My Green Manifesto (8 page)

Much has been made, of course, of the fact that celebrity environmentalists like Gore, McKibben, or even DiCaprio jet around the world to deliver their speeches about burning less fuel, and, on a much smaller scale, I'm
the same sort of hypocrite. Over the last couple of months I have been flying all over the country, from sea to shining sea, burning massive amounts of fossil fuel as I preach, in part, about burning less fossil fuel. Call me Son of Gore.

I've been feeling a little bad about this but there is something freeing about Dan's admission that we are all, to some extent, full of shit. The larger point that he is making, and that I couldn't agree with more, is that none of us are pure, none clean.

It occurs to me that, in its frankness and open humor, this attitude could do the environmental movement a world of good. We need to start again, I'm convinced, and we might do that by admitting that we are limited, human animals, not idealistic, über creatures. This may seem obvious enough, and I certainly would have thought it so, but over the last few months, as I've traveled, I have come in contact with a certain type of environmentalist that I once thought was merely the bogeymen of far-right conservative imaginations. I once regarded “environmental extremists” the way I did the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot, but it turns out
they are real
.

My first encounter came when I agreed to be on a scholarly panel with the writer I mentioned earlier, Derrick Jensen. A couple of weeks before the panel I sent out a friendly e-mail to the other panelists, suggesting we bounce some ideas off each other. Here is a sampling from the e-mail I got in response from him:

The other writers and I felt a little cowed by the note, embarrassed that we had been up to then corresponding about such minor concerns as semicolons, tree frogs, and imagery. We worried that we were poseurs next to Derrick, that we should immediately
do
something, maybe burn our bras or draft cards. I read his e-mail to a friend, a writer who is much more careful about keeping his politics out of his essays than I am. He told me a story about a Marxist poet who accosted Robert Frost and said: “No poetry is worth its name unless it moves people to action.” Frost replied: “I agree. The question is,
how soon
?”

I admired Jensen's passion, and realized that, face-toface, we might have more in common than not. The sheer earnestness of environmentalism can make me uneasy, but force me to choose between a tad too much earnestness and melting ice caps and I'll take earnestness every time. Still, something about his tone unsettled me. I was reminded of one of my oldest friends, a man who not long ago became obsessed with the theory of peak oil.

Peak oil is the idea that we have already passed the high point of petroleum production and will run out much faster than most predict, bringing the world as we know it grinding to a halt in the near future. It certainly could
be true, but it is far from a certainty. My problem is that this old friend, who is otherwise a very nice guy, has let it take over his life. Everything—his friends, his family, his job—is now seen through the lens of peak oil. His marriage, for instance, has dissolved, in part because he was critical of his wife for being concerned with quotidian things like playing tennis and going out to dinner. How could she care about such petty concerns when the world was about to end? Lately he started talking about taking his kids up to the mountains with other like-minded peak oil-ists where they will grow and can their own food. Despite my own environmental leanings, I can't help but feel that this plan has a Unabomber whiff to it.

I first learned how serious things had gotten when he told me we “needed to talk.” He is not a big talker, so I knew something was up. After a bunch of “um”s and “ah”s, he finally got to his point. A couple years before he and his wife had asked my wife and I to be the legal guardians of their children should anything happen to them. But now he was having second thoughts. When I asked why, he
um
-ed and
ah
-ed some more before mumbling something that I had to ask him to repeat.

“I'm not sure you're going to make it,” he said.

“Make it?”

“In the coming times.”

Then, by way of explanation, he added: “You and your wife know nothing about canning food.”

All I could do was shake my head. Not so much at the silliness of what he said as at the tone, the sheer certainty with which he said it. I, too, believe that the next centuries will bring some radical changes and that out of necessity our worlds, and food, will become more local. But still, I
couldn't help but feel that he had become a Dickens character, consumed by his ONE IDEA while forgetting anything that fell outside that theory: friends, say, or common sense, or his wife.

I've been thinking about my old friend as I wrestle with my own desire to fight for the environment, while still fighting against calling myself an “environmentalist.”

Maybe this resistance springs from my ingrained suspicion of being part of anything organized (especially now that it's popular). This urge to resist labels might not have any larger repercussions, but then again it might. I think it may come from a fear of seeing the world too simply, of falling into the trap of believing there
is
just one answer, one way, one thing, one solution. And perhaps it is the larger fear of creating a too-simple map of the world in a time when the world could not possibly be more complex, messy, and interconnected.

Or maybe I'm just afraid? “The earth is our home,” the writer Edward Abbey said simply enough, “And we must protect our home.” So what do I say to that? Well, in response I lean on another writer, a writer who was Abbey's contemporary, but who fought an entirely different fight. I think of James Baldwin's lines on racism near the end of one of the finest modern essays, “Notes of a Native Son”:

That gets at it best, better than Abbey's blunt passion. The complexity of the challenge, the need to, in Keats' words, “be in uncertainties.” While I want to fight for a green world, I don't want to live my one life on earth as a caricature, a person who sees everything through one lens. It's when environmentalism becomes fundamentalism that I get nervous.

I feel the need to embrace opposites: to understand, on one hand, that life is sloppy, complicated, even ridiculous, and that destroying ourselves may be a fit ending to this farce; but to understand that, on the other hand, we need to fight with all our hearts to preserve what is left of this beautiful mess for our children and grandchildren.

So both ideas, which are, like Baldwin's, “in opposition,” must be held in mind.

Which is not an easy thing to do.

Which may be why so few of us do it.

Obviously I see Dan—hearty, energetic, slightly crazy Dan—as a counterbalance to the Derrick Jensen school of environmentalism. But there's also something about Dan's personal history that strikes me as typical, and possibly archetypical, of environmental fighters. As we paddle down the river Dan fills in more details about that history.

“I was raised in Newton,” he says. “My father eventually ended up as president of Payne Elevator, but he did this with just a high school degree. He started out working class and he was always no-nonsense. I grew up as a kind of punk without any environmental conscience. The thing that changed my world was when my father bought a house in Wellfleet. For years a friend of his from his bowling league tried to get him to buy this place. ‘Where the hell is Wellfleet?' my father said. But this friend talked about how cheap the house was, and the joy of getting down to Cape Cod in the summer. My father just said ‘I have a house already.' Finally, one day, over a few drinks, the guy wore him down. My dad ended up agreeing to buy the house, sight unseen, for 9,500 dollars. When he got home and told my mother she threw a fit. ‘Are you crazy?' she yelled. Then she said the same thing my dad did. ‘Why do we need a house in
Wellesley
? We already have a house.' ”

Cape Cod stirs up associations of tennis courts and yacht clubs, and, more recently, of oversized trophy houses, but the Cape of that time, the sixties, was still
the destination for many Massachusetts families, not just the rich. The father's purchase, an impulse buy after years of restraint, would change the course of his third child's life. Dan began spending summers in Wellfleet, and that, by his own account, transformed him.

“My father didn't have an environmental bone in his body, but suddenly I was spending time at a place that had marshes right out the back door. Whole days mucking around out on the marsh digging steamers and mussels and oysters. Some nights I fed our family from the marsh and I started a small business selling shellfish to neighbors. Something in me changed out there. I think in a lot of ways Wellfleet was the catalyst for the work I've done on the river. If I—through my love of the marshes on Cape Cod—could be transformed into someone with an eco-conscience then so could others. I thought, ‘Well let's create other places for kids who maybe aren't lucky enough to go to the Cape. Let's give them some nature right at home.' And that's a lot of what drives me to create these wild places for kids to interact with nature.”

“How did you start working for the state?” I ask him.

“Well I had been kicking around from job to job in my twenties. I was finally about to begin something real. I was going to start a nursery on Cape Cod. I had all the money together and everything. Then I drove down to Wellfleet and stayed up all night thinking. I thought about what that place meant to me and what I really wanted to do with my life. The next day I drove back to the University of Vermont, where I'd gone to school, and talked to my old professors. They told me I could start getting extension school credits toward a master's in natural resources planning.

“My father said, ‘Don't do it. You're running away. You're not facing the world.' ”

Left unsaid is that his father was dead wrong: This was exactly how Dan eventually faced the world. In fact, his rebellion from his father is an essential aspect of what I am coming to call, in my head, The Myth of Dan. Gary Snyder wrote that the West is a country of “men removed from the father image.” Substitute “wilderness” for West and you can broaden the meaning. Theodore Roosevelt, to name our greatest presidential conservationist, knew this first hand from his pilgrimages to the Badlands, the place that transformed him from a soft New York Daddy's boy into something harder and wilder.

The Myth of Dan goes something like this: as a child, the Dan Figure (as we will call him) discovers something in nature, something he will lose along the way. Later, as a young man, he wanders aimlessly before returning to that childhood place away from society, into nature, a place of solitude, where he forms his vision. Part of this retreat involves a break from the parents. But retreat is not the end of it. Equally important is what the Dan Figure brings back from his retreat. He must return with something—a vision, a book, an idea—and then he must present that thing to the world.

So the short version is: Dan finds nature as child, Dan wanders lost, Dan breaks from his father, Dan retreats to nature, Dan returns to the world....

Let me add that I am aware that one of the reasons that I am attracted to Dan's myth is narcissistic: His quest bears more than a little resemblance to The Myth of Dave. I wouldn't be on this river at all if I hadn't made the odd decision, after graduating from college, of heading, not to law school or Wall Street, but to a town not far from Dan's stomping grounds on Cape Cod. I had only known that peninsula in the summers and decided, during my first year on my own, to live there in the off-season. I don't remember
how long it took me to realize that I had done a miraculous thing by moving to the Cape in September. The year startled me. The wind swept out the clinging heat and the tourists, and ushered in that clarifying light that made each and every object—each blade of eel grass or cormorant on a rock or outline of the gibbous moon—look like the only thing left on earth. I watched the leafy world redden, the sumac and poison ivy bloodying the bluffs right around the time of the cranberry harvest. I laughed as thousands of swallows gathered in groups, staging before their trip south, and speckle-bellied starlings lined the phone wires, and for the first time I began to learn the names of birds. Also, I began my first book and became more confident in my seemingly delusional decision to become a writer. Looking back, I sometimes feel that from that moment onward all my choices somehow spring from that first wild fall. Obviously my life did not begin at twenty-three, and the roots of what I did go back much further. But so much, for me, hinged on my decision not to advance but to retreat.