My Green Manifesto. David Gessner
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it seemed to fit my present mood, and I’d heard that Nordhaus and Shellenberger, like me, have grown tired of both musty mysticism and hysterical apocalypse-ism, favoring a more practical, hard-headed brand of environmentalism. I find myself nodding through their initial arguments as the authors criticize yet another manner of speaking about nature, that of the technocrat.
It gradually dawns on me, though, that the two authors seem to rail against the technocracy with their own form of techno-speak. I really wanted to like this book, but while I am full of admiration for these two men—mostly for their willingness to jab a stick in the environmental hornets’ nest—as I read on it seems to me that they ultimately lack a truly creative response to crisis. They want “greatness,” which they conveniently define as their own Apollo energy proposals. They tell me that what drives those of us interested in nature—which they consistently, ridiculously define as “hiking”—is a kind of post-materialist affluence, mocking anyone who might have more complex reasons to seek out the non-human world. Meanwhile, they happily belittle the contributions of old time environmental heroes like Rachel Carson. They seem to believe that human beings started to think about nature in the nineteenth century, around the same time Thoreau did, conveniently forgetting, or misplacing, the million years or so when we lived in the natural world.
In fact, what astounds me as I make my way through their text is that I don’t encounter a single rock or tree or bird. Before too long I’m tempted to unzip the tent and toss the book in the river with the rest of the debris headed seaward. It’s not that I disagree with a lot of their premises. Their willingness to criticize their august environmental forefathers, to suggest that the problems of poverty and environmentalism are deeply intertwined, is definitely praiseworthy. And whether or not you agree with them, their take is refreshing in that they try to shake things up. They also, for the most part, attempt to translate environmental policy into English while eschewing the gloomy rhetorical style that environmentalists have been known for since the dark days of the seventies when Jimmy Carter and his sweater first preached to us about conserving.
And yet the book is a hard slog. The authors constantly stress the need for a larger “vision,” using the word again and again, but their own vision remains a little murky. Like so many professional activists, they seem to suffer from conservative think-tank envy, waxing poetic about the Republicans’ ability to appeal to our self-interest through “core values,” as if values were merely strategic and vision merely a selling point. They suggest, for instance, that environmentalists focus more on “the job creation benefits of things like retrofitting every home and building in America.” Well, retrofitting is nice, but it’s not exactly a vision for a livable future—maybe just a trip to Home Depot.
Then there’s a larger problem: The authors tell us that environmentalists don’t acknowledge the potential of human beings, and that they, on the other hand, hope to free our great human potential. But their view of human beings is cobbled together from a mish-mash of humanist psychologists, neo-conservative critics, and what they keeps stressing are the great breakthroughs of social psychology over “the last fifty years,” which seems a particularly arbitrary time period when considering human development.
What does it all add up to? They sell human beings way short. They discount, for all their talk of vision, the power of ideas. Take environmentalism, for instance: according to the authors it came about in the sixties because we as a society had become “post-material” and affluent, which led to the great liberal agenda that environmentalism was part of. They dismiss as antiquated and dusty anyone who buys into the old mythos, anyone who dares believe that actual thinkers and writers, like Rachel Carson, had an influence on how people acted. Carson’s story in fact is just the sort of cobwebbed tale they think we must get rid of. They don’t exactly explain why this is so, nor do they rebut the impact of her ideas on her times—how, for instance, Carson’s book led directly to the congressional hearings that led to the banning of DDT and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. No big deal, I guess. We are nonetheless supposed to buy their premise, based on a crazy quilt of sources, that environmentalism’s flowering owed nothing to ideas but was a mere sociological byproduct of wealth.
The most thought-provoking chapter in their book considers Brazil, but it follows an argument that is deeply confusing, and a bit disturbing. It goes a little like this: Americans are really only concerned about the environment because we are affluent and “post-materialist” (not because human beings evolved in, and therefore probably have some affinity for, nature) and other countries will only care about the environment once they become post-material. Therefore it is imperative that we, rather than in any way try to restrain growth, encourage other nations, like Brazil, to follow us down the post-materialist path. So how can we help save the rainforest? Since only post-materialists can care about the environment, we need to create economic stimulus packages so that other countries become affluent, and post-material, and therefore are ready to save their environment that—oops—will already have disappeared in the process of their becoming post-material. They claim we are hypocrites not to try and help others to have what the United States has, but then again they acknowledge that if others have what we have the world will be ruined.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger begin their book by citing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, and end by again claiming that what we need is vision. But Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision was a clear and passionate one: All people should be treated equally and fairly. Here is their dream, as I summarize it: Countries should achieve an abundance similar to the United States and gradually achieve a post-materialism that will allow them, gradually, to get interested in environmentalism (and hiking). Not quite as catchy as King’s, you must admit. It makes you wonder why they so dislike the old dream—the one about “saving the world.”
What most surprises me is how these two ever ended up going into a field that had the word “environment” in it. Their bios state that they have spent their entire careers as part of, or advisers to, environmental organizations, and you can’t help but feel they would have benefited from taking a few other jobs, maybe even one that got them out of the office. It isn’t just that they seem to have little respect for the idealistic, passionate environmentalists who came before them, it’s that I see no evidence at all that either of these men, at any point in their lives, have ever interacted with the nature that they so like to theorize about. They seem to care little for the natural world, except as it pertains to theories and models.
You’ll have to forgive me, dear reader, for going on so long about these two individually, but as I fume I realize they are coming to embody for me much of what is wrong with the environmental movement these days: primarily the belief that humans are only data points; that theory and policy will guide us beyond the troubled present we occupy and the future it suggests. Policy and theory are great, but they’re only as strong as the belief of the people meant to follow them. So Nordhaus and Shellenberger come in for a beating here, but only because, to date, they’re the best effigies I’ve found yet for the environmental technocracy. Sorry guys.
I sleep pretty well on a cushion of pine duff and only get up twice during the night. Once to piss and another time when a loud noise jerks me out of sleep—just the commuter train rumbling past a couple of miles away, letting off the shriek of its whistle. And then another noise, much stranger, a noise that the train’s whistle calls up. The train initiates the dialogue, but the coyotes continue it eagerly. They howl wildly for a good half hour after the train has passed, their howling in turn setting off the distant yipping and wailing of domestic dogs. The blurry dialogue between what is wild and what is tame seems particularly appropriate as a lullaby. I think back to when I lived in the city this river is bound for, the year my daughter was born and the year I tracked the coyotes that have made this their urban territory, their tracks then tracing a path in the snow along the frozen Charles, right down into the city’s heart.
I listen to the chorus for a while, how long I don’t remember, before drifting back off to sleep.
I wake to a river covered with mist. A blanket of white