My Green Manifesto. David Gessner
TO THE END OF THE WORLD?”
It’s not too hard to see why most of us don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on these larger issues. Who wants to feel that knot in their chest, that twisting in their gut? The feeling of panic I get about the state of the world is not so different, on a personal, physical level, from the tightness I experience when worked up about the state of my own finances.
Paddling, it turns out, is a fairly effective way to shut up one’s mind. Dan did a lot of it in those first days working for the state, getting to know the river he would soon be fighting for. Today, paddling helps me turn from brain to body. Whatever else kayaking is, it is a form of work, and work, starting with the taking of small actions, is the only reliable way I know to escape from those insomniac anxieties that can strike even in broad daylight. In this case, that means rotating my paddle in and out of the water. Feeling the sun on my face, the sweat trickling down my neck as I paddle harder. Not that this is truly a “way out” of the problem, not that my paddling will help with global warming in any way or form. But it is a break, a respite, before returning fresh.
And before long I am feeling good. My thoughts calmer, my muscles stronger. Birds also help pull me outward. I watch the flashing blue backs of swallows as they skim over the water, scooping up insects in mid-flight as I paddle through a channel some forty feet wide, between banks high with grasses, viburnum, and the occasional willow tree. Through my binoculars I can study the flight of one particular swallow, intrigued by its mussel-orange belly, trying to trace its every turn and twist, and then, concentrating even more deeply, trying to anticipate where it will turn or bank next. I can actually watch the moment it opens its bill and snaps—the exact moment it catches a damselfly out of the air. I follow the bird with my gaze as it hooks back over the bank, digesting.
From the trees near the banks I hear a song—“peterpeter-peter” —a tufted titmouse. The titmouse sings for two main reasons, to define his territory and to woo a mate. It’s late in the season for the latter, so maybe he, like the heron, is letting me know I’m an intruder. This bird’s song is partly inside it, encoded, handed down from its parents and their parents. Some species—herons and hawks and ducks, for instance—will never expand their repertoire beyond this genetic heritage, or if they do expand, it will be by the nudge of accident. But for my titmouse, and for most songbirds, their music is only partly in the genes. It is also learned, which means it is varied and individual. This is why a modern mockingbird can imitate a chainsaw or car alarm. A bird’s song, then, belongs both to their species and themselves. Donald Kroodsma, the dean of avian vocal behavior, writes: “Listen carefully to robins or individuals of almost any songbird species as well, and you can hear how each bird sings with his own voice by varying his songs in either small or large ways from birds of his own kind.”
My friends from my younger days laughed when they found out I had gotten deeply into birds. Birds, of all things. Fancy, pretty little birds. These friends were mostly athletes and they saw me as an athlete, too, not to mention as someone who was gruff and crude and drank too much. And now . . . birds!
What I might have said to them, if I’d had the nerve, was that it was nothing fancy or pretentious that had led me to birds. Quite the opposite in fact. I believe that birds held the secret to something I’d been searching for. I slowly came to understand that it had been contact I’d been after the whole time, and that I had first sought out contact in drink and sport. What I might have said was that the contact that I craved was right there in an osprey’s dive. But maybe it’s best that I kept quiet. They would have laughed back then, I’m sure. But they are getting older now and it will not surprise me if a few of them gradually find themselves turning to birds.
But still, the question: Why birds? I mentioned contact but it goes beyond even that. I think the answer ultimately has something to do with both narcissism and its opposite. I go to birds selfishly but I also go to them because they are one of the few things that are capable of prying me out of myself. They don’t do this always or even often and when they do it it’s not for very long. But they do it. They give me transport along with contact. For that, and the fact that they fly, I love them. I don’t like the geeky aspect of learning their names and calls as much as I like the sheer simplicity and transcendence of their lives. I am not talking about god here, and maybe god is not necessary. Maybe bird is enough.
At my worst moments I live trapped in what my old professor Walter Jackson Bate called “the subjective prison cell of self.” I try to remember, during the dark, depressed, inward-turned times, that not only is there a world beyond me but that I have gone there—however briefly—and believe I will be able to go there again. This is the most reassuring thing I know. Not success or god or the big rock candy mountain. But the simple fact that there is still a world beyond us. That we are not alone.
Let’s just assume for a minute that the experts are right and the world is doomed. Let’s assume that when my four-year-old daughter is my age she will be living in a crowded slum apartment eating human-being patties like those in Soylent Green. What am I supposed to do about that? As I said above: I just don’t fucking know.
And how much does my long-term doom affect what I will do on a day-to-day basis?
I will still drink my coffee; still make my things-to-do list; still go to work; still pick up my daughter at preschool; still watch my birds. I might think about eco-doom once or twice a week but it won’t truly impact my consciousness. When will that change?
Perhaps there will come a time when the problem is so pressing that we all rally around to fight. Perhaps we will pull an all-nighter and summon Bruce Willis and his crew of roughnecks and somehow save the world. But while this last is a story I would like to believe, a story I hope for, it isn’t a story that I am going to put money on. Gloom and doom, while less palpable, seem a more likely forecast.
And this is just about where my brain usually freezes up again. This is where I always feel the need to take things down a few notches, to leave the problem behind for a while and turn to other concerns. Extreme fear—THE END OF THE WORLD!—leads to extreme thinking. Trembling before the world, we create apocalyptic scenarios and cast ourselves as prophets. Consider your own life: the way during a middle-of-the-night panic your thoughts spiral away from Earth, zigging and shooting and swirling upward. How to ground those thoughts? Where to root them?
I don’t know about you, but my own inclination is to return to the personal, which is not to turn from the altruistic to the selfish. What I am suggesting is that, as pressing as the end of the world is, most of us have other fish to fry. I am not saying that this should be the case, just that it is. And I am not the first to suggest that, as vital as saving the world is, saving ourselves is of some importance, too.
The dark secret of kayaking is that it can be pretty boring. Even with the stimulation of the changing weather and animal life, there are moments when the activity grows tedious and my back and arms ache. Doing anything for eight hours will wear you down. On the other hand the boring moments are more than counterbalanced by the delightful ones. On the banks of the marsh I see empty mussel shells and wonder if I’ll catch a glimpse of a river otter. That would be worth any tedium. Less romantic than imagining that sight, but equally stimulating, is the twenty minutes I spend paddling through what signs announce as a LICENSED SHOOTING PRESERVE. Gunfire tends to keep the human mind alert.
The noise dies out as the river seems to change to creek. Suddenly I am twisting and turning back on myself in a sinuous maze, the marsh undermining any sense of progress. It often feels like I am going backwards, but I know that if I just keep paddling I’ll cover the thirteen miles I need to before I get to my campsite by nightfall.
As I slog through the marshy passage, red-winged blackbirds, proud of their blazing orange epaulets, cluck at me, scolding. They let go with their three-word song, the last note like a punchline. Calmer now, I return to the ideas