My Green Manifesto

by David Gessner

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY DAVID GESSNER:

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  “DIRTY WATER”

  PRELUDE: THE RIVER MAN

  I. THE SOURCE

  A BACKYARD WILDS

  A NEW MUSIC

  THE FIRE THIS TIME

  FIGHTING WORDS

  II. A LIMITED WILD

  ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISTS

  THE MYTH OF DAN

  A LARGER FIGHT

  THE WILD WEST

  THE IRISH ALEHOUSE

  III. TRANSFORMATION

  THE VISION THING

  BIRD MEN

  ANTAEUS

  ISLAND BOYS

  DAN’S RIVER

  FLIGHT

  IV. INDEPENDENCE DAY

  HENRY’S RIVER

  HEY, HEY WE’RE THE MONKEYS

  FIREWORKS

  BEYOND

  POSTLUDE: THE END OF THE WORLD

  ENDNOTES

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY DAVID GESSNER:

  The Prophet of Dry Hill

  Return of the Osprey

  Soaring with Fidel

  Sick of Nature

  Under the Devil’s Thumb

  A Wild, Rank Place

  To Hadley Gessner, Again and Always

  A man does best when he is most himself.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  It’s not that easy being green.

  —Kermit the Frog

  “DIRTY WATER”

  —Ed Cobb

  I’m gonna tell you a big fat story, baby

  Aww, it’s all about my town

  Yeah, down by the river

  Down by the banks of the river Charles

  Aw, that’s what’s happenin’ baby

  That’s where you’ll find me

  Along with lovers, buggers and thieves

  Aw, but they’re cool people

  Well I love that dirty water

  Oh, Boston you’re my home

  ’Cause I love that dirty water

  Oh, Boston you’re my home (oh, yeah)1

  PRELUDE: THE RIVER MAN

  We are paddling our rock-battered canoe down a particularly stunning section of the river, twisting between steep granite walls and overhanging trees, as we travel toward the hidden city at river’s end. Over the past hours we have heard coyotes howl and watched deer wade, observed a sharp-shinned hawk swoop into the canopy, swallows cut above the water in front of us, kingfishers ratchet past, and toasted with beers to congratulate ourselves after an exhilarating ride through rapids. If I squint I can imagine myself on a great and wild river, the Amazon or Congo or, at least, the Colorado, and can imagine the man steering the canoe behind me as an epic adventurer, Teddy Roosevelt, say, hurtling down the River of Doubt.

  The truth is slightly less glamorous. The truth is this isn’t the Amazon but the Charles—a name that conjures up images less adventurous and wild than fancy and effete, not to mention domesticated and decidedly British—and that the hidden city ahead is known, in the native tongue, as Bawhston. What’s more, the dwellings we will soon pass will not be primitive huts but Super Stop & Shops, and the Homo sapiens we’ll encounter downriver will not be headhunters but Harvard students, and, if I am perfectly honest, the fearless leader in the stern isn’t Teddy R. but a state worker named Dan Driscoll, who I once played some Ultimate Frisbee with, and who we referred to, in those days, as “Danimal.”

  We like to strip down myths, we modern folk, and it’s easy enough to quickly strip our journey of all its mythic qualities: to see it as a pretty modest trip on a pretty modest river with a modest enough guy. But if our adventure has not been a life-or-death journey into a vast, untamed wilderness, the truth is I have been consistently astonished over the last couple of days, not just by the hidden wildness of the river but by Driscoll himself. The man’s own considerable energy, which I had only previously witnessed when he chased down Frisbees like a border collie, is equally apparent when he talks about his efforts to revitalize the river we travel down.

  “It started back around 1990 when I was working as a planner for the state,” he tells me as we paddle. “Someone in the office said ‘Why don’t you take a look at the Charles?’ I think they were just trying to give the new kid something to do. Little did they know. I looked over the maps and saw possibilities. I began to plan and scheme. When I first started talking about connecting the river paths, everyone looked at me like I was crazy. I said, ‘Let’s have these green paths that run through the urban areas. Let’s re-plant native plants to bring animals back. Let’s reconnect people to nature.’ Pretty soon I was known as this raging ecological planner.... Next thing I knew I was ‘The River Man.’”

  Dan Driscoll is a man of average height and proportions, fit and compact, thanks in part to his daily bike commute in and out of Boston. Since our Frisbee days his hair has gone white, but his intense eyes still shine out a cracked blue. There is something of the true believer to Dan, as there has to be in anyone who will take on the sort of fight he has; but that intensity is leavened by a certain regular guy-ness and sense of humor.

  As he paddles, he describes what he calls his “radical idea” that being environmental isn’t about education or politics. It’s about what Thoreau called “contact.” Falling in love with something—a place, an animal—and then fighting for it.

  “When I grew up in Newton we always had our butts dragged out to Lincoln to learn about ‘nature.’ The way I look at it, if one kid walks out into his own backyard and has contact with nature, then maybe that will do something. Maybe he’ll be inspired to fight for the place. Maybe he’ll be the next John Muir.”

  He pauses to correct his exaggeration.

  “Or at least maybe he’ll just be less of a dick.”

  Environmentalism is officially hot the summer we paddle down the river. Not long ago Arnold Schwarzenegger posed as a green warrior on the cover of Newsweek, while a couple of spots down the magazine rack Vanity Fair featured Leo DiCaprio standing next to a young polar bear on what I assume was meant to be a melting iceberg. In a few months Al Gore will win a shiny new Oscar for showing us his slide show. In the meantime, celebrities everywhere are tripping over themselves trying to show off their small carbon footprints.

  Many of us understand that the things environmentalists have long told us are right. Though we don’t actually do it, we know that we should eat and drive less. And, on a deeper level, we know that we should conserve. We the people need to move away from our obsession with growth at all costs toward a dependence on local economies, and obviously away from slurping down oil and gobbling resources like a bunch of drunken gluttons. Yes, we know; we understand. But all these shoulds and needs. What about wants and what about fun? We are Americans for God’s sake!

  Why does environmentalism, much of which is just common sense, so often sound like nagging? Particularly deadening is the endless repetition of the phrase “global warming.” We have all seen Uncle Al’s slideshow and are appropriately horrified. But what to do? Certainly the answer doesn’t lie only in screwing in those twisty little light bulbs. Whatever the answer is, it isn’t singing the same songs to the same choir. Maybe it’s overstatement to say that environmentalism, for all the recent media coverage, has lost its soul, but it’s not an overstatement to say that it has lost its power to excite the masses, or, at least, to excite me. And if it can’t excite me, the card-carrying nature guy among my friends, then environmentalism is in trouble.

  For my part, while I have spent a lot of time in the natural world and can talk almost unblushingly about my love for it, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the “environmentalist” label. Then again, all my hair splitting
might just be a case of playing Hamlet when what the world needs is action. Whatever we call ourselves, it is time to do something. But what to do when there are so damned many catastrophes, and how to do it without playing out the same old environmentalist Chicken Little act?

  I will not insult you, dear reader, and pretend, for the sake of narrative, that Dan Driscoll is a folksy sage who holds the answers to all these questions. But I will say that, even before I put my paddle in the water, I am starting to think that Dan may hold hints of what I am rooting around for. It occurs to me that Dan might just be the right eco-hero for these times. Not an oversized Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Vulcan-like Al Gore, or even a Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon, but a regular guy fighting a local fight for a limited wilderness—the only sort of wilderness available to most of us. Maybe what is needed isn’t a raging prophet of doom, a stern-faced administrator, or an action hero, but a slightly goofy, stubborn, joyful, ex-Frisbee playing stoner of modest proportions—a stubborn guy who fell in love with a place and then fought like hell for it.

  Life is strange: the way you sometimes start in one place and float elsewhere, seemingly despite—or even without—the self you once were. Dan Driscoll couldn’t have possibly plotted out becoming “The River Man” on a graph, moving from point A to B. As for me, I never set out to become that animal known as a nature writer. Little did I know. But one thing led to another and over the last dozen years I have written six books where the natural world—and birds in particular—keeps sneaking in, while being christened with tenure and the dubious title of “environmental spokesperson.” At the same time I have found myself unhinged over a seemingly simple question: How does any individual—swamped with other concerns and worries—wrestle their way toward a relationship with place and, perhaps, a means of fighting for that place? It isn’t an easy question for me to answer, and I assume that this is also true for you, swamped as you likely are with your job, your family, your life. And so I thought that I, newly a father and overwhelmed with work, might be the right person to help answer the question. Which led me to set out to do what anyone would do in such a bind: write a manifesto.

  What I didn’t realize was that most issuers of manifestos begin with their conclusions concluded, their concrete hardened, and their intentions, motives, and views firmly in mind, or in hand, fit to bash you over the head with. I began, on the other hand, with nothing more than questions—questions as numerous as the sources of the Charles River, and as meandering as the river itself. But trust, dear reader, that though these questions do wander, they also reach the sea, moving toward answers if not the answer.

  In this small book I have welded that intellectual adventure to the physical one of riding the wild Charles with Dan. Perhaps the two were not always as concurrent as they appear in the text (I did not carry a lectern in my canoe, after all) but the two journeys informed each other so deeply that I present them here as one.

  And last, while my thoughts may flow from many sources, Dan Driscoll’s spring directly from the man himself: On the trip I carried a tape recorder wrapped in a zip-lock bag, which means that Dan Driscoll’s words are his own—with the “ums” and “ands” edited out. And of course the amazing feats of derring-do we indulge in, heroically taming the wild river, are also entirely true and factual.

  I. THE SOURCE

  A BACKYARD WILDS

  The original plan had been for Dan and me to paddle the entire river together, but it turned out that for Dan the business of fighting for the Charles takes precedence over the pleasure of floating on it. A state meeting interfered, so I am paddling the first day solo.

  Earlier this morning, however, Dan took some time away from work to drop me off at the launch, driving way too fast down the back roads of Medfield and Norfolk while we drank tubs of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. He explained that the kayak I’d be paddling was an expensive one and not really his but a loaner from a friend. As it turned out he was nervous enough about me navigating my first rapids that he drove to the Pleasant Street Bridge to coach me through the initial series of rocks. He was right to be nervous as I had mostly kayaked on ocean marshes before and, while the rapids on the Charles pale before true river rapids, they were challenging enough to do damage to the boat, if not to me.

  Dan stared down from the bridge above, no doubt wincing when I slammed full on into a half-submerged boulder. After that I self-consciously picked my way along until, at last, I landed in a strong trough of current that whooshed me away and down the river.

  That was how it started. Six hours have passed since then and I have not seen another canoe or kayak. What I have seen is a dazzling array of birds—hawks, wrens, warblers, orioles, tanagers, woodpeckers—and a variety of landscapes that not even the most optimistic nature lover would expect only miles from the tenth largest metropolitan area in the United States. After the exhilaration of the early rapids, I found myself riding a current of tannin-dark water that reflected back the overgrown banks of maple, swamp oak, and beech. Several miles later, the river began to double and triple back on itself, twisting and turning through the great marsh that divides Millis and Medfield, a landscape filled with the rustling of tall phragmite grass and the whistle-skreek punchlines of red-winged blackbirds.

  The day’s weather has been as variable as the landscape with great cloud continents shifting overhead. At one moment I am paddling in scorching midsummer sun, shirt off and sweating, and the next I find myself in the midst of a rain shower. All the while water bugs play across the river, pock-marking the surface along with the raindrops. As I float past, painted turtles plop off the mud banks, swallows swerve above the river hunting for insects, fish jump, and at one point I watch a beaver plow by with a sprig of vegetation in its mouth, leaving a V wake behind.

  I half-expected something like this, but not really like this. What I’m trying to say is that while I knew this trip would be kind of wild—if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have signed on in the first place—what I didn’t expect was the sheer thrill of the experience, the thrill of being alone and discovering a new place, a thrill that reminds me of my first time stumbling upon an Anasazi ruin while hiking through the desert in southeastern Utah. Not that it is as spectacular and novel as that, at least to my Eastern eyes, but the experience itself has held the same bubbling thrill. Part of this comes from the fact that I expected more houses and human intrusion. Occasionally I’ll notice a dock or rowboat that indicates I’m paddling through someone’s backyard, but more often the feeling is one of relative solitude with little indication that I am entering the home turf of over four million human beings. Furthermore, the evidence of human habitation, however minimal, is, in its own way, as thrilling as the long sections of trees. What you see of the houses has a secret childhood feel to it: that rope swing out over the river, the old dock with a dinghy tied up to it, those decayed stairs leading to the water. None of the lawns are of the enormous and mowed variety, and the few houses themselves are only glimpses through the branches and leaves. I can’t help but think how lucky the people are who live there, lucky to have a river moving like a dream through their backyards.

  My point here is not to describe the lovely world, but rather to make some points about saving it. And yet, oddly, my first point is that the world is still lovely, even when it is limited and somewhat un-wild. In other words, for all of environmentalism’s cries of doom, there are still places like this river, teeming with life and flowing right through our backyards. Yes, the world is overheating, and, yes, we will get to that; but how about—before the flames of apocalypse consume the planet—we explore our own neighborhoods a little?

  I think of my friend Bill Roorbach, whose house in Farmington, Maine I visited not long ago. The house itself was nothing special, at least not at first glance: a crowded two-story dwelling with warped floors that sat right on a paved road. But when he took me out into the backyard, I began to understand why you couldn’t shut him up about the place. Behind the house, there grew a great shambling
garden and that was just for starters. From the garden we walked along a path through the briars and woods, “down to the stream,” he said, but when we reached the water, which I was expecting to look very docile—all quaint and New-Englandy—it was nothing like a stream. The small woods opened up and we were standing in front of a powerful surge of wide water, water that S-ed around and cut deeply into the opposite bank, water that looked more like a Western river than a New England brook. Instantly it became clear why he had brought me there, why he had showed me this before showing me his living room or study or anything else inside. He pointed to it with pride and without a word I got it. This is where I live, he was saying, This is why I live here. This is where I come to gather myself, be myself, and get beyond myself. This is where I come to get to know my neighbors, neighbors that include birds and beavers and muskrats and an occasional moose or fisher. And this is where I come to connect to the greater world since this un-stream-like stream eventually flows into the river and then that river flows into the ocean.

  Well, his backyard is extraordinary, you might argue, as was Henry David Thoreau’s backyard, which held Walden Pond. But I think that is exactly the wrong point to take away. As a kid who grew up in Massachusetts, I can tell you that ponds like Walden are a dime a dozen, a few hundred others just like it scattered around the state. “Oh, it’s nothing special!” people often say when they first see the pond. Which is the whole beautiful point! It’s as ordinary as it gets, and that is why it’s so important. It means that your own ordinary backyard might just be extraordinary, too. It means that your own territory might also be worth exploring.