Perhaps I am too persnickety, too preoccupied with the language that he, or any of us, uses to describe the natural world, but I am in the minority that believes we should watch our words, that false language both reflects and encourages false thinking, that our lives depend on our sentences. I feel particularly strongly that “being in nature” should not be described as some precious or highfalutin experience. After all, didn’t we as a species evolve, along with our words, while spending a million years or so living in the midst of the natural world? And wasn’t our relationship with that world, among other things, quite practical and direct? “Nature” is where the living roots of our language evolved, which suggests that that language should still be able to circle back and describe the place from whence we came. Like the natural world itself, natural language has become fenced-off and attenuated. Our words are zoo animals.
So many people who speak for the wild world seem to feel the need to speak in the voice of the mystic, a hushed, voice-over reverence. We affect this high priest tone, and everyone else is expected to get down on their knees and listen to the whispered wisdom of the shaman. At times like those there’s very little indication that any of us have the quality that many humans find most important for living on earth: a sense of humor. You’d never guess that any of us ever laughed or farted. (Which, it needs to be pointed out, is different than translating Native American myths about trickster coyotes who laugh and fart.)
I cringe when my language grows too flaccid on the one hand—oh, Great Blue Heron, help my soul and keep all sweetness and light—or, on the other, too rigid and devoid of feeling—Great Blue Heron, or Ardea herodias, a member of the order Ciconiiformes.
Lately, I’ve been invited to give a lot of talks, and when I speak people sit listening, rapt, or at least putting on rapt faces. I suppose if I really wanted to make it big I would start spreading the word of doom and intoning the phrase “global warming” over and over, hitting my audiences with it like a big stick. But I’ve got other ideas, however, impure and pesky little ideas that get in the way. For instance, sometimes I think that, from an artistic point of view, the end of the world might be kind of interesting , at least more interesting than all the dull predictions about it. Another troubling notion is that I’m not really sure I want to be this thing called an environmentalist.
I’m not trying to be glib here—I don’t think it’s unimportant to fight for environmental causes. It’s just that I would like to put forth a sloppier form of environmentalism, a simultaneously more human and wild form, a more commonsense form and, hopefully, in the end, a more effective form. Because the old, guilt-ridden, mystical envirospeak just isn’t cutting it. Maybe the musty way of talking about nature needs to be thrown over a clothesline and beaten with a broom. That’s what I’ve been trying to say at these talks I’ve been giving. My role, as I see it, is to try to pull the pole out of the collective environmental ass. It isn’t easy work. For a costume I wear a Hawaiian shirt and to get into character I drink a few beers. Throughout my talks I make jokes about how earnest everyone is and the audience usually laughs along semi-masochistically. Sometimes I get carried away. I start feeling megalomaniacal and believe I am the bringer of a new language. I imagine myself to be Bob Dylan at Newport, playing electric guitar among the folkies, trying (futilely) to get them to yell out “Judas.”
This last metaphor was confirmed by one of the door prizes I was given recently, a CD tribute to Rachel Carson’s work, after a talk at a conference in Boothbay Harbor, Maine to celebrate Carson’s life and work. On the way home I listened to a song on the CD that told the story of the osprey’s near demise from DDT and then its remarkable comeback, a subject I once wrote a book about. It is fair to say that Carson is one of my greatest heroes but the music that came warbling out of my speakers seemed to be sung by a caricature of a late fifties Pete Seeger wannabe, who wailed about the poisons coursing through the ospreys’ bodies with such excruciating earnestness that it almost made me root for the birds’ death. Anything as long as the song ended. This, I found myself thinking, this is part of the problem. Why does nature turn us into this kind of warbler? It makes me long for a new sort of music, a music with energy, irreverence, and drive, a punk osprey tribute sung by, say, the Sex Pistols.
And maybe, I think now, that’s a good place to start.
A new music.
THE FIRE THIS TIME
I paddle through the afternoon, watching the pulsating light on the under branches of trees. Somewhere on the other side of this living green wall cars are rushing to and from the city, but that doesn’t concern me. How many types of weather can I name from the day? Too many to count. The wind comes up, the water ripples, the clouds blow over and create a chill, then disappear; after the sun bears down, the wind stops, and a short rain falls. Every turn of the river is different. There is no formula for it. As I slide past the forested banks whole riverside landscapes reflect in the water. The cloud continents rush overhead and the rain soaks me again. Shaggy weeping willows bow to the river.
What would a new environmental music sound like? It might, at the risk of coming off like the mystics I just ridiculed, sound a bit like this river. Burbling, lapping, rushing, calm, excited, but above all fluid. And contradictory, too, rushing one way but filled with back eddies and counter-currents. Uncertain and confident all at once.
Before I go all Siddhartha on you, however, let me add that it should also be blunt. Wedging downward past nineteenth-century romanticism and tunneling back toward the practical source of “nature language”: daily dialogues with fellow tribesmen, directions to the kill, songs sung by generations upon generations of roaming hunter-gatherers. Ugh. Wolf scat. Look—berries. That’s a kind of music, too.
Of course it’s hard to keep a fluid, riverlike mind in this time of adamancy and increased hysteria. We live in an age of blowhards, windbags, and he-who-shouts-loudest wins. In the environmental community this means increasingly shrill warnings about our pending doom. We are never allowed, not for a moment, to forget GLOBAL WARMING and its corollary admonishment that we must SAVE THE WORLD. While I know it is sacrilege to say it, I still don’t believe that “global warming” is the answer to every question left on earth. Frankly, the subject exhausts me. I find my optimism and energy waning when my brain turns to that ever-popular environmental topic: The End of the World. Perhaps that is because I, like most of us, am not built to think in terms of the apocalypse. Too much of it and I am left stunned, helpless, curled up in a fetal position on the kitchen floor.
It’s not that I disagree with the experts. If they are right, and they probably are, the next century will be a dismal one. Our present six billion will become ten. Our resources will dry up as the world warms and our population essentially doubles. Massive extinctions are likely to occur—in fact, they are already occurring—animals that have inhabited the planet for millions of years will be gone forever. The truth is that it’s great to care about sentences and write books and all, but I’m not sure anything is going to help. If the predictions are even half-correct, we’re fucked.
I admire all the thinkers who try to wrestle with these concepts and come up with ideas that will help. I admire all those brave enough to try and offer words and solutions. But for my part, I can’t help but despair. I’m out of my league really, and in that I’m not so unlike most of us. When it comes to politics, I have no global plan or solution. I’m sorry. It is not what I’m good at and maybe it’s not what the animals that we evolved into are good at. One of the religious purposes for the concept of an apocalypse was to force us to admit that life was terrifying beyond the ken of mere human beings. And it is beyond the ken.
If you are like me, there is something particularly unpleasant about the fashion of apocalypse currently in vogue. At least with nuclear annihilation everything would end quickly. And at least it wouldn’t so obviously be each of our own faults. Our current fantasy of disaster has
