My Green Manifesto. David Gessner
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up to meet them.
Groggily, I return to last night’s argument with Nordhaus and Shellenberger. It turns out that they bug me as much in daylight as after dark. These two claim to dislike scoldings, but their book sure feels like one. After reading for awhile, I prowl my small patch of shoreline. I feel chastised and it isn’t chastisement that we need. We need the opposite. We need language—simple, plain, impassioned—that can be used both to describe our love for nature and to rally humans, actual people living in the world, to the fight to save it. A language that calls us away from computers, think tanks, and ethereal theories so that we may return to the ground truths of the places we call home. Why talk about language again, you ask, when there are polar bears to save? Because language comes first, the source, the rallying cry before the fight.
One thing I do enjoy in Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s book is their fondness for Winston Churchill. The biographer William Manchester wrote of Churchill’s speeches during World War II: “Another politician might have told them: ‘Our policy is to continue the struggle; all our focus and resources will be mobilized.’ ”4 Instead Churchill’s words rose to the occasion and he spoke directly of sacrifice, of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”5 If we are indeed entering a time of crisis—and everyone tells us we are—then we will need the direct and urgent language of crisis, a language that fills us with hope, despite the darkness.
Part of what a living language must do is address the crisis itself, but more importantly it must tackle the psychology of environmentalism. How do we go from engaging in a full-on panic attack to taking small steps, from listless apathy to the beginnings of action on a wide and wild scale? For me those questions spring from this one: Why save a world you don’t care about? After all, how do we fight for something that is no longer a part of our lives? Or to put it another way, how do we start to care for something we have nothing to do with? Beyond buying into the faddish popularity of our new all-green, all-natural, consumerism, the majority of people in this country have little to no contact with the natural world in their daily lives. What this new language must do, in clearly unsentimental terms, is to cultivate a return to, a love and delight for, wildness. Because that is what we are losing when we lose daily contact with birds, animals, trees, water, and land. Part of the problem, of course, is what I would call the nature calendar view of nature: over there is spectacular untrammeled NATURE and then there’s what we’ve got. But I am here to say that what we’ve got, right here, trammeled and all, ain’t so bad. We simply need to fall in love with what is left, with the limited wildness that remains. That is what Dan Driscoll did with the river I’m staring out at now. He saw past the piles of Coors Light cans and shopping carts floating in the water and fell for the coyotes, the hills, and the black crowned night herons that had come back to nest along the shore.
My own experience suggests that love, and sometimes hate, are much better motivators than theory. For several years—the most intense years of my life in many ways—I lived on a deserted beach on Cape Cod, squatting in the homes of the wealthy during the off-season, and during that time I fell hard for one particular section of rocky beach.
I didn’t clearly recognize it at the time but that period was a love affair. And then the love affair was interrupted when, one day, someone began constructing a trophy home on the bluff. I was filled with something close to rage, and for the first time in my life, found myself attending town meetings and writing letters of protest. I bring this last point up, not to boast of any strain of righteousness, but because I believe it speaks to what motivates many of us to act. The writer Jack Turner puts it well: “To reverse this situation we must become so intimate with wild animals, with plants and places, that we answer to their destruction from the gut. Like when we discover the landlady strangling our cat.”6 Our greatest environmentalists, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir among them, were instinctive fighters, who also happened to spend plenty of time outdoors. More of us need to follow their lead. It is not my place to offer pep talks, aphorisms, or dictums. But if I had to give one piece of practical advice it would be this: Find something that you love that they’re fucking with and then fight for it. If everyone did that—imagine the difference.
If environmental psychology is my topic, some of the pressing questions are: What allows a person to go beyond paying lip service to nature and to actually live with it in this modern, muddled world? How can we fall in love with something so limited and wounded? And how can we go from loving to fighting? Finally, we must consider what role, if any, that hope plays in these questions.
A while back I read an essay by a writer named Derrick Jensen, in which he argued for a politics of hopelessness. I couldn’t disagree more. Without hope and the energy it provides we curl into the mental equivalent of the fetal position, hiding from the world. “Where there is no hope, there can be no endeavor,” wrote Samuel Johnson.7 He was not talking about the Disney variant of hope, but the real animal. It’s the light that filters down into our dark brains, sparking our neurons. The brightening after darkness, which energizes like the quickening of the world in spring. A thawing and movement into activity, an activity that then gains momentum. This is hope as a physical thing: The hope that spring inspires, after the long winter.
It is just this sort of hope that energizes me now as I pace this bank, hope spiced, of course, with a dash or two of vitriol. A fine cocktail. It occurs to me to write a manifesto, but one quite different from Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s. My agenda is simple: To describe the ways that my own life, and the lives of some people I admire, are connected to the natural world, and the benefits that come from that connection, benefits that are not always obvious. To provide a way for those of us who would blanch at calling ourselves environmentalists to begin to at least think of ourselves as fighters, in the way that citizens suddenly think of themselves as soldiers during times of war. Finally, by both argument and example, to provide a new language for those of us who care about nature.
II. A LIMITED WILD
ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISTS
Rags of mist drift above the river. Despite the usual hassle of breaking camp, and sore arms from the day before, I feel good this morning. Part of that is the simple pleasure of being on the river, and part is the “phew” element that accompanies any morning after a night of solo camping. As in, “Phew, I wasn’t killed by bears,” or, in this case, joggers or coyotes. I stuff my clothes and gear into their appropriate bags, pack the kayak, and I am back on the water. The sun greets me around the first bend, burning off the mist, and around the next I look back at the chalky outline of a nearly full moon.
Though my cell phone is dead, I trust Dan has figured that out, and I assume that we will meet, as planned, just a quarter mile downstream at Bridge Street in the town of Dover. I look forward to seeing Dan, and to turning this solo journey into a group adventure, but moreover I look forward to something that Dan’s wife Donna has promised to bring: coffee.
I met Donna, and the Driscolls’ son Dylan, in Wellfleet when I picked up the kayaks. Dylan was a delightfully rambunctious two-year-old who instantly made me homesick for my four-year-old daughter, Hadley. Donna I was less sure about at first.
“I’m here to make a hero of your husband!” I said to break the ice. I expected something either supportive or sardonic in return but instead she said simply, “Well, someone should do it.” She seemed similarly distant as Dan and I sat on his porch poring over maps to plan our trip. I guess I understood that while I was offering Dan adventure, all I was offering her was a couple of days as a single parent. The only moment she perked up was when I mentioned that I was enlisting a friend of mine, a kayak guide, to be our “Sherpa,” making sure the kayaks and cars were all in the right place, and helping supply us with food and drink along the way. It turned out that this was something that she would be interested in doing—for a price. Wanting to please Dan, and his family, I instantly said yes, not really thinking through the possible challenges of a wife serving as a husband’s