The Tarball Chronicles. David Gessner
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lunch Jim pulled out his iPod and showed me that, though it felt calm, the winds on the Sound were blowing strong enough to provide us with around 67 percent of our electrical needs, even during the crowded summer.18
“The environment is changing with or without Cape Wind,” he said. “This region is one of the most susceptible to sea level rise. Already you’ve got insurance companies pulling out from houses within a half mile of shore. You’ve got more intense storms, beaches eroding. And as the population doubles, where is our energy going to come from? It would be nice if it were a choice between Cape Wind and nothing. But it isn’t. It’s either gas and coal or us. We need to make some hard choices.”
I liked what Jim was getting at, but what I liked even more was that he admitted his motives were not pure:
“My opponents say, ‘He just wants to make money.’ And I do want to make money. I want to show that it’s not just coal-driven power or oil-powered power plants that make money. Alternative energy can make money.”
I have held on to that conversation during these dark times in the Gulf. While this past April was a bad mnth environmentally, there was one bright note that did not get much attention outside of the Northeast. During the very same week that the oil started gushing, Jim’s project, the first offshore wind farm in the country’s history, was approved by the Department of the Interior.19
Perhaps I can better explain what I am talking about by using an example of what I am not talking about. Not long ago I watched a film of a lecture recommended by a friend who knew I was going to the Gulf. In the lecture, Jeremy Jackson, a famous coral reef ecologist, described the current and future state of our ocean. The news was bleak: corals are gone, fish are gone, algae blooms are everywhere, and the ocean floors now look paved, all previous growth dug up by trawling that kills the very grounds where future fish will be born. In twenty years we will have only minnows left, and that if we are lucky. Jackson’s talk was an apocalyptic tour de force and you could see people in the audience nodding even as their hearts and hopes sank. Then, after delivering his funeral oration for twenty minutes or so, he concluded: “The thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It’s not about the fish, it’s not about the pollution, it’s not about the climate change. It’s about us, and our greed, and our need for growth. . . .”
It sounded familiar: we need to change something basic about ourselves. I think Jackson is probably right about the fate of the oceans. Certainly I would not debate him on a subject that he has spent his life studying. But I think he is dead wrong about human nature. I would argue that while he was busy staring down at sea urchins through his microscope, he did not keep quite as careful note of the species he is part of.
“We humans are an elsewhere,” said my old friend and mentor, the poet and essayist Reg Saner.20 The natural human state is that of hunger. We are always reaching, reaching, grasping, wanting to be somewhere other than where we are. It is not my role to stand apart from this and say, “No, it is bad to reach and grasp.” That is as foolish as it is ineffective. A better question is how to use this desire, and the unimaginable energy it unleashes. Is it possible to change the objects we grasp for? To refine and revise what we mean by “more” and “better”?
Talk of our doom is supposed to motivate us to change, but most often it leaves us feeling impotent. Rather than cause us to fight, it makes us withdraw. And to set the problem in terms of changing our basic nature is to insure it is a fight we will lose. It would be like saying to a bee, “You’ll be okay as long as you stop buzzing and working so hard on the hive.” If we set ourselves against human nature we propose an impossibility, insuring our own failure.
The question is not “How do we change human nature?” That has never been the question. The question is “How do we use human nature?”—just as surely as it is “How do we use the river or the tides or the winds?” The environmentalism that makes me most uneasy is a rationalist’s environmentalism, one that seems to hint at the perfectibility of man. I do not believe that humans are perfectible, or even very rational. We are a tribe with restless minds. We move and we shake and we need fuel to do it. For most of us, there is no greater punishment than sitting still and, faced with our current crises, we are not going to suddenly turn ourselves into Zen monks. Instead, maybe, at best, we can take some of this restlessness and energy and put it to better uses. Maybe we can nudge it in new directions, or, better yet, divert it toward older, deeper channels where it used to run. Maybe, as we do this, we can be guided, not just by the desire for ease, but also by older ideals of sacrifice; of good work and growth and wildness beyond an engineer’s dream of straight lines.
Which does not mean we should deny our engineers entirely, just suggest that they work with the world and not against it. We all have an engineer’s voice inside us—calm, rational, logical. We need those voices in difficult times, but we have made the mistake of thinking that that one voice is all. It is not: along with that voice we need one that is wild, inspired, simultaneously guided by, but somehow beyond, mere reason. It isn’t that I don’t believe in reason, willpower, all that; it’s just that I believe in this other thing too. And that other thing is where we merge with the world beyond us, a world that does not believe in straight lines. This is not a New Age sentiment. It is rather a very old one, one we need to get back to. The trouble is that we seem hell-bent on destroying the only thing that might hold a clue to an alternative way to be. And that thing we are destroying is a machine of such complexity that it makes our strongest computers look like children’s toys.
Over the last few years we have lost a clear-cut definition of what it means to be environmental, and that is good. So many things are mixed up that we have now entered a world where developers can be the good guys. I like that things have become muddied and complicated. I like that, at the moment, two of my favorite environmentalists are a businessman from Boston and a conservative Louisiana fishing guide, both driven as much by self-interest as their desire to save the world. Maybe they are the poster children for a new environmentalism, a hard-nosed environmentalism that sees how wind and water can coincide with profit.
Maybe it is time for the word environmentalism to go away altogether. Maybe the word needs to be knocked over and shattered. Whatever we call the shards that are left, it is not time to think in terms of black and white, good and bad. Black and white is what led to the checkerboard grid that covers the delta, slicing and sinking the marsh. What we need is creative, energetic thinking, but thinking that really takes the world into account—what my father called “the real world,” though his meaning was the opposite of mine. The real world is the one that has been here for millennia, not the industrial model that has been stamped upon us over the last hundred years.
We need to unleash our imaginations, wedding them to good science and engineering, while working with the world. This is not a conservative or liberal issue. It is a practical one. How will we next fuel our tribe? What juice will make us go? Do we keep pumping what is basically a dry hole, in the meantime taking risks that will destroy not just ecosystems and habitats and animals, but lifestyles and human culture? Do we do this in the name of sucking the last drops out of an old well, an old way? Or do we start doing now what we will have to do soon enough: looking for a new one?
RUSSIAN DOLLS
We reach the outer edges of the Barataria Bay, our boats landing on a barrier island facing the Gulf. It is hot, midday hot, and we climb out and start walking across the island, a thin patch of sand that stretches out for a couple of miles. Until a few moments ago the place was mostly populated by terns. True, there are a few crabs and laughing gulls and millions of crustaceans and insects and about a hundred million microscopic creatures that I can’t see, but until five minutes ago, no human beings. Now there are six of us marching across the island, and we do so in a remarkably self-conscious manner, a manner perhaps unique to our species. While terns are poseurs of a sort, aggressively defensive birds that always make far too big a show of defending their turf, they have nothing on humans. We, as a species, may be overly proud of our uniqueness, but one way that we are undeniably