starts buzzing with connections. Carson explains how DDT, sprayed to kill insects, has permeated ecosystems with deadly results, especially for animals, like the osprey, on the top of the food chain.

A couple of more year pass and Art is teaching a marine science class. He teaches this class at the high school but also, to help make ends meet, he teaches it as an adult education course, and in both courses he always uses local issues to illustrate his points. In the night school class, he has the students chart how duck farms pollute Long Island Sound. Then he takes the class to Mt. Sinai Harbor where Art points out the dredging that has been going on—pretty common stuff in those days—wetlands dug up and the muck from the marshes, the fill, dumped to create land to build houses on. Art bemoans this practice, but leaves it at that, at least until the next night when a student from the class calls him at home.

The student has been talking to another student and they have a question for Art. “What are you going to
do
about this?” they ask Art. “What are you going to
do
about the duck farms and the dredging?” Well, it's a good
question. Art teaches full time, and he teaches the night school class, and of course he's got a wife and kids, too, and it really isn't his job to save the world. But he starts asking questions and one thing leads to another. The two adult students get involved, and so does Dennis Puleston, his bird-watching partner, and then some other people do too.

Which is to say that Art does something very important. He forms a
group.
It's hard to express how much this changes things. Individuals, artists like Rachel Carson for instance, might bring back something, a vision, a book, that inspires. But groups get things done
.
This group has a name (the Brookhaven Town Natural Resources Committee or BTNRC) and annual dues (one dollar per year for mimeographing) and Art is elected chairman. Art, it turns out, has a talent for running the meetings, maybe learned in his years of teaching high school students; he is burly with a deep voice, good at telling people to shut up and get started, and also at summarizing what they've discussed and then assigning people tasks to get done by the next time the group meets. It's a surprisingly effective strategy: Tell yourself that you will get something done and you may, but there is no one to report back to. That is quite different than reporting back to a group, specifically to a man as big and forceful as Art Cooley, and saying, “Um . . . sorry, I failed.” The word people from that time often used to describe Art is “energetic,” but “tough” gets in there fairly often, too. You didn't want to come back to Art and tell him you didn't get your job done.

Different words are used to describe Dennis Puleston, for instance “gentle” and “brilliant”—but that is the beauty of a group: it can contain multitudes. Different people bring different skills to the party. Other group members include
George Woodwell, head ecologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Charles Wurster, a biology professor at Stony Brook University and an expert on chemical pesticides. But to ignite these more serious scientific personalities, a spark is needed. Art, with his energy and bouncer's brawn, provides the organizational spark, but another spark comes uninvited in the personage of Victor Yannacone, a flamboyant local lawyer.

It is said of Yannacone that “the only thing silent about him was the final ‘e' in his name,” and when he reads a local editorial written by Wurster, decrying the use of the chemical DDT in spraying local marshes, he wastes no time filing a suit against the local Mosquito Commission, the sprayers of the chemical. Yannacone then approaches the BTNRC, and it is here that the individual talents of the group came to the fore. “Do you have any evidence?” Yannacone asks. Well, yes, it turns out they do. Dennis Puleston draws on his studies of the Gardiners Island ospreys, where he has been noting the number of nests and birth rates, and where only fifty nests remain from the original three hundred he began studying. In fact there are only three chicks this year, and from the failed nests he brings the too-thin eggshells to Charles Wurster's lab, where Wurster confirms they contain DDT. George Woodwell, not to be outdone, writes a brilliant paper on biomagnification, describing the process by which DDT rises up the food chain, increasing in toxicity in larger species. In court Yannacone presses the point that the chemical is threatening the community, and Art Cooley testifies in his usually emphatic manner. Dennis Puleston provides beautiful drawings of ospreys, and his charts of the falling osprey population are exhibit A, which means that the osprey, hitched to everything, finds itself
smack in the middle of the country's first cases of what will soon come to be known as “environmental law.”