and end by again claiming that what we need is vision. But Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision was a clear and passionate one: All people should be treated equally and fairly. Here is their dream, as I summarize it: Countries should achieve an abundance similar to the United States and gradually achieve a post-materialism that will allow them, gradually, to get interested in environmentalism (and hiking). Not quite as catchy as King’s, you must admit. It makes you wonder why they so dislike the old dream—the one about “saving the world.”
What most surprises me is how these two ever ended up going into a field that had the word “environment” in it. Their bios state that they have spent their entire careers as part of, or advisers to, environmental organizations, and you can’t help but feel they would have benefited from taking a few other jobs, maybe even one that got them out of the office. It isn’t just that they seem to have little respect for the idealistic, passionate environmentalists who came before them, it’s that I see no evidence at all that either of these men, at any point in their lives, have ever interacted with the nature that they so like to theorize about. They seem to care little for the natural world, except as it pertains to theories and models.
You’ll have to forgive me, dear reader, for going on so long about these two individually, but as I fume I realize they are coming to embody for me much of what is wrong with the environmental movement these days: primarily the belief that humans are only data points; that theory and policy will guide us beyond the troubled present we occupy and the future it suggests. Policy and theory are great, but they’re only as strong as the belief of the people meant to follow them. So Nordhaus and Shellenberger come in for a beating here, but only because, to date, they’re the best effigies I’ve found yet for the environmental technocracy. Sorry guys.
I sleep pretty well on a cushion of pine duff and only get up twice during the night. Once to piss and another time when a loud noise jerks me out of sleep—just the commuter train rumbling past a couple of miles away, letting off the shriek of its whistle. And then another noise, much stranger, a noise that the train’s whistle calls up. The train initiates the dialogue, but the coyotes continue it eagerly. They howl wildly for a good half hour after the train has passed, their howling in turn setting off the distant yipping and wailing of domestic dogs. The blurry dialogue between what is wild and what is tame seems particularly appropriate as a lullaby. I think back to when I lived in the city this river is bound for, the year my daughter was born and the year I tracked the coyotes that have made this their urban territory, their tracks then tracing a path in the snow along the frozen Charles, right down into the city’s heart.
I listen to the chorus for a while, how long I don’t remember, before drifting back off to sleep.
I wake to a river covered with mist. A blanket of white punctuated by fingers of sunlight stretching down toward the water as small whirlwinds of steam rise up to meet them.
Groggily, I return to last night’s argument with Nordhaus and Shellenberger. It turns out that they bug me as much in daylight as after dark. These two claim to dislike scoldings, but their book sure feels like one. After reading for awhile, I prowl my small patch of shoreline. I feel chastised and it isn’t chastisement that we need. We need the opposite. We need language—simple, plain, impassioned—that can be used both to describe our love for nature and to rally humans, actual people living in the world, to the fight to save it. A language that calls us away from computers, think tanks, and ethereal theories so that we may return to the ground truths of the places we call home. Why talk about language again, you ask, when there are polar bears to save? Because language comes first, the source, the rallying cry before the fight.
One thing I do enjoy in Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s book is their fondness for Winston Churchill. The biographer William Manchester wrote of Churchill’s speeches during World War II: “Another politician might have told them: ‘Our policy is to continue the struggle; all our focus and resources will be mobilized.’ ”4 Instead Churchill’s words rose to the occasion and he spoke directly of sacrifice, of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”5 If we are indeed entering a time of crisis—and everyone tells us we are—then we will need the direct and urgent language of crisis, a language that fills us with hope, despite the darkness.
Part of what a living language must do is address the crisis itself, but more importantly it must tackle the psychology of environmentalism. How do we go from engaging in a full-on panic attack to taking small steps, from listless apathy to the beginnings of action on a wide and wild scale? For me those questions spring from this one: Why save a world you don’t care about? After all, how do we fight for something that is no longer a part of our lives? Or to put it another way, how do we start to care for something we have nothing to do with? Beyond buying into the faddish popularity of our new all-green, all-natural, consumerism, the majority of people in this country have little to no contact with the natural world in their daily lives. What this new language must do, in clearly unsentimental terms, is to cultivate a return to, a love and delight for, wildness. Because that is what we are losing when we lose daily contact with birds, animals, trees, water, and land. Part of the problem, of course, is what I would call the nature calendar view of nature: over there is spectacular untrammeled NATURE and then there’s what we’ve got. But I am here to say that what we’ve got, right here, trammeled and all, ain’t so bad. We simply need to fall in love with what is left, with the limited wildness that remains. That is what Dan Driscoll did with the river I’m staring out at now. He saw past the piles of Coors Light cans and shopping carts floating in the water and fell for the coyotes, the hills, and the black crowned night herons that had come back to nest along the shore.
My own experience suggests that love, and sometimes hate, are much better motivators than theory. For several years—the most intense years of my life in many ways—I lived on a deserted beach on Cape Cod, squatting in the homes of the wealthy during the off-season, and during that time I fell hard for one particular section of rocky beach.
I didn’t clearly recognize it at the time but that period was a love affair. And then the love affair was interrupted when, one day, someone began constructing a trophy home on the bluff. I was filled with something close to rage, and for the first time in my life, found myself attending town meetings and writing letters of protest. I bring this last point up, not to boast of any strain of righteousness, but because I believe it speaks to what motivates many of us to act. The writer Jack Turner puts it well: “To reverse this situation we must become so intimate with wild animals, with plants and places, that we answer to their destruction from the gut. Like when we discover the landlady strangling our cat.”6 Our greatest environmentalists, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir among them, were instinctive fighters, who also happened to spend plenty of time outdoors. More of us need to follow their lead. It is not my place to offer pep talks, aphorisms, or dictums. But if I had to give one piece of practical advice it would be this: Find something that you love that they’re fucking with and then fight for it. If everyone did that—imagine the difference.
If environmental psychology is my topic, some of the pressing questions are: What allows a person to go beyond paying lip service to nature and to actually live with it in this modern, muddled world? How can we fall in love with something so limited and wounded? And how can we go from loving to fighting? Finally, we must consider what role, if any, that hope plays in these questions.
A while back I read an essay by a writer named Derrick Jensen, in which he argued for a politics of hopelessness. I couldn’t disagree more. Without hope and the energy it provides we curl into the mental equivalent of the fetal position, hiding from the world. “Where there is no hope, there can be no endeavor,”
