My Green Manifesto (24 page)

I would suggest that one thing a good animal might do is explore his or her territory. Explore it, prowl it, walk it, swim it, smell it, and even occasionally mark it. Get to know it at night, in all seasons and in all weathers. As we consider this question more deeply, it's worth looking again at what Wendell Berry called his “governing ambition.” He writes:

Berry is discussing his river home in Kentucky, and perhaps the tone here is a little ministerial, even grand, given our current theme of a
limited
wild. But let's take what Berry says seriously for a minute. How would we act if we were to really go along with Berry and make belonging to our homes our governing ambition? Well, first we might think about where to live, considering, as much as it is practical, how we could live near places and creatures, including humans, who we actually care about, or might grow to care about through “labor.” Then, once we have selected our place—our
territory
let's call it—we would think about how we will choose to inhabit that place.

Thoreau answered this question by moving to Walden and then setting up a daily regimen that consisted of four hours of walking in the woods. Of course not all of us have a pond to go live at for free (squatting on Emerson's land) or an ancestral family home to return to like Berry's, and the effect of these grand visionaries, and their grand actions, may be to make us run away and hide, or at least to claim, defensively, that what they did has no bearing on us, or on the “real world.” After all, when we get done with work, with playing with our kids, with eating and drinking and sleeping, most of us don't have a four hour chunk of time left over for frolicking with the muskrats. But, I would argue, if we return to the idea of a limited wild, and take what these thinkers say seriously, but also with a small grain of salt, we might find that there are cracks
in the day, limited times when that limited wild can sneak in. And I would suggest that it is possible and even crucial to regard the place where you live, be it urban or rural, as your first wilderness, and as such more immediately vital and relevant than the national park you drive or fly to.

I have meandered again. But it seems only right to let Thoreau and Darwin have the last word of this chapter. What follows are the final four sentences of
Walden
and the last line of
Origin of Species
:

Back to my walk back down Harvard Square to the river. It's a walk I took a hundred times during the months I waited for my wife to give birth. For the record, Dan isn't the only one who found something in the sight of hundreds of night herons roosting along the Charles. And he isn't the only one who took some solace in daily trips to the river.

In fact, it got to the point where my wife started teasing me about it.

“Your beloved Charles,” she called it.

Soon I am back on that beloved river. Cambridge is a strange town, in many ways more complex than its cliché image as the People's Republic of Cambridge. Yes, it is crammed with PhDs, and is the home of Harvard and MIT, but it is also the most racially (and internationally) diverse of Boston's cities, and despite the gaudy prices of Brattle Street real estate, it actually has a median household income closer to Waltham's than Wellesley's. As I figured, it is not too hard to bum a ride, what with everyone heading downtown to see the fireworks, and, for the small price of the six pack of Harpoon IPA, I am now riding in luxury, barely lifting my arm to paddle, carried forward like an emperor in the canoe's middle.

I float the last section of the Charles in a canoe with some MIT grads. It has been my experience that writing a book is sometimes a bit like being a healthy schizophrenic, that when it's going good every person you meet,
or book you read, seems to fit perfectly into your larger symbolic world. True to this, the woman paddling next to us, in a small, handmade wooden kayak, turns out to be engaged in an environmental battle of her own. Her name is Sandy and she is an MIT scientist, and for years she has been working to help clean up the outfall pipe, a controversial experiment in treating Boston's sewage and dumping it in the sea. She is fascinating and I nod from my canoe, but what I am really thinking is that I need to take a leak. I eye a patch of willows, which seems to me the last private spot before the esplanade. Meanwhile the whole town seems to have emptied out onto the streets. Hordes head down to the Hatch Shell to watch the fireworks.

While the women in my canoe sip cherry beer home brew, I give up all pretense of helping and put down my paddle. Lindsay, the girl in the back, is talking nervously, using words that are rarely found outside of the SATs, but I am focused on the view. This section of river inspires a regional chauvinism in me. I stare up at the MIT bridge and then down at the Prudential and Hancock buildings. Then there's the Citgo sign above Fenway which says Boston to me almost as much as the next sight I see: a car being towed.

The section we are paddling was once a tidal river and the banks where people walk were marshland. The river was dammed and the marshes filled in, which makes this section of the Charles about as “natural” as a ride at Riverworld. But, having spent some pages extolling Dan Driscoll's work to alter the river, I can hardly flip hats and come out against this artificial section of the Charles. The Basin is often said to serve the same purpose of Central Park in New York, and during my own years in Boston I took solace in getting out here whenever I could. But
compared to the section I just paddled with Dan it feels like a city park, which is what it is after all. It may be the lack of trees, or just the crowds both on and off the water, but I suddenly feel ready to quit the river. My canoe hosts kindly deposit me by the willows where, after making use of the natural facilities, I walk the final half-mile downtown.

Storrow Drive is shut down to cars, just like in Dan's fantasies. “Too bad it's not permanent,” he'll say later. Yellow-slickered state police try to keep some order but it is useless. There are hotdogs and tents and cranes and cops and people in biking hats and boats tied up and, by the way, over four hundred thousand people. Powerboats fly up the river and helicopters buzz overhead. There's still an hour before I'm supposed to meet Dan again. I buy a hotdog and find a spot by the river to sit that is, if not quiet, at least private, tucked behind some bushes. From my pocket I pull the wet, rumpled notes that I have been working on during the trip.

It occurs to me that, after spending the last few days squabbling with Nordhaus and Shellenberger, I am ready to reach a sort of truce. The two men do have something important to offer to the picture of a “new environmentalist” that has been emerging from my notes. While at first I didn't like their idea of environmentalists as “chipper entrepreneurs,” I am starting to see that, if you strike the word “chipper,” there is something to this notion.

In the end I'm willing to give an inch. My definition of this “new environmentalism” is wide, and since it is wide it can accommodate the new entrepreneurial model, albeit an entrepreneurial model that is rooted in the wildness of given places we inhabit. This expanding picture fits my idea of a less pure, less clean environmentalism. And it fits my picture of human nature. After all, Dan Driscoll's vision
isn't a simple one. It's not a passive one either. He decided to use his energy, his ambition, his goals, his know-how, his persuasive abilities, everything he had to make this vision come to pass.

What is Dan Driscoll if not an entrepreneur? Though fired by idealism, my theoretical eco-being is essentially pragmatic: he or she will wing a deal to save
some
land, even if it means giving something up. That is because actually getting something done in the world always trumps theory. The fact is I like this picture of the new environmentalist—eco-fighter as hustler—that is emerging. Not some guy wearing a bearskin and speaking in hushed tones but someone common-sensical, smart, hard-headed. Someone who understands that for most of us the wild we fight for is a limited wild and that we fight it with an imperfect, limited environmentalism. This new picture is that of a man or woman who knows how to get things done, who understands the value of momentum, of focus on a particular project. Not a shrill or dry or particularly flowery environmentalism or environmentalist. Someone willing to get in a fight and “Sue the bastards.” Someone willing to stick their nose in there and feel what it's like to get bruised. And someone willing to stay locked in that fight for years, even if it costs them emotional as well as actual capital. I remember walking through the woods as a teenager and ripping up a dollar bill, fancying myself a new Thoreau. It's time to store that romantic model in mothballs and remember that the real Thoreau, as the writer Robert Sullivan has recently pointed out, was at least in part a hard-headed entrepreneur working at innovation in the family pencil business.

Finally my fantasy eco-fighter would have a virtue that has fallen out of favor in recent times even, and perhaps
especially, amongst environmentalists—a virtue that Emerson and Thoreau once held in high esteem: nonconformity. I suppose you could say that what is required is a way of looking at the world somewhat at odds with the way that most people look at it. In fact, it may be that an underrated aspect of committing to nature is the willingness to be considered strange. Or, at the very least, unconventional. To be a true environmentalist is, even within the current vogue, often to invite social ridicule. Go ask someone not to toss their cigarette on the beach and see what happens. Some bravery is required. There is a possibility of conflict. Nonconformity, as necessary as it is to accomplish new things, isn't easy. Seeking approval is encoded in most of us, a basic component of being a social primate. What could be easier and more natural, and sensible, than to please the parents, to become the doctor or lawyer or whatever? There's got to be something wrong in the kid who doesn't, something a bit off.

Even in a time when environmentalism is all the rage, to do something truly environmental—even something as simple as asking someone to pick up litter or a cigarette—is to invite some degree of scorn and ridicule. So what? Scorn and ridicule are not so bad in the face of love. When you're energized and motivated by joy
for
something rather than just being
against
something, asking someone to clean something up or think twice doesn't feel superior or moralistic, it just feels logical.

I scribble down my emerging picture of this creation, this prototype, my new environmentalist. Eastern but Western. Romantic but practical. Able to quote a poem and swing a deal. Equally unafraid of thought and action. Of course there is no such animal, or no such exact
animal. But the encouraging thing is that there are thousands of like animals, all prowling and defending their territories, all around this country and the world.

As I write, I am aware that the examples of fighters that I have used, from Dan Driscoll to Art Cooley to Ken Sleight, have their limits. Many are male, which is certainly not to say that even a majority of “fighters” are male—look at Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, Diane Wilson—just that a few of the ones that I've bumped into are. They also may tend to be a tad on the aggressive side, and are not exactly teetotalers, which again likely reflects the character of the writer who sought them out. But the beauty of the fight, and the fighters, is that they are in no way restricted to this small group or to the narrow characteristics of that group. The fact is that this ideal environmentalist does not have to be a chipper entrepreneur or even an entrepreneur at all, doesn't have to hew to any of the specific characteristics I have outlined. All they need to do is pick a fight worth fighting and then, in accordance with their own temperament, personality, and DNA, fight that fight in their own way.