My Green Manifesto. David Gessner
to plan and scheme. When I first started talking about connecting the river paths, everyone looked at me like I was crazy. I said, ‘Let’s have these green paths that run through the urban areas. Let’s re-plant native plants to bring animals back. Let’s reconnect people to nature.’ Pretty soon I was known as this raging ecological planner.... Next thing I knew I was ‘The River Man.’”
Dan Driscoll is a man of average height and proportions, fit and compact, thanks in part to his daily bike commute in and out of Boston. Since our Frisbee days his hair has gone white, but his intense eyes still shine out a cracked blue. There is something of the true believer to Dan, as there has to be in anyone who will take on the sort of fight he has; but that intensity is leavened by a certain regular guy-ness and sense of humor.
As he paddles, he describes what he calls his “radical idea” that being environmental isn’t about education or politics. It’s about what Thoreau called “contact.” Falling in love with something—a place, an animal—and then fighting for it.
“When I grew up in Newton we always had our butts dragged out to Lincoln to learn about ‘nature.’ The way I look at it, if one kid walks out into his own backyard and has contact with nature, then maybe that will do something. Maybe he’ll be inspired to fight for the place. Maybe he’ll be the next John Muir.”
He pauses to correct his exaggeration.
“Or at least maybe he’ll just be less of a dick.”
Environmentalism is officially hot the summer we paddle down the river. Not long ago Arnold Schwarzenegger posed as a green warrior on the cover of Newsweek, while a couple of spots down the magazine rack Vanity Fair featured Leo DiCaprio standing next to a young polar bear on what I assume was meant to be a melting iceberg. In a few months Al Gore will win a shiny new Oscar for showing us his slide show. In the meantime, celebrities everywhere are tripping over themselves trying to show off their small carbon footprints.
Many of us understand that the things environmentalists have long told us are right. Though we don’t actually do it, we know that we should eat and drive less. And, on a deeper level, we know that we should conserve. We the people need to move away from our obsession with growth at all costs toward a dependence on local economies, and obviously away from slurping down oil and gobbling resources like a bunch of drunken gluttons. Yes, we know; we understand. But all these shoulds and needs. What about wants and what about fun? We are Americans for God’s sake!
Why does environmentalism, much of which is just common sense, so often sound like nagging? Particularly deadening is the endless repetition of the phrase “global warming.” We have all seen Uncle Al’s slideshow and are appropriately horrified. But what to do? Certainly the answer doesn’t lie only in screwing in those twisty little light bulbs. Whatever the answer is, it isn’t singing the same songs to the same choir. Maybe it’s overstatement to say that environmentalism, for all the recent media coverage, has lost its soul, but it’s not an overstatement to say that it has lost its power to excite the masses, or, at least, to excite me. And if it can’t excite me, the card-carrying nature guy among my friends, then environmentalism is in trouble.
For my part, while I have spent a lot of time in the natural world and can talk almost unblushingly about my love for it, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the “environmentalist” label. Then again, all my hair splitting might just be a case of playing Hamlet when what the world needs is action. Whatever we call ourselves, it is time to do something. But what to do when there are so damned many catastrophes, and how to do it without playing out the same old environmentalist Chicken Little act?
I will not insult you, dear reader, and pretend, for the sake of narrative, that Dan Driscoll is a folksy sage who holds the answers to all these questions. But I will say that, even before I put my paddle in the water, I am starting to think that Dan may hold hints of what I am rooting around for. It occurs to me that Dan might just be the right eco-hero for these times. Not an oversized Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Vulcan-like Al Gore, or even a Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon, but a regular guy fighting a local fight for a limited wilderness—the only sort of wilderness available to most of us. Maybe what is needed isn’t a raging prophet of doom, a stern-faced administrator, or an action hero, but a slightly goofy, stubborn, joyful, ex-Frisbee playing stoner of modest proportions—a stubborn guy who fell in love with a place and then fought like hell for it.
Life is strange: the way you sometimes start in one place and float elsewhere, seemingly despite—or even without—the self you once were. Dan Driscoll couldn’t have possibly plotted out becoming “The River Man” on a graph, moving from point A to B. As for me, I never set out to become that animal known as a nature writer. Little did I know. But one thing led to another and over the last dozen years I have written six books where the natural world—and birds in particular—keeps sneaking in, while being christened with tenure and the dubious title of “environmental spokesperson.” At the same time I have found myself unhinged over a seemingly simple question: How does any individual—swamped with other concerns and worries—wrestle their way toward a relationship with place and, perhaps, a means of fighting for that place? It isn’t an easy question for me to answer, and I assume that this is also true for you, swamped as you likely are with your job, your family, your life. And so I thought that I, newly a father and overwhelmed with work, might be the right person to help answer the question. Which led me to set out to do what anyone would do in such a bind: write a manifesto.
What I didn’t realize was that most issuers of manifestos begin with their conclusions concluded, their concrete hardened, and their intentions, motives, and views firmly in mind, or in hand, fit to bash you over the head with. I began, on the other hand, with nothing more than questions—questions as numerous as the sources of the Charles River, and as meandering as the river itself. But trust, dear reader, that though these questions do wander, they also reach the sea, moving toward answers if not the answer.
In this small book I have welded that intellectual adventure to the physical one of riding the wild Charles with Dan. Perhaps the two were not always as concurrent as they appear in the text (I did not carry a lectern in my canoe, after all) but the two journeys informed each other so deeply that I present them here as one.
And last, while my thoughts may flow from many sources, Dan Driscoll’s spring directly from the man himself: On the trip I carried a tape recorder wrapped in a zip-lock bag, which means that Dan Driscoll’s words are his own—with the “ums” and “ands” edited out. And of course the amazing feats of derring-do we indulge in, heroically taming the wild river, are also entirely true and factual.
I. THE SOURCE
A BACKYARD WILDS
The original plan had been for Dan and me to paddle the entire river together, but it turned out that for Dan the business of fighting for the Charles takes precedence over the pleasure of floating on it. A state meeting interfered, so I am paddling the first day solo.
Earlier this morning, however, Dan took some time away from work to drop me off at the launch, driving way too fast down the back roads of Medfield and Norfolk while we drank tubs of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. He explained that the kayak I’d be paddling was an expensive one and not really his but a loaner from a friend. As it turned out he was nervous enough about me navigating my first rapids that he drove to the Pleasant Street Bridge to coach me through the initial series of rocks. He was right to be nervous as I had mostly kayaked on ocean marshes before and, while the rapids on the Charles pale before true river rapids, they were challenging enough to do damage to the boat, if not to me.
Dan stared down from the bridge above, no doubt wincing when I slammed full on into