My Green Manifesto by David Gessner Read Free Book Online Page A

do we fight for something that is no longer a part of our lives? Or to put it another way, how do we start to care for something we have nothing to do with? Beyond buying into the faddish popularity of
our new all-green, all-natural, consumerism, the majority of people in this country have little to no contact with the natural world in their daily lives. What this new language must do, in clearly unsentimental terms, is to cultivate a return to, a love and delight for, wildness. Because that is what we are losing when we lose daily contact with birds, animals, trees, water, and land. Part of the problem, of course, is what I would call the nature calendar view of nature: over there is spectacular untrammeled NATURE and then there’s what we’ve got. But I am here to say that what we’ve got, right here, trammeled and all, ain’t so bad. We simply need to fall in love with what is left, with the limited wildness that remains. That is what Dan Driscoll did with the river I’m staring out at now. He saw past the piles of Coors Light cans and shopping carts floating in the water and fell for the coyotes, the hills, and the black crowned night herons that had come back to nest along the shore.
    My own experience suggests that love, and sometimes hate, are much better motivators than theory. For several years—the most intense years of my life in many ways—I lived on a deserted beach on Cape Cod, squatting in the homes of the wealthy during the off-season, and during that time I fell hard for one particular section of rocky beach.
    I didn’t clearly recognize it at the time but that period was a love affair. And then the love affair was interrupted when, one day, someone began constructing a trophy home on the bluff. I was filled with something close to rage, and for the first time in my life, found myself attending town meetings and writing letters of protest. I bring this last point up, not to boast of any strain of righteousness, but because I believe it speaks to what motivates many of us
to act. The writer Jack Turner puts it well: “To reverse this situation we must become so intimate with wild animals, with plants and places, that we answer to their destruction from the gut. Like when we discover the landlady strangling our cat.” 6 Our greatest environmentalists, Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir among them, were instinctive fighters, who also happened to spend plenty of time outdoors. More of us need to follow their lead. It is not my place to offer pep talks, aphorisms, or dictums. But if I had to give one piece of practical advice it would be this: Find something that you love that they’re fucking with and then fight for it. If everyone did that—imagine the difference.
    If environmental psychology is my topic, some of the pressing questions are: What allows a person to go beyond paying lip service to nature and to actually live with it in this modern, muddled world? How can we fall in love with something so limited and wounded? And how can we go from loving to fighting? Finally, we must consider what role, if any, that hope plays in these questions.
    A while back I read an essay by a writer named Derrick Jensen, in which he argued for a politics of hopelessness. I couldn’t disagree more. Without hope and the energy it provides we curl into the mental equivalent of the fetal position, hiding from the world. “Where there is no hope, there can be no endeavor,” wrote Samuel Johnson. 7 He was not talking about the Disney variant of hope, but the real animal. It’s the light that filters down into our dark brains, sparking our neurons. The brightening after darkness, which energizes like the quickening of the world in spring. A thawing and movement into activity, an activity that then gains momentum. This is hope as a physical thing: The hope that spring inspires, after the long winter.

    It is just this sort of hope that energizes me now as I pace this bank,