David Gessner, “My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism”
Milkweed Editions
2011, 225 pages, paperback, $15
This morning when I opened my email inbox, it held half a dozen “URGENT!!!” messages informing me that “we have only 24 hours to save the planet.” When I got home this afternoon, my mailbox held several similar “URGENT!!!” letters, informing me of further threats to the planet. Now, I am all for saving the planet; I get all those earnest entreaties because I do support many of those organizations. But the constant, humorless tone of them all is driving me nuts. I envision rabbit warrens of earnest young men and women cranking out those earnest emails, stuffing those envelopes-spending every day in their cubicles beneath fluorescent lights, saving nature without ever going out to look at it.
This notion of going outside brings me to David Gessner’s “My Green Manifesto.” The book, framed by a journey with Dan Driscoll down the Charles River, is one part critique of the kind of humorless and ultimately natureless environmentalism embodied by shrill entreaties about “saving the planet,” and one part Gessner’s examination of his own environmentalism.
Too often, Gessner argues, nature is reduced to an abstraction, a not-place if you will, rather than something inescapably real. That abstract wild (to borrow a term from Jack Turner) is a theoretical place; “we don’t need more theory,” Gessner tells us, “disembodied from the world.” His journey down the Charles with Driscoll is an example of an embodied nature; Driscoll has for several years been working to restore the Charles to a wild condition, returning wetlands to pre-industrial fecundity. Driscoll, Gessner writes, “is a stubborn guy who fell in love with a place and then fought like hell for it.”
Yet restored or not, the Charles is by no means a “pristine” river; it is, rather, an example of a “limited wilderness,” as is the “majority” of wilderness today. This trammeled wilderness still warrants both love and preservation, though; the question is how to achieve these things in the face of ongoing degradation on the one hand and over-theorized abstract “wilderness” on the other.
Rather than a more theoretical approach, Gessner seeks to develop “a sloppier form of environmentalism.” This involves spending time outside; it also involves spending less time quoting Thoreau (among others). The problem is not so much what Thoreau offers-Gessner reveals that he is actually quite taken by his work-but that we need to “break out of Walden and add an element of senseless and outrageous humor to the fight.” That need leads to the gist of his argument, which is to go outside, look around, and fall in love a little with the place you live in. If the inherent wildness of the nature you know is diminished, he argues, “we simply need to fall in love with what is left, with the limited wilderness that remains.” The idea here is that we are more likely to fight to protect a place we love than to do so for some abstract thing called “nature.”
A cynic might say that paddling down the Charles River, while perhaps pleasurable, or even educational, is an affectation, and the resulting love of that diminished place nothing more than romanticization, just the sort of thing that’s preventing us from SAVING THE PLANET!!! Not so, Gessner argues; for in these benighted times, all the nature left to most of us is “a limited wilderness.”
Perhaps because of this understanding, Gessner decries the methods of many current environmental organizations, arguing that no disembodied environmentalism that “so often sound[s] like nagging” is likely be fully effective. He believes that to “fight joyously for what’s good in the world,” as his friend Dan has done for the Charles, is the key to protecting even the most trammeled wildness.
Ultimately, Gessner points out, human presence has damaged most of the places we call home. If we can only love and protect the “nature of Sierra magazine,” he argues, if we can only love and protect some idealized wilderness out there somewhere, we miss the point. We miss, too, most of the natural world, as well as the joy of living in this trammeled, wonder-filled world.
Richard Hunt hails from Southern California, and received his doctorate from the University of Nevada, Reno. After traveling much of the country, he now lives in West Virginia, where he writes about his misspent youth, the vagaries of our relationship with the natural world, and the connections between music and environment. In his day job, he teaches composition and literature at Potomac State College.