My Green Manifesto

by David Gessner

  “I’m sorry we were running late,” she says flatly. “We didn’t have time to get coffee.”

  “That’s fine,” I say with a big smile.

  I want to kill her.

  While I contemplate the gloomy prospect of a decaffeinated morning, Dan inspects the banged up bottom of the kayak, slowly shaking his head. But neither of us is in the mood to dwell on the negative, not when it’s morning and we have a day on the river in front of us. Soon the bustling momentum of preparation takes over: getting the canoe down off the car rack, throwing the kayak back up, packing the canoe, looking at the map to plan out our next meeting point with Donna. She rejects our first suggested rendezvous, which confirms what I already suspect: She will be a decidedly un-Sherpa-like Sherpa. I think of my friend Ian, who was my first choice for the job. He is a childhood pal, an outdoorsman, as devoted as a puppy, and, had nepotism not reared its ugly head, he would have embraced being part of the adventure with the sort of goofy enthusiasm the job requires.

  Lack of caffeine, no doubt, is darkening my thoughts, and as we push out onto the river I wonder if an early beer might alleviate the inevitable headache.

  It turns out that I don’t need the beer, or the coffee, at least not right away, since the river itself, and the exercise of paddling on it, will soon enough serve to lift my mood.

  Dan has a different avenue toward transcendence: No sooner have we paddled around the first bend and, in Thoureauvian fashion, left family behind, when he announces that it’s “time for a little eye opener.” With that he whips out something that smells of skunk, and lights a bowl. This is where Dan parts ways with Thoreau, who preferred “the natural sky to an opium-eater’s heaven.”

  “You can thank Ronald Reagan for this,” he says. “Thanks to his drug laws we started growing the best bud in the world right at home.”

  He offers the bowl. I have plenty of friends like Dan—doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, competent professionals all—who seem capable of using pot as mild relaxant. That’s great for them, I suppose, but my system is a little different. One puff for me and our idyllic paddle would transform into a Conrad-like journey into the heart of paranoia. I politely decline.

  We paddle quietly for a while on the green shadowy river, and then, as if on cue, a young deer, tawny and hesitant, emerges from the woods, freezing when it sees us. It is a stunning sight there by the bank, and we lift our paddles and let the current carry us, trying to stay as still as the animal. Once we round the next bend we laugh and hoot at our good luck.

  “You see, that wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t attuned with the river,” Dan says.

  I nod, though I’m not so sure. The deer was pretty easy to see. But I’m not about to argue. I listen as Dan launches into the first of the morning’s monologues.

  “Nature is my religion,” he begins. “Pantheism is my religion!”

  He talks in this vein for a while, and then his sentences take what I will begin to recognize as a characteristic turn. He can’t really talk about his love of nature without spouting a lot of semi-mystical mumbo jumbo. I know how it is. But when his words start snaking their way to the topics of activism and politics they become bold and original.

  “We nature lovers are hypocrites, of course,” he says. “We are all hypocrites. None of us are consistent. The problem is that we let that fact stop us. We worry that if we fight for nature, people will say, ‘But you drive a car,’ or, ‘You fly a lot,’ or, ‘You’re a consumer, too.’ And that stops us in our tracks. It’s almost as if admitting that they are hypocrites lets people off the hook.”

  I pull my paddle out of the water to listen.

  “What we need are more hypocrites,” he said. “We need hypocrites who aren’t afraid of admitting it but will still fight for the environment. We don’t need some sort of pure movement run by pure people. We need hypocrites!”

  I think of Edward Abbey fighting for the West while throwing empty beer cans out the window of his truck. I think of my own environmental Achilles heel, a dainty preference for hot baths over showers—not nearly as cool as Abbey’s boozing, but possibly as wasteful. And then I think of everyone I know and know of and can’t come up with anyone who has an entirely clean eco-slate. Which seems to mean that, logically, Dan is right: If only nonhypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none.

  When Dan finishes talking we turn our attention more fully to the work of paddling. We have a good ways to go, almost sixteen miles, if we are going to make it to our destination, the less-than-romantically-named Long Ditch, by sunset. As we glide through the Broadmoor a sharp-shinned hawk banks over the river and lands in a tree, spreading its tail like a delicate oriental fan. Around the next bend, a statue of a praying woman stands on a low triangular rock on the river bank, her face mottled by the shadows of oak leaves. Dan mentions that we are in Natick, and that praying, of the enforced variety, has a long history here. The state mandated the creation of Native American towns for the Massachusetts tribe in this area, evidently to help them preserve their culture—except for that one minor cultural component: their religion. These were Christian towns, the inhabitants referred to as “the Praying Indians.” Now Natick is a mostly white suburb, though not quite as affluent as some of the surrounding towns. It is also, Dan tells me, one of the few spots along the river where the same town forms both banks.

  “Almost everywhere else the river is the border between towns,” he says. “You can look at it either way. As a connector or a separator. Either way we are almost always paddling down the middle of a border between towns.”

  Before lunch we portage around the South Natick Dam and float through the backyards of Wellesley’s stately mansions. The river seems to like the easy affluence; arcing in and out of Wellesley in a lazy oxbow. This is a town where sixty-six percent of the households have at least one advanced degree, and it’s one of the last, long stretches of river before we hit more urban and dam-filled waters. We paddle hard for an hour, cutting a line between Needham and Dover. On my map I count fourteen dams, though I have read somewhere that there are at least twenty.

  Our next dam portage is the Cochrane. While South Natick required nothing more than sliding the canoe over a hill of dirt and pine needles, this dam presents more of a challenge. We finally take the boat out close to where the falls go over the dam, climb a hill covered with poison ivy, and muscle the canoe up onto a stone wall. Then we carry the canoe down Mill Street in Dover for about a hundred feet. There is no sidewalk, and cars seem to be taking the blind corner we are walking into at about two hundred miles an hour, so as soon as we hit the woods below the dam we cut back in, despite the fact that this requires more bushwhacking though poison ivy. Once the canoe is back in the river we scrub ourselves with sand and water, and hope we don’t start itching soon.

  As we paddle through the afternoon, I chew over what Dan said about hypocrisy.

  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:You ask me what I think about so-called nature writing? I think the same about it that I think about any beautiful writing. There is no time for it. There is time for only one thing: saving the earth. The world is being slaughtered and we need to stop it. At this point writing is beside the point: the only—and I mean only—thing that matters is to stop this culture from killing the planet. The reason I feel comfortable saying that it’s the only end that matters is that without a landbase you don’t have anything. Everything—including beautiful writing—emerges from and is secondary to the land.

  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”:It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.

  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.

  THE MYTH OF DAN

  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 hi
s 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.