but a minute to move beyond the phone crisis. So strange that even just turning off a cell phone, or being unintentionally disconnected from one, is a step into a wilder world.
I sip the beer and watch a long finger of light shaft down through the pines. It occurs to me that this would be a good spot to have sex if I were traveling with, say, my wife. I scribble down notes for an essay about wild sex in the wild—anything to help jazz up Nature’s dowdy reputation. Meanwhile, streaks of sunset bleed into the river as a beaver plows by, heading back upstream. A barred owl lets out a series of classic whoos. Solo camping can be both thrilling and terrifying. I remember the first time I spent a couple nights alone in California’s Lassen Park; I was sure the deer grazing outside the tent were killer bears. Over the years, I’ve become gradually less nervous. The woods behind me feel substantial and it seems I have the place to myself, at least until I hear a loud stomping and yelling coming down one of the paths. What enemy tribe is this? Three joggers and two dogs crash their way toward my campsite and suddenly my patch of wildness feels a little tamer. When they see my tent they grow quiet, and while they stop to let their dogs splash in the river I tell them about my trip. To my own surprise my voice sounds excited, almost overly so, and I realize I am already turning the day into a story.
I have always enjoyed spending days alone—solo days carry a special thrill—but for me, as a writer and storyteller and human animal, there is something else going on during these trips. I am readying my narrative, preparing to tell someone, itching to recreate my day. Pity the poor innocent who is the first person I bump into after these trips—the unlucky woman, for instance, who sat next to me at the coffee shop counter in Chester after my trip into Lassen—who gets her ear talked off.
I ask the runners how they happen to have come this far into the woods, and learn that I’m not quite as secluded as I hoped: there’s a trailhead and a road a couple of miles away. After they leave it quickly grows dark. I urinate around the camp’s perimeters to ward off other visitors and return to my ledge over the water, waiting for the moon, breathing in the slightly skunky smell of the river. I consider smoking the cigar I’ve stuffed in my dry pack, but when the moon doesn’t show up, I climb into my tent. The night is quiet enough, despite the steady highway howl in the background. I settle in my sleeping bag with a book and flashlight.
I’m reading a book called Break Through, written by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two lifelong environmental advocates best known for releasing an attention-grabbing essay called “The Death of Environmentalism.” That paper, which sparked a lively debate, advocated breaking environmentalism out of its granola ghetto and tackling global warming head-on, which, according to the authors, and contrary to most conservatives, would actually create jobs and help the economy. I thought I’d pick up the book because it seemed to fit my present mood, and I’d heard that Nordhaus and Shellenberger, like me, have grown tired of both musty mysticism and hysterical apocalypse-ism, favoring a more practical, hard-headed brand of environmentalism. I find myself nodding through their initial arguments as the authors criticize yet another manner of speaking about nature, that of the technocrat.
It gradually dawns on me, though, that the two authors seem to rail against the technocracy with their own form of techno-speak. I really wanted to like this book, but while I am full of admiration for these two men—mostly for their willingness to jab a stick in the environmental hornets’ nest—as I read on it seems to me that they ultimately lack a truly creative response to crisis. They want “greatness,” which they conveniently define as their own Apollo energy proposals. They tell me that what drives those of us interested in nature—which they consistently, ridiculously define as “hiking”—is a kind of post-materialist affluence, mocking anyone who might have more complex reasons to seek out the non-human world. Meanwhile, they happily belittle the contributions of old time environmental heroes like Rachel Carson. They seem to believe that human beings started to think about nature in the nineteenth century, around the same time Thoreau did, conveniently forgetting, or misplacing, the million years or so when we lived in the natural world.
In fact, what astounds me as I make my way through their text is that I don’t encounter a single rock or tree or bird. Before too long I’m tempted to unzip the tent and toss the book in the river with the rest of the debris headed seaward. It’s not that I disagree with a lot of their premises. Their willingness to criticize their august environmental forefathers, to suggest that the problems of poverty and environmentalism are deeply intertwined, is definitely praiseworthy. And whether or not you agree with them, their take is refreshing in that they try to shake things up. They also, for the most part, attempt to translate environmental policy into English while eschewing the gloomy rhetorical style that environmentalists have been known for since the dark days of the seventies when Jimmy Carter and his sweater first preached to us about conserving.
And yet the book is a hard slog. The authors constantly stress the need for a larger “vision,” using the word again and again, but their own vision remains a little murky. Like so many professional activists, they seem to suffer from conservative think-tank envy, waxing poetic about the Republicans’ ability to appeal to our self-interest through “core values,” as if values were merely strategic and vision merely a selling point. They suggest, for instance, that environmentalists focus more on “the job creation benefits of things like retrofitting every home and building in America.” Well, retrofitting is nice, but it’s not exactly a vision for a livable future—maybe just a trip to Home Depot.
Then there’s a larger problem: The authors tell us that environmentalists don’t acknowledge the potential of human beings, and that they, on the other hand, hope to free our great human potential. But their view of human beings is cobbled together from a mish-mash of humanist psychologists, neo-conservative critics, and what they keeps stressing are the great breakthroughs of social psychology over “the last fifty years,” which seems a particularly arbitrary time period when considering human development.
What does it all add up to? They sell human beings way short. They discount, for all their talk of vision, the power of ideas. Take environmentalism, for instance: according to the authors it came about in the sixties because we as a society had become “post-material” and affluent, which led to the great liberal agenda that environmentalism was part of. They dismiss as antiquated and dusty anyone who buys into the old mythos, anyone who dares believe that actual thinkers and writers, like Rachel Carson, had an influence on how people acted. Carson’s story in fact is just the sort of cobwebbed tale they think we must get rid of. They don’t exactly explain why this is so, nor do they rebut the impact of her ideas on her times—how, for instance, Carson’s book led directly to the congressional hearings that led to the banning of DDT and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. No big deal, I guess. We are nonetheless supposed to buy their premise, based on a crazy quilt of sources, that environmentalism’s flowering owed nothing to ideas but was a mere sociological byproduct of wealth.
The most thought-provoking chapter in their book considers Brazil, but it follows an argument that is deeply confusing, and a bit disturbing. It goes a little like this: Americans are really only concerned about the environment because we are affluent and “post-materialist” (not because human beings evolved in, and therefore probably have some affinity for, nature) and other countries will only care about the environment once they become post-material. Therefore it is imperative that we, rather than in any way try to restrain growth, encourage other nations, like Brazil, to follow us down the post-materialist path. So how can we help save the rainforest? Since only post-materialists can care about the environment, we need to create economic stimulus packages so that other countries become affluent, and post-material, and therefore are ready to save their environment that—oops—will already have disappeared in the process of their becoming post-material. They claim we are hypocrites not to try and help others to have what the United States has, but then again they acknowledge that if others have what we have the world will be ruined.
Nordhaus
