My Green Manifesto (14 page)

The first came while holding my father's hand while he died. I listened to his final breaths, first deep and then gasping and fish-like, and I gripped his hand tight enough to feel the last pulsings of his heart. Something rose in me that day, something deep, animal, unexpected, something that I didn't experience again until my daughter Hadley was born nine years later. Before her birth everyone warned me that my
life was about to change, the implication being that it would become tamer. But there was nothing tame about those twenty-four hours in the hospital, or that indelible moment, after the C-section, when the doctor reached into my wife, up to his elbows, and a bloody head emerged, straight up, followed by Hadley's full emergence and a wild squall of life as her little arms rose over her head in victory. Sure the surge was physiological—goosebumps and tingling scalp and a hundred other physical symptoms—but it was more than that, too, a wild rush, both a loss of and a return to self.

These moments of death and life, as much as any moments in pristine nature, reconnect us to our primal selves, remind us that there is something wilder lurking below the everyday, that, having tasted wildness, we return to our ordinary lives both changed and charged. So while I will continue to seek out and protect wild places, I do so knowing that I don't need to travel to the Amazon or Everest to experience the ineffable. It is on that same Cape Cod beach where I first walked holding my mother's hand, near the waters where I later spread my father's ashes, that I learned that my wildest moments are often closest to home. And it is there that I now bring Hadley each summer, secretly hoping that the wild will rise up in her when she least expects it.

Dan snores in the tent while I read, taking breaks to listen to the orchard oriole that sings in the willow tree above our tent, offering a sweet accompaniment to Dan's glottal savagery. For most of the night I had been frightened for my life, but the rustling alien creature is apparently nocturnal—the grasses are now quiet. I wonder if it could have been a fisher. Whatever the case, it is a relief to no longer be stalked.

In fact it is a beautiful morning and if not for my lack of caffeine, and the book in my hands, I might feel quite peaceful. I look up again from
Break Through
, contemplating whether drowning or fire would be a better fate for these pages. It is sad that we have become so specialized that someone who writes about nature can feel so distant from someone responsible for writing the laws to save nature. We are separate tributaries off of the main Thoreauvian river, and we have branched off long ago and in separate directions.

I remember something Dan said to me last night, while we sipped our vodka and ate our steaks.

“I think of myself as a common, modern-day visionary,” he said. “Understand that the emphasis is on
common
. The only reason I seem extraordinary is that in a business like mine, in any kind of government business, there are so few of us. In general the visionaries are cut out of the process. Instead you get little visionary blips like what I've done out
here. But to make it happen I've had to leverage federal funds and get corporate help and convince people to give me their land.

“I've found that what Carnegie said is true. There is more money than there are good ideas. Get a good idea and the money follows.

“Of course, even when I pull in outside money I get crap for it. Here is what one of the administrators actually said: ‘I'm tired of Dan Driscoll trying to leverage outside money to control what the state is going to do.' So if I said to him, ‘I just got a four million dollar grant for us—and fourhundred thousand dollars of our funds will go to restoring this corridor.' But he feels like I'm forcing him to spend fourhundred thousand on something he didn't want to spend it on. And I'm saying, ‘you don't want to spend it on anything good because you don't know anything good.' You're a bean counter. You shouldn't be involved in policy decisions. And people sit in rooms and people make decisions about how to spend billions of dollars. And they have no plan, no vision.”

It was me, the choir, he was preaching to, but this morning his words also bear down on the book I'm reading. I can't help noticing the antipathy that Nordhaus and Shellenberger feel toward visionaries, and toward artists in particular. While they really don't seem to like nature and environmentalists that much, it's nothing compared to what they have to say about us poor writers. They'll quote Thoreau—who won't?—because he's safely dead and canonized. But the rest of us had better watch out. Most writers focusing on nature, according to the authors, go around claiming that nature is “above mankind.” Artists believe, according to Nordhaus and Shellenberger, that anyone jimmying around with nature represents a kind of biblical fall
(apparently they think our tribe doesn't use flush toilets or electric screwdrivers). They also politely lecture us, telling us—lo and behold, trumpets here please—that human beings are actually a part of nature too. What they might find if they picked up a book or two is that those who write and think about nature do so in a myriad of ways, just as people think about policy in different ways. They might find that there are ideas, outside of affluence and abundance, that move human beings.

Disdain might be too strong a word for how the authors feel about artists, but it's pretty close. I remember reading an interview in the online environmental magazine
Grist
with these two where they were asked why they'd exhaustively interviewed leading activists but not a single visionary thinker or writer—someone, for instance, like Wendell Berry. Nordhaus replied, “We interviewed the people in the environmental movement who are deciding how to spend tens of millions of dollars annually.... I'm sorry, Wendell Berry isn't the person deciding how the enviro movement is going to construct its campaigns to address global warming.”
¹⁴

And there it is. When it comes to their number one priority, forming a vision of a new environmentalism, Wendell Berry is not relevant. Wendell Berry, who has spent the last forty years or so fashioning an original, idiosyncratic, and brilliant body of work that often focuses on committing to, and fighting for, the places where we live. Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue against the false separation and specialization of different groups, but they apparently think they have nothing to learn from a mere writer. Which is more than a little problem. After all, if you are going to construct your argument around the need for a “vision,” can you
really ignore visionaries? Can't they acknowledge that inspired words and inspired politics often go hand in hand? Art isn't a box you can pack in the attic, far away from another box called politics. Clearly a compelling vision, one that calls us back to the natural world, is required before we get down to the business of saving it.

I like arguing with Nordhaus and Shellenberger so much that it's hard to stop but I finally put the book down. The truth is that, for all my antipathy, we have more in common than I'm admitting. They too want to create an environmentalism that goes beyond the name, one that is included in a larger politics. They are at their best when they apply the principles of ecology to the wider political landscape, when they connect the economy to national security to energy independence. This is the landscape they know well, the ecotone of pragmatism and passion, and like naturalists they make connections within that ecosystem. Their point is a good one. You can't look at “the environment” alone; you need to see it, as any good ecologist will tell you, in its greater ecosystems. I admire this. My only complaint with their politics of inclusion is that they have excluded two important elements: the storytellers, and nature.

I should add that Nordhaus and Shellenberger are not
entirely
anti-artistic. They are fond of one form of art: the hour-long TV drama. At the book's conclusion they cite the inspiring 2002 season of
The West Wing
, where the fictional President wins reelection “on an Apollo-type clean-energy investment platform.”

Dan wakes groggily and soon we are paddling again across Cow Island Pond. Hungover after our evening at the Irish
Alehouse, we approach the morning's task like two blearyeyed galley slaves. Our moods are not aided by the wind, which blows directly in our faces. After twenty minutes of hard paddling, I stare at the shore and swear we are still directly across from the same branch of the same gnarled oak tree. After a while we start to move. Sirens go off as we pass by Millennium Park, providing a strange soundtrack to the beauty surrounding us: black willow trees, a downy woodpecker, and little pink-purple cups of wild petunia. After a good stretch of paddling we reach Nahantan Park. Dan is talking again but the wind blows the boat and his sentences backward. Here in the bow I catch about every third or fourth word. If I am getting what he is saying, the park coming up on our right was once known for its high frequency of homosexual “encounters.” The problem reached such proportions that a special city government meeting was called, and Dan was asked to join the group. They should have thought twice before they sent that invitation. Always an innovative thinker—a minor visionary as he himself suggested—Dan had a novel solution: they should create a new park in the city that would provide what Nahantan was already known for. In other words this new park would have a place designated for “encounters.” Then everyone would know what was what and if that wasn't your scene you'd move on to another park.

“If the demand is there, you can't end the supply,” he argued. “You have to think of it in original ways.”

Dan's proposal didn't carry the day.

Another hour of hard paddling follows.

My back hurts and I long for the fancy, comfortable kayak of day one. When I eventually long out loud, Dan tosses me a pillow from his pack, which I place over my
hard seat. A little while later, when I start waxing poetic about the pillow, he dubs it “Wilson,” after Tom Hanks' famous cinematic volleyball.
¹⁵
We don't talk much but focus on our twin goals of making it down the river and exorcising our hangovers. No one has yet mentioned that it is our country's birthday.

As we paddle, I search the sky for birds. Last night, when we were crossing Cow Island Pond on our way to the Alehouse I was treated to the site of an osprey hovering above. It was hard to see at first, but its crooked wings gave it away. Dan said it was the first one he'd seen on the river. I resisted any talk about “totem animals” and was happy when he did, too.

While I have more and more respect for Dan as an environmentalist, when it comes to the English language, he isn't exactly Thoreau or Carson.

“Fuck yeah!” was his response to seeing the osprey.

Which was better than what it might have been. I'll take “fuck” over mystical oneness any day of the week. And yet, while Dan is all grit and common sense talking policy, he has a pretty romantic way of describing his inspiration.

“Nature tricks you,” he said to me as we paddled. “You fall in love with it and you love it so much that you end up fighting for it.”

It almost sounded chivalrous, as if nature was a maiden and Dan one of her knights. But if that example treads close to the mawkish, I don't object to his frequent use of the word “vision.” Slap a “quest” at the end of the word and before you know it you're talking about drumming and fire-walking, and it does tread dangerously close to Robert Bly territory. But in Dan's case, the word choice seems appropriate. That was what he did after all. He
saw
what the Charles could return
to before other people did, presented others with the picture in his mind, and then, despite all the political fights and setbacks and compromises, he went ahead and made something close to what he had seen manifest itself in the world.

Certainly, that is something important in these compromised, apathetic times. It is, at the very least, a better way of spending one's time on earth than trading stocks or piling up money. It is—and I hope I can say this in the least Disney-like fashion—a hopeful and inspiring way to be.