My Green Manifesto (17 page)

Things speed up after that. The judge delays but then agrees to grant a stay that stops the Mosquito Commission from spraying. In the meantime public opinion turns against DDT, and the local extermination companies bow to public pressure, switching to more organic pesticides. When the judge's decision comes back, months later, he decides not to decide, acknowledging the danger of DDT but saying it is not in his powers to judge, an issue for the legislature. By then it doesn't matter. Art and company are off and running. There is a wonderful moment in any project, any great effort, when impotence transforms into potency. When an individual, or group, suddenly realizes, “Hey, I actually can do something.... I can impact the world.” This is why Derrick Jensen and the anti-hope gang are dead wrong. Suddenly “I did something” transforms into “I can do more?!” Suddenly momentum takes over and energy surges.

“What you've got to understand is that we were all friends,” Art will say later, trying to explain the intoxicated mood of the time. “We all
liked
each other. Many of us were naturalists and birders. For years we had felt pushed around by big companies, the chemical people. And suddenly we realized that we might actually be able to push back. It was terrifically exciting.”

There are some within the BTNRC who feel they have done enough, but there are others who believe they are just getting started. Those others—including Art, Dennis Puleston, George Woodwell, Charles Wurster, and Victor Yannacone—form another group, which they called the Environmental Defense Fund. The EDF is incorporated as a nonprofit organization with a mission to “encourage and
support the conservation of the natural resources of the United States of America.” The first thing the group does is file a suit against the Michigan Department of Agriculture, trying to stop the spraying of DDT and the use of pesticides around Lake Michigan. That case is thrown out on a technicality, but the next case, in neighboring Wisconsin, is not. Thanks to the Environmental Defense Fund, DDT is soon banned in that state. A few years later, in June of 1972, the chemical will be banned throughout the country by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency. People will point to both the Environmental Defense Fund and the writing of Rachel Carson as prime movers behind this law.

If there was a sense of momentum after the Long Island court case, imagine the sense after Wisconsin, or after the national ban. Imagine the sense of “we did something” transforming into “let's do more!” Imagine the ice breaking and the floes beginning to steam downstream. Oh, and remember, by the way, it began with
bird watching
.

Today Art Cooley sounds positively jolly when he recounts the EDF's motto, at least their private motto, during those heady days.

Their motto was this: “Sue the bastards.”

Sue the bastards!

Think of the life in those words. So much better than “The World is Doomed.” Even if it is.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. As with the results of Dan's fight—the green banks we have been paddling by—the results of Art Cooley's and Dennis Puleston's are there for anyone to see. For the ospreys, the effects of the DDT ban were immediate and dramatic: the coast quickly filled again with brown-and-white wings and wild, shaggy nests. In 1960, thirteen pairs of ospreys nested in Massachusetts while today we have well over three hundred. But the story itself is as important as the results. In the face of the familiar litany of environmental pessimism—not just global warming but depleted resources and the intractable crush of population—it is easy to close down. But I am energized by the fact that a few people took action and actually affected change, or, to put it another way, it is thanks to the fact that some Long Islanders sued the bastards that we now have ospreys on Cape Cod.

I believe that the osprey story, like Dan's story, is worth repeating in these embattled times. It seems a vital puzzle piece as I try to fit together my own green philosophy. One lesson, arguably the biggest lesson, we can take from it is how small, local change can have large, global results. “It all began in our backyard,” is how Art Cooley recently put it. And it ended as one of the biggest and most successful
environmental organizations of the twentieth century. Of course the technocrats would love to put Art's story permanently on the shelf with the rest of the cobwebbed old stuff. They would prefer to replace it with a “vision of affluence.”

For my part I don't get excited by the idea of humans turning into a band of chipper entrepreneurs. “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind,” said Thoreau.
¹⁹
A great life can be a different life, a new life. For the last thirty years we have told ourselves tales of affluence without sacrifice, of big cars and big houses—but there are other stronger, deeper myths that can guide us in the future which have also guided us in the past.

In a quest for newer, shinier ways to save the world, influenced, no doubt, by our belief that we can Google our way to any solution, we forget that stories matter. They may be chestnuts, but Dennis Puleston and Art Cooley's story, and Dan Driscoll's story for that matter, are ones that should be told and re-told, repeated around campfires. We don't need more theory, disembodied from the world. We need stories, told outside, told in a way that links activism to beauty, wild beauty. (And yes, there are beautiful places, countless beautiful places, near Boston and on Long Island—still
.
) They should be told in the open air so that we remember that loving and fighting aren't two specialties, but one thing, or at least two things that are part of a whole, connected through the pumping blood of a single circulatory system.

I can see why Nordhaus and Shellenberger consider Art Cooley's story outdated. For one thing it starts with Rachel Carson.
Oh god not Rachel Carson again
, you hear them moaning,
please not again
.... The Carson model, remember, is that of an artist retreating to nature, then
returning with a vision and that vision influencing the world. For another it fits what Nordhaus and Shellenberger call “the pollution paradigm,” the old model of environmentalism that they claim we will all have to give up now that we are fighting a new fight against a colorless, odorless gas in this age of global warming. But it could be that what they like least of all about the story is the simple fact that a large national fight, a fight with global consequences, began as a local battle over disappearing ospreys and some duck crap in a few Long Island ponds.

Because, to put it as simply as possible, Nord and Shell don't get places. Yes, it's true, believe it or not. They like the world, or at least they claim to, but local places, actual neighborhoods or street corners or copses of trees with squirrels in them strike them as, well, kind of yucky. You can see them up there on the shiny, clean bridge of the
Enterprise
, Kirk and Spock, or maybe, in their case, Spock and Spock, gazing placidly at a planet on the view screen but never quite wanting to beam down and leave their antiseptic ship.

For these two Spocks, one of the great culprits of modern environmentalism, one of the reasons it needs to die, is NIMBY-ism, or the famous “Not-In-My-Backyard” syndrome.

For an example of why fighting for one's backyard is so bad they point to a battle that has been raging for almost a decade in my former home. The controversy began when an entrepreneur named Jim Gordon proposed satisfying the Cape's ever-increasing energy needs by erecting 130 wind turbines out in Nantucket Sound, and the issue
gained national prominence for the usual Cape Cod reason: As it turned out the wind farm, as it came to be called, would be in the Kennedys' watery backyard, and the family trumpeted and harrumphed about this. Cape residents were split on the issue and I, a Cape resident, was split too, unsure what was right. But Nordhaus and Shellenberger, looking down from outer space, were not split. Of course they had good points to start with. Yes, Robert Kennedy was a hypocrite for supporting wind power everywhere but where he could see it (though he is clearly one of Dan Driscoll's good “fighting hypocrites,” having done much to clean up the Hudson and other rivers), and, yes, we of course needed to start exploring alternative energy. The problem, you see, isn't that Nordhaus and Shellenberger support Cape Wind, which is something that I, and most Cape Codders, have also ultimately come to do. The problem is that they, as usual, go too far, taking Cape Wind as their jumping off point to blame NIMBY-ism for all that is wrong with environmentalism. According to the authors, caring about one's backyard is synonymous with small thinking, an irrational prejudice comparable to racism.

Yes, they really say this: “We no longer believe it is justified to confine our affections to or reserve our loyalties for a particular race. Why then do we believe we are justified in reserving our loyalties for a particular place?” The real problem, according to the dynamic duo, is good old “place-based environmentalism,” and those narrow-minded, old-fashioned “place-based” environmentalists who fight for their own places.

True, NIMBY-ism can certainly be narrow-minded and class-based, but, far from being a snobby evil, it is actually where a lot of environmentalism is born. Think Dan
Driscoll. Think Art Cooley and the beginnings of the EDF. Think of Diane Wilson, the down-on-her-luck shrimper who went from being just another fisherwoman to singlehandedly fighting off multinational chemical companies because they fucked with her backyard: the Gulf of Mexico. What Nord and Shell neglect is the fact that almost all environmentalism grows out of places, and that most of it grows out of home places. As I mentioned earlier, my own first small burst of activism came when a trophy house was built, quite literally, in my backyard. If you aren't going to fight for your home you aren't very likely to fight for any place. And if you don't have a connection to a particular place, and to particular animals, humans and otherwise, who dwell in that place, then you don't fight. It's that simple. The Spock twins argue just the opposite. We need to think of policy not place. We need to think internationally, not locally, and we are bigots if we favor one place over another.

If they and their ilk don't like place, then please oh please don't talk to them about actual animals. When Jim Gordon first introduced the idea of erecting wind turbines off the coast, I was at the height of my love affair with Cape Cod. Like a lot of people I was more than a little apprehensive about what the turbines might do to the birds. Furthermore, I had some scary insider information. My work with ospreys had led to my getting to know two Scottish ornithologists who worked as consultants to wind farms in Europe.

“The machines don't do too much damage unless they are in migratory routes,” they told me, off the record. “But put them in migratory routes and they can kill a lot of birds.” And Cape Cod is dead in the middle of one of the world's biggest migratory routes: A million birds a night migrate over the peninsula at the height of the fall season.

But when Nordhaus and Shellenberger consider this issue from the deck of the
Enterprise
, anxieties about migrating birds and other wildlife are quickly and easily dismissed. They write: “Studies of wind turbines in Europe similar to the ones that are planned for Cape Wind have found vanishingly few bird deaths annually.”
Vanishingly few!
Whatever the fuck that means. If one follows the footnote of this statement it will lead to two sources, one a BBC news report and the other an article in a local glossy tourist magazine,
Cape Cod Today.
This is in line with their other research. For instance, countering Robert Kennedy's extensive early objections to the wind farms, the authors write: “Indeed we were able to debunk most of them in just forty-five minutes of fact-checking on Google and the Nexus news database.” Apparently the line is written without irony.

As for the birds and animals of Nantucket Sound, they are reduced to a minor role in the drama. It's about saving the world, after all, not saving birds. They quickly dismiss worries about local wildlife, referring to them as “photogenic animals.” Any claimed concern with non-human life, after all, is part of the old fashioned “grand environmental narrative” and not
au courant
. This makes sense within their overall logic since individual animals, including human animals, are all of and from a place. That is, they grow some
where
. The trouble again is that without knowledge of particular creatures that live in particular places, it is hard to actually care.