friend and mentor, the poet and essayist Reg Saner.20 The natural human state is that of hunger. We are always reaching, reaching, grasping, wanting to be somewhere other than where we are. It is not my role to stand apart from this and say, “No, it is bad to reach and grasp.” That is as foolish as it is ineffective. A better question is how to use this desire, and the unimaginable energy it unleashes. Is it possible to change the objects we grasp for? To refine and revise what we mean by “more” and “better”?
Talk of our doom is supposed to motivate us to change, but most often it leaves us feeling impotent. Rather than cause us to fight, it makes us withdraw. And to set the problem in terms of changing our basic nature is to insure it is a fight we will lose. It would be like saying to a bee, “You’ll be okay as long as you stop buzzing and working so hard on the hive.” If we set ourselves against human nature we propose an impossibility, insuring our own failure.
The question is not “How do we change human nature?” That has never been the question. The question is “How do we use human nature?”—just as surely as it is “How do we use the river or the tides or the winds?” The environmentalism that makes me most uneasy is a rationalist’s environmentalism, one that seems to hint at the perfectibility of man. I do not believe that humans are perfectible, or even very rational. We are a tribe with restless minds. We move and we shake and we need fuel to do it. For most of us, there is no greater punishment than sitting still and, faced with our current crises, we are not going to suddenly turn ourselves into Zen monks. Instead, maybe, at best, we can take some of this restlessness and energy and put it to better uses. Maybe we can nudge it in new directions, or, better yet, divert it toward older, deeper channels where it used to run. Maybe, as we do this, we can be guided, not just by the desire for ease, but also by older ideals of sacrifice; of good work and growth and wildness beyond an engineer’s dream of straight lines.
Which does not mean we should deny our engineers entirely, just suggest that they work with the world and not against it. We all have an engineer’s voice inside us—calm, rational, logical. We need those voices in difficult times, but we have made the mistake of thinking that that one voice is all. It is not: along with that voice we need one that is wild, inspired, simultaneously guided by, but somehow beyond, mere reason. It isn’t that I don’t believe in reason, willpower, all that; it’s just that I believe in this other thing too. And that other thing is where we merge with the world beyond us, a world that does not believe in straight lines. This is not a New Age sentiment. It is rather a very old one, one we need to get back to. The trouble is that we seem hell-bent on destroying the only thing that might hold a clue to an alternative way to be. And that thing we are destroying is a machine of such complexity that it makes our strongest computers look like children’s toys.
Over the last few years we have lost a clear-cut definition of what it means to be environmental, and that is good. So many things are mixed up that we have now entered a world where developers can be the good guys. I like that things have become muddied and complicated. I like that, at the moment, two of my favorite environmentalists are a businessman from Boston and a conservative Louisiana fishing guide, both driven as much by self-interest as their desire to save the world. Maybe they are the poster children for a new environmentalism, a hard-nosed environmentalism that sees how wind and water can coincide with profit.
Maybe it is time for the word environmentalism to go away altogether. Maybe the word needs to be knocked over and shattered. Whatever we call the shards that are left, it is not time to think in terms of black and white, good and bad. Black and white is what led to the checkerboard grid that covers the delta, slicing and sinking the marsh. What we need is creative, energetic thinking, but thinking that really takes the world into account—what my father called “the real world,” though his meaning was the opposite of mine. The real world is the one that has been here for millennia, not the industrial model that has been stamped upon us over the last hundred years.
We need to unleash our imaginations, wedding them to good science and engineering, while working with the world. This is not a conservative or liberal issue. It is a practical one. How will we next fuel our tribe? What juice will make us go? Do we keep pumping what is basically a dry hole, in the meantime taking risks that will destroy not just ecosystems and habitats and animals, but lifestyles and human culture? Do we do this in the name of sucking the last drops out of an old well, an old way? Or do we start doing now what we will have to do soon enough: looking for a new one?
RUSSIAN DOLLS
We reach the outer edges of the Barataria Bay, our boats landing on a barrier island facing the Gulf. It is hot, midday hot, and we climb out and start walking across the island, a thin patch of sand that stretches out for a couple of miles. Until a few moments ago the place was mostly populated by terns. True, there are a few crabs and laughing gulls and millions of crustaceans and insects and about a hundred million microscopic creatures that I can’t see, but until five minutes ago, no human beings. Now there are six of us marching across the island, and we do so in a remarkably self-conscious manner, a manner perhaps unique to our species. While terns are poseurs of a sort, aggressively defensive birds that always make far too big a show of defending their turf, they have nothing on humans. We, as a species, may be overly proud of our uniqueness, but one way that we are undeniably unique is in our obsessive need to record everything that we do.
I am the last to leave the boat, which means I get to look at all the others walking in front of me. Here is what I see. Twenty feet ahead walks Alan Guggenheim, who is filming the people who walk in front of him, a group that includes Brian, the Cousteau team cameraman, who is in turn filming the cameraman from the NBC Nightly News with the fancy accent, who is in turn filming the Ocean Doctor, who is holding out a microphone and recording (for his radio show) what Ryan, the only local, is saying. Then, what the hell, just to add another Russian-nesting-doll layer to the whole thing, I take out my microcassette tape recorder and speak the words you are now reading.
My head is spinning—this is what we’ve come to, the crazy self-consciousness of so many recorders, including myself. Enough, says a voice in my brain. I decide I need a little break, and veer off from the line of recorders and yell a too-quiet good-bye. I hike off to the east, cutting across the hump of the island. Once I can no longer see the rest of the group I pull out a beer from my pack. It’s warm but I drink it quickly anyway, trying to smash the hall of mirrors in my brain. I am Bruce Lee at the end of Enter the Dragon.
It is important for me to be honest about my motives. The Vessels of Opportunity captains aren’t the only ones who see potential gain in disaster. Writers and reporters and filmmakers are washing up on these shores like so many tarballs. This, after all, is a big story, and these days our storytellers migrate immediately toward any story deemed big. I am part of that national migration, and I make no claims to be above the baser motives that drive such a movement. But while I want to be honest, I don’t want to denigrate my motives. It is easy to take a single swipe and say that the media is bad and superficial, and that all storytellers are just in it for their own sake. Accepting the fact that self-interest drives us all does not necessarily mean racing toward bleak conclusions. To try to make a narrative out of a thing is not an entirely dishonorable endeavor.
One thing I do know: down here the stories gush like oil. By the time I arrived in Louisiana, I thought I had seen enough already, and in fact considered the possibility that I didn’t even have to visit Louisiana to be able to tell the story of the Gulf. I was dead wrong. With apologies to Florida and Alabama, this place is so terrifically strange that it makes me want to cry and laugh, usually both within every ten minutes or so. Never before have I experienced so intensely the disparity between hearing a story on the ground, from the people it is happening to, and the way it is told to the country. Never before have I been so deeply a part of the sheer Lewis Carroll strangeness of the modern storytelling machine.
I continue hiking up the beach, which
