My Green Manifesto by David Gessner Page B

poison ivy, and muscle the canoe up onto a stone wall. Then we carry the canoe down Mill Street in Dover for about a hundred feet. There is no sidewalk, and cars seem to be taking the blind corner we are walking into at about two hundred miles an hour, so as soon as we hit the woods below the dam we cut back in, despite the fact that this requires more bushwhacking though poison ivy. Once the canoe is back in the river we scrub ourselves with sand and water, and hope we don’t start itching soon.

    As we paddle through the afternoon, I chew over what Dan said about hypocrisy.
    Much has been made, of course, of the fact that celebrity environmentalists like Gore, McKibben, or even DiCaprio jet around the world to deliver their speeches about burning less fuel, and, on a much smaller scale, I’m
the same sort of hypocrite. Over the last couple of months I have been flying all over the country, from sea to shining sea, burning massive amounts of fossil fuel as I preach, in part, about burning less fossil fuel. Call me Son of Gore.
    I’ve been feeling a little bad about this but there is something freeing about Dan’s admission that we are all, to some extent, full of shit. The larger point that he is making, and that I couldn’t agree with more, is that none of us are pure, none clean.
    It occurs to me that, in its frankness and open humor, this attitude could do the environmental movement a world of good. We need to start again, I’m convinced, and we might do that by admitting that we are limited, human animals, not idealistic, über creatures. This may seem obvious enough, and I certainly would have thought it so, but over the last few months, as I’ve traveled, I have come in contact with a certain type of environmentalist that I once thought was merely the bogeymen of far-right conservative imaginations. I once regarded “environmental extremists” the way I did the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot, but it turns out they are real .
    My first encounter came when I agreed to be on a scholarly panel with the writer I mentioned earlier, Derrick Jensen. A couple of weeks before the panel I sent out a friendly e-mail to the other panelists, suggesting we bounce some ideas off each other. Here is a sampling from the e-mail I got in response from him:
    You ask me what I think about so-called nature writing? I think the same about it that I think about any beautiful writing. There is no time for it. There is time for only one thing: saving the earth .
The world is being slaughtered and we need to stop it. At this point writing is beside the point: the only—and I mean only —thing that matters is to stop this culture from killing the planet. The reason I feel comfortable saying that it’s the only end that matters is that without a landbase you don’t have anything. Everything—including beautiful writing—emerges from and is secondary to the land.
    The other writers and I felt a little cowed by the note, embarrassed that we had been up to then corresponding about such minor concerns as semicolons, tree frogs, and imagery. We worried that we were poseurs next to Derrick, that we should immediately do something, maybe burn our bras or draft cards. I read his e-mail to a friend, a writer who is much more careful about keeping his politics out of his essays than I am. He told me a story about a Marxist poet who accosted Robert Frost and said: “No poetry is worth its name unless it moves people to action.” Frost replied: “I agree. The question is, how soon ?”
    I admired Jensen’s passion, and realized that, face-toface, we might have more in common than not. The sheer earnestness of environmentalism can make me uneasy, but force me to choose between a tad too much earnestness and melting ice caps and I’ll take earnestness every time. Still, something about his tone unsettled me. I was reminded of one of my oldest friends, a man who not long ago became