My Green Manifesto by David Gessner Read Free Book Online

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