My Green Manifesto

by David Gessner

  And of course, another thing that helps are the birds. Jays, mallards, chipping sparrows, Eastern kingbirds, and a kingfisher too. In my dry bag I have a list of the birds I’ve seen over the last three days and it contains more than thirty species.

  “The strange thing,” Dan says. “Is that you likely see more birds here, close to the city.”

  I ask why.

  “Well, we’re closing in on the harbor so you get seabirds too. And this stretch is smack dab in the middle of the North American flyway. And because of the dams no one really paddles here. Which means it’s a kind of small wildlife refuge.”

  I remember the jungled stretch of water we paddled yesterday and the sharp-shinned hawk we saw weaving its way through the branches. I can’t help but think aloud how amazing it is for an animal to have evolved to maneuver in tight between trees and branches.

  Then, thinking about Dan’s story about the black crowned night herons, I remember that during the year my daughter was born, when we lived in Cambridge, I regularly got out to the river to watch herons too. His story of being renewed by the birds may sound hokey to some, but it rings true to me. My friends may give me a hard time for how much I write about birds, but the fact is that birds, more than anything else, have led to my transformation into this creature called an environmentalist. So much of my environmental life has begun with, and sprung from, birds.

  I admit this to Dan.

  “It makes sense,” he says. “It all starts with simply looking around. And when you look around these days you’re unlikely to see too many grizzly bears, whales, or cougars. But you can still see a lot of birds.”

  Birds then, oddly, considering how high they fly, are nature’s lowest common denominators.

  We face another long portage in the middle of Watertown. Dan stays with the boats and sends me off for supplies at the local Store 24. After all this exertion, I feel I can guiltlessly eat anything, which shows in my selection: a store-heated cheesesteak, a bag of Ruffles, a Hostess blueberry pie, and assorted other junk food. Dan grunts with disgust at my offerings, and I have to admit that, as hungry as I am, it does not sit well.

  We are not looking forward to carrying the canoe again. At the Store 24 I tried to call for help. One of my oldest friends, Mark Honerkamp, lives not a quarter mile from where we now sit, but he didn’t pick up the phone when I called. Honerkamp’s life has been ruled, over the last decade, by the cycles of the fishing season. Once April comes round he spends every weekend, and every spare moment, heading out to the Wachusetts Reservoir, an hour to the West. He keeps a notebook where he harvests countless observations of the weather, wind, birds, and animals he sees. When he does consent to pick up his phone the news he bears is not of the worldly sort, but rather the fact that he saw river otters near the dam above the reservoir. Closer to home, Honerkamp has been one of the chief beneficiaries of Dan Driscoll’s work, so that now, with a short stroll from his house, he can head to the water below Watertown Dam and see if the herring are running.

  Honerkamp’s beginnings as a nature-lover might have come straight out of David Sobel’s mind. He grew up in different times than my daughter or any young children today. As a ten-year-old, he lived in upstate New York and his mother’s passion was dog shows. The shows were usually on the weekends, and the night before the show, she and her son would find a map of the area they were visiting and look for a river. The next day they would drive to the area and, following the map, find an area where river and road ran close to one another. Son would then kiss mother goodbye and scramble down the bank with his pole and gear. He would spend the day fishing while she spent it watching dogs perform, and then, at a prearranged time, they would meet again on the road.

  Leave aside the fact that such behavior would get his mother arrested today and focus on the fact that that time outdoors imprinted itself on the young Honerkamp. He learned, not just about the animals that swam below the water, but those that flew above it. In more recent years, he has accompanied me on many of my nature adventures, following ospreys to Venezuela for instance, and, since his eyes and ears are sharper than mine, I have come to defer to him in the matter of bird identification. But neither of us are real birders. We are rather two guys who feel our lives are lifted when we pay attention to the creatures who are flying through them. Lowest common denominator, indeed.

  I began this section by talking about birds, and I’d like to end that way too.

  To Nordhaus and Shellenberger this must be the worst sort of old school foolishness. Another cobwebbed Rachel Carson tale. But you’ve gone off-track again, I hear Nord and Shell saying. You’re supposed to be talking about environmentalism and saving the world, and here you are yammering on and on about birds. Come on, give us a break: This is just another branch of the same nut job extremist stuff you were railing against before. Enough with the birds!

  For all you do-gooders out there, it might seem like I’m working backwards. You are already acting environmentally, so what’s all this about birds? Perhaps all I am really suggesting is taking a little time to get to know the world you are working so hard to save. If you are willing to do this, birds are not a bad way to start. Pick a bird, any bird. Watch it for a while: note its habits, note what it eats, how it flies. Note its priorities and how it goes about being in the world, based on those priorities, in a manner different, but similar, to human beings. Keep it up and after a while you might find your brain migrating outward. I’m not saying that you will find yourself flying out of self, like Wordsworth or Emerson or something. But you might feel the first tugging of outward movement, the beginning of something. (Notice I said go look at a bird. I didn’t say go bird-watching or bird-cataloguing or bird-identifying.)

  “It all starts by looking around,” Dan said. I like that. But why is looking so important? Because looking outward, noticing someone, or something, is usually the first step toward falling in love. How does love start after all? As a crush, a surface attraction that deepens with time and knowledge, leading to a larger, longer, more consistent commitment.

  You can’t force love, of course, everyone tells us so, but you can be open to it.

  Often it begins by accident. My own love of ospreys began with a walk out on a local jetty. That walk led to several years spent observing the birds. I can honestly say that since I discovered ospreys my life has radiated outward from them. I realize that I am on the verge of slipping into just the sort of gooey, lovey-dovey OSPREY-WARBLING mysticism that I ridiculed earlier. It’s hard to talk about these transcendent emotions without sounding silly. But from a hard-nosed, practical point of view, I have always found that birds work quite efficiently as a means of transport. They work well in part because they are close, physically close, the closest many of us come to wildness. And they work because we don’t have to backpack through Alaska to find them: they come to us, flitting through our lives. You may find that something else triggers wildness in you—frogs, maybe, or plants, or soil—but birds are what do it for me. Simply watching them go about their wild business of flight. I’m somewhat easy in this regard: really any bird that flies through my life will do. Ospreys work but so do gannets plunging into the ocean or pelicans soaring overhead in all their pterodactyl glory.

  Black skimmers work, too. This past fall I developed a crush on these small birds on the Southern beach where I now live, and they may provide a concrete example of the transport I’m talking about. It’s hard not to get excited when you see these strange little creatures scything along the shoreline. I would dare you to stay in your own mumbling head, running around on the same hamster wheel of thought, would dare you, as they mow the water, scooping up tiny fish with their preposterous bills, to not at least momentarily skip out of yourself. Of course I know you can resist, know you can stay stubbornly in your mind. Skimmers are not the only miraculous animals after all, and human beings excel, beyond all else, at becoming absorbed in their own obsessions. But if you actually turn away from those stories and look at thes
e birds for a moment, really look, you’ll need to pause thought and briefly rearrange the way you think about the world.

  Here is what you’ll see:

  A line of birds flying along the shore, the size of small gulls but unmistakably not gulls. Maybe they’re terns, you think for a second, but like no terns you’ve ever seen. An electric red-orange patch shines out from the upper sheath of their long bills and then there are the bills themselves: candy-corn orange-red like something from the pages of a comic book, certainly not real birds. But they are real, these, the only birds that have a lower mandible longer than the upper, the better for scooping. They patrol the shore, jaws dropped (like yours maybe), grazing the water and hoping for accidental contact with a fish. Then, if they do touch a fish, the merest touch, a built-in tactile trigger in their jaw sends a signal to their upper bill, the maxilla, which instantaneously snaps shut.

  This sounds miraculous, a thing of wonder, but of course to the fish it is a different, not so wonder-filled, story. To the fish the skimmer’s oversized lower mandible cutting through the water might as well be the reaper’s scythe. But you won’t worry too much about the fish as you watch the bird fly belly to belly with the sea, so close that its reflection seems to fly below it through the water. Instead you’ll watch that lower mandible, the very front part, kicking up the small wake as it plows forward. You’ll notice that the birds actually leave a line behind them in the water.

  Curious, maybe, you’ll learn more. You’ll learn that skimmers were once called “Sea Dogs” for the strange garbled barking sounds they make. You’ll learn that, like us, they are creatures of edges; they thrive at dawn or dusk, harvesting the edge of water and land, working the edges between day and night. Your field guide will wax poetic about their flight, about how they execute hairpin turns and smooth banks while foraging, how their flocks wheel in unison. The guide will also confirm what your eyes tell you: that their heads are held down below their wings and that their flight is “buoyant.” As you read on, it may occur to you that evolutionists and creationists could fight for hours over this bird. Days maybe. Who, after all, the latter group would argue, but a creator, and a creator with a sense of humor, could have created this? The joke shop nose, the funny barking, the crazy way of getting dinner. The former group would rebut that the silly bill is fit exactly to its task, and so could have evolved into no other shape. The only thing the two camps will agree on, throwing up their hands, will be the bizarre uselessness of the candy-corn color of the bill. They will all shrug and call it beyond comprehension.

  You may become greedy for skimmers. You’ll start planning your walks for dawn or dusk so that you can see them gracefully mowing the water. One day, as if to further emphasize just how strange these birds are, you’ll see a hundred skimmers plopped down on the sand as if they’d just decided, then and there, that they’d had it. It is a strange sight, one you’ve never seen before with any birds: They have all dropped themselves chest first on the sand—gone kaput—and stretched their bills forward as if too tired to go on. Later your field guide will reassure you that this is common skimmer behavior, not just a flock of particularly exhausted birds.

  Of course skimmers will not solve any of your life’s problems. To say that you will return from your walks changed is an exaggeration. Maybe you’ll barely remember the sight of the scything birds during the rest of your busy day. Perhaps you’ll never even mention them to your spouse. But if not fundamentally changed, you are in some unspoken way at least mildly altered. At the very least you’ve experienced a blip in the day’s habitual worry. Perhaps, better yet, those sharp bills have given you a cutting gift, slicing through the nettles of thought. And perhaps the birds have allowed those tapes in your head to stop for a moment, long enough for you to briefly notice that there are vast worlds beyond your own.

  IV. INDEPENDENCE DAY

  HENRY’S RIVER

  When most people think of the Charles, they picture the Basin, the wide city river of boathouses and colleges and scullers, where the river briefly goes to the Ivy League. Right now that Basin is filling with boats, everyone anticipating tonight’s fireworks and Pops concert, and I will be joining them, hitching a ride in a canoe with some scientists from Woods Hole and watching the fireworks up close. The reason I will need to hitch that ride is that Dan has decided to pull the canoe out just short of Harvard. He has places to be, and anyway, this stretch of river, the fancy, man-made river, isn’t for him.

  “They won’t let me put in a natural landscape here,” he grumbles, “And there’s too much lawn—it becomes a festival of goose crap. They mow the grass on the banks so it’s like a golf course. My goal all along has been to create a natural, varied ecosystem—a dynamic landscape. If you don’t want geese then plant native plantings, not grass.”

  I ask if there are any creative possibilities for re-wilding the Basin.

  “Maybe if they let me blow up Storrow Drive. Then you could make that a corridor of trees with a path down the middle. . . .”

  But even to someone with Dan’s environmental imagination, the possibilities near downtown are limited: Highways on both sides sandwich the Charles so that it looks like the middle of three parallel-running rivers.

  “You can’t replant roads,” Dan admits. On the other hand, he points out with a smile, there have been recent winter sightings of coyote footprints on the frozen river. We aren’t the only ones who think of the river as a path.

  Just above Harvard we climb out of the boat. Donna is there to pick up Dan and our goodbye is a hurried one. But the plan is to meet up again tonight, downtown above the esplanade, on the rooftop of one of Dan’s friends’ homes, where we can toast our trip and watch the fireworks. Dan makes sure that I don’t want a ride, and I tell him that I will either hitch a ride in one of the many boats heading downtown, or will simply stroll along the river. In turn I make sure he doesn’t want to paddle the final few miles with me. No, work and family obligations press.

  Donna pulls him away before he can start scheming again, and, with their canoe strapped to the roof of the car, they rumble out of the parking lot. I have changed into my first dry clothes in days, a rumpled Hawaiian shirt and shorts. The riverbank is bustling with people and boats and I doubt I’ll have trouble talking my way into a ride down to the Hatch Shell. But for now I don’t mind being alone. My ideas for a new environmentalism, my green manifesto, have mostly been confined to a small boat, and I want to air them out. I’ve stretched Dan and his story just about as far as I can, and as I stroll east up the river and cut up Mount Auburn to Harvard Square, it is another Massachusetts boy, born only twenty miles or so from Dan’s hometown, who begins to occupy my mind.

  When I first began thinking seriously about my “green manifesto,” I scribbled these words:Now dressed in full nature writing regalia—spear in hand and animal pelts on—I am finally ready to do battle. I am ready to leave behind the effete fear that politics will somehow taint my work, to understand that this exclusion is mere fashion, and that fashions change. I am also ready to leave behind the nature writer’s sense of impotence. What I want to carry into the fight is humor, irony, and the personal essayist’s recourse to the testing ground of self. What I want to leave behind is “Oh, how lovely!” while what I want to carry into the fight are the moments—often lovely moments, yes—when I am briefly outside of myself, moments that remind me of how multifarious and delightful this world still is and that speak to my own animal wildness. What I want to leave behind is false romanticism. What I want to carry into the fight is the original romantic urge for the specific, the local, the real. What I want to leave behind is quoting Thoreau; what I want instead is to follow more deeply the complex spirit of the man. What I want to leave behind are pages of facts. What I want to carry forward are facts marshaled for purpose, facts enlivened because they follow an idea. What I want to leave behind is the sanctimony of quietude and order and “being in the present.” What I want to embrace is loud and wild disorder,
growing this way and that, lush and overdone. What I want to leave behind is the virtuous and the good, and move toward the inspiring and great. And while we’re at it I want to leave behind anything false, false to me that is, false to what I feel is my experience on this earth. What I want instead is to wade through the mess of life without ever reaching for a life ring called The Answer.

  My dream is to fight and to rally others to my fight. And here is my cry:

  Nature writers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your daisy chains.

  I’ve tried to stick to some of these vows, but in at least one way I’ve failed miserably. It turns out I can’t quit Thoreau. While vowing to stop quoting him was easy, actually stopping has been close to impossible. Either it is because I am a kind of Thoreau addict, or because the man keeps pointing back to what I see as the true root of living a wild life. Here in Cambridge, for instance, I can’t help but include these thoughts of Henry’s about the section of river I am now walking, thoughts that he scribbled down on a July night 156 years before my stroll:Coming out of town—willingly as usual,—when I saw that reach of Charles River just above the depot, the fair, still water this cloudy evening suggesting the way to eternal peace and beauty, whence it flows, the placid lake-like fresh water, so unlike the salt brine, affected me not a little. I was reminded of the way in which Wordsworth so coldly speaks of some natural visions or scenes “giving him pleasure.” This is perhaps the first vision of Elysium on this route from Boston. And just then I saw an encampment of Penobscots, their wigwams appearing above the railroad fence, they, too, looking up the river as they sat on the ground, and enjoying the scene. What can be more impressive than to look up a noble river just at evening—one, perchance, which you have never explored—and behold its placid waters, reflecting the woods and sky, lapsing inaudibly toward the ocean; to behold a lake, but know it as a river, tempting the beholder to explore it and his own destiny at once? Haunt of waterfowl. This was above the factories—all that I saw. That water could never have flowed under a factory. How then could it have reflected the sky?