My Green Manifesto by David Gessner Page A

morning’s monologues.
    â€œNature is my religion,” he begins. “Pantheism is my religion!”
    He talks in this vein for a while, and then his sentences take what I will begin to recognize as a characteristic turn. He can’t really talk about his love of nature without spouting a lot of semi-mystical mumbo jumbo. I know how it is. But when his words start snaking their way to the topics of activism and politics they become bold and original.
    â€œWe nature lovers are hypocrites, of course,” he says. “We are all hypocrites. None of us are consistent. The problem is that we let that fact stop us. We worry that if we fight for nature, people will say, ‘But you drive a car,’ or, ‘You fly a lot,’ or, ‘You’re a consumer, too.’ And that stops us in our tracks. It’s almost as if admitting that they are hypocrites lets people off the hook.”
    I pull my paddle out of the water to listen.
    â€œWhat we need are more hypocrites,” he said. “We need hypocrites who aren’t afraid of admitting it but will still fight for the environment. We don’t need some sort of pure movement run by pure people. We need hypocrites!”
    I think of Edward Abbey fighting for the West while throwing empty beer cans out the window of his truck. I think of my own environmental Achilles heel, a dainty
preference for hot baths over showers—not nearly as cool as Abbey’s boozing, but possibly as wasteful. And then I think of everyone I know and know of and can’t come up with anyone who has an entirely clean eco-slate. Which seems to mean that, logically, Dan is right: If only nonhypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none.
    When Dan finishes talking we turn our attention more fully to the work of paddling. We have a good ways to go, almost sixteen miles, if we are going to make it to our destination, the less-than-romantically-named Long Ditch, by sunset. As we glide through the Broadmoor a sharp-shinned hawk banks over the river and lands in a tree, spreading its tail like a delicate oriental fan. Around the next bend, a statue of a praying woman stands on a low triangular rock on the river bank, her face mottled by the shadows of oak leaves. Dan mentions that we are in Natick, and that praying, of the enforced variety, has a long history here. The state mandated the creation of Native American towns for the Massachusetts tribe in this area, evidently to help them preserve their culture—except for that one minor cultural component: their religion. These were Christian towns, the inhabitants referred to as “the Praying Indians.” Now Natick is a mostly white suburb, though not quite as affluent as some of the surrounding towns. It is also, Dan tells me, one of the few spots along the river where the same town forms both banks.
    â€œAlmost everywhere else the river is the border between towns,” he says. “You can look at it either way. As a connector or a separator. Either way we are almost always paddling down the middle of a border between towns.”
    Before lunch we portage around the South Natick Dam
and float through the backyards of Wellesley’s stately mansions. The river seems to like the easy affluence; arcing in and out of Wellesley in a lazy oxbow. This is a town where sixty-six percent of the households have at least one advanced degree, and it’s one of the last, long stretches of river before we hit more urban and dam-filled waters. We paddle hard for an hour, cutting a line between Needham and Dover. On my map I count fourteen dams, though I have read somewhere that there are at least twenty.
    Our next dam portage is the Cochrane. While South Natick required nothing more than sliding the canoe over a hill of dirt and pine needles, this dam presents more of a challenge. We finally take the boat out close to where the falls go over the dam, climb a hill covered with