My Green Manifesto. David Gessner

      He talks in this vein for a while, and then his sentences take what I will begin to recognize as a characteristic turn. He can’t really talk about his love of nature without spouting a lot of semi-mystical mumbo jumbo. I know how it is. But when his words start snaking their way to the topics of activism and politics they become bold and original.

      “We nature lovers are hypocrites, of course,” he says. “We are all hypocrites. None of us are consistent. The problem is that we let that fact stop us. We worry that if we fight for nature, people will say, ‘But you drive a car,’ or, ‘You fly a lot,’ or, ‘You’re a consumer, too.’ And that stops us in our tracks. It’s almost as if admitting that they are hypocrites lets people off the hook.”

      I pull my paddle out of the water to listen.

      “What we need are more hypocrites,” he said. “We need hypocrites who aren’t afraid of admitting it but will still fight for the environment. We don’t need some sort of pure movement run by pure people. We need hypocrites!”

      I think of Edward Abbey fighting for the West while throwing empty beer cans out the window of his truck. I think of my own environmental Achilles heel, a dainty preference for hot baths over showers—not nearly as cool as Abbey’s boozing, but possibly as wasteful. And then I think of everyone I know and know of and can’t come up with anyone who has an entirely clean eco-slate. Which seems to mean that, logically, Dan is right: If only nonhypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none.