Why Care?

When I was ten years old, my family lived near a reservoir, and a portion of our backyard belonged to a water company. When a neighbor cut down trees on company property to enhance his water view, the company cleared even more trees to build a road by which to patrol and prevent further clearing. The company gave no notice of its intentions, so we were shocked when, one July afternoon, a bulldozer crashed through the woods and stopped just short of our garden. My mother convinced the bulldozing crew to avoid our fruits and vegetables, but it had already scarred my sacred landscape, the world I knew best.

My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism

David Gessner (Author)

Milkweed Editions

224 pages

$14.85

Your backyard is your world when you’re ten. David Gessner, in My Green Manifesto, suggests that perhaps that should never change. Perhaps the natural “limited wilds” we know best, no matter how small or imperfect, are the healthiest points of departure for a “new environmentalism.”

According to Gessner, the current environmentalism is too alarmist and discouraging in tone, too apocalyptic in scale, and too extreme in ambition. Gessner builds this critique and his manifesto for an alternative around the narrative of a canoe trip down Massachusetts’ Charles River with his friend Dan Driscoll, an environmental planner in Boston.

“It’s when environmentalism becomes fundamentalism that I get nervous,” Gessner writes, yet he asserts the value of the middle ground with some ambivalence.

Driscoll, an energetic, middle-aged hippie, has accomplished impressive habitat restoration along the Charles. That he has done so in a spirit of love and fun, and with the goal of restoring a modest wilderness, makes him the hero of Gessner’s environmentalism: “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.”

Gessner’s critique of the larger environmental movement is worth reading, especially if you aren’t familiar with the prevailing trends of secular environmentalism. Those conversations affect the daily contexts and choices of the general public, but they also influence our perspective on environmental stewardship and to what degree we undertake or ignore it.

For instance, there is the movement’s humorless alarmism, which can make us cringe and cover our ears, like children ignoring strident orders. That tone receives the brunt of Gessner’s “rambunctious” criticism. Many of his remarks are too riddled with profanity to be quoted at length in these pages, but here is a snippet: “Could we at least take a week off from new projections of doom? A month off from talk of the apocalypse? Maybe even a year-long moratorium on books that begin with the words The End of, The Death of, or The Last?”

Hand-in-hand with this apocalyptic tone is the scale of environmental crises. The magnitude of global climate change, ecosystem collapse, and species extinction drives us to middling efforts at conservation—buying reusable bags or energy efficient light bulbs. Those actions aren’t worthless, but they aren’t as constructive as taking responsibility for the places we can manageably love and nurture. “Tell me to save the world and I will panic,” says Gessner. “But tell me to save a chunk of that world … and I might just become engaged.”

He takes to task the opposing goals of the environmental technocrat and the “environmental extremist.” The technocrats are represented by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, who advocate an “ecotheology” rooted in evolutionary and technological progressivism. The righteous shall be saved by leveraging technology to both conquer environmental challenges and advance humanity so that adopting environmentalism can be as affordable globally as it is today in Western societies. Derrick Jensen represents the “environmental extremists.” Jensen’s own manifestos call for a world divested of all human-made infrastructure, restored to its wild roots. Here, the righteous shall be saved by their obeisance and submission to nature.

“It’s when environmentalism becomes fundamentalism that I get nervous,” Gessner writes, yet he asserts the value of the middle ground with some ambivalence. In an effort to avoid being accused of environmental “sacrilege,” he begins building a justification for his assertions about how environmentalism should look.

Gessner deserves credit for attempting to answer the “why care?” question with something other than an appeal to utilitarian self-preservation. But as he is a product of the times and uncomfortable with normative statements, he struggles to justify taking responsibility for something outside ourselves, for its own sake, without resorting to traditional moral authority. He ends up cobbling together his own sort of eco-religion in order to establish a framework from which to make his value judgments. What Christians might see as a Creator’s revelation in creation, Gessner reduces to a Thoreauvian, quasi-transcendent concept of “the wild,” which we humans connect to through our animal nature. Even if that wild is “limited,” and our interaction with it less than salvific, it is “something other than me, bigger than me, better than me. I don’t think this thing I’ve got is going to make me immortal …. But I do think it is enough.”

Really? This appeal to “the wild” could easily be co-opted by Nordhaus, Shellenberger, or Jensen to justify their own ends: We are animals, so we must evolve technologically. Or, we are animals, so we must surrender to wildness. Maybe it is predictable that Gessner eventually waters down his expectations, perhaps wary of judgmentalism, and declares, “The fact is that this ideal environmentalist does not have to … hew to any of the specific characteristics I have outlined. All they need to do is … fight in their own way.”

Despite this confusing turn, which Gessner seems to accomplish with little self-awareness, I had hoped he would approach what Andy Crouch, in Culture Making, calls “cultivation”: an application of the divine creative force within us to earthly materials. This is the balance of tending and keeping assigned to humanity in Genesis. This is the balance of the “limited wild” Gessner seems to be articulating. And I think, although he retreats from it, Gessner wants to acknowledge that something outside our own ambition or fear must dictate the healthy union of our wildness and our innovation.

Gessner’s struggle, however uneasy, to find a moral framework for his convictions is in itself noteworthy. The rapidly growing environmental movement’s struggle to answer “Why care?” may well be indicative of a larger desire for the reclamation of moral absolutes. The movement’s effort to justify itself without appealing to something beyond self-interest leads to its disparate goals and desperate voices. But it is a microcosm of larger confusions, convictions, and motivations, and Gessner gives us a peek into it: into the embattled efforts and imagination of the age, into the reluctant desire for some moral tethering, and into the opportunity for something true to take root.

Kendra Langdon Juskus is a freelance writer and editor and also works at the Marion E. Wade Center, where she is the editorial assistant for Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. She lives in Illinois with her husband and is in the MFA program for poetry at Spalding University.