My Green Manifesto (23 page)

Dan Driscoll has little use for Harvard. The school, and the others like MIT and B.U. that like to feature the Charles on their brochure covers, don't have a lot of interest in returning a varied ecosystem to the river.

“They reap the benefits of a revitalized river but you can't get a cent out of them,” he said not long before he climbed out of the canoe. “You'd think they'd want to spend a little of that zillion dollar endowment. Not a chance.”

When Dan was invited to speak at the school, he found that it only brought out the contrarian in him. He repeated for his learned crowd what he had said to me on our first day on the river:

“Real environmental awareness may not be possible without hallucinogens,” he told them.

Maybe the audience laughed; maybe they thought him silly. Dan claimed not to care.

“I believe in anything that turns us away from the virtual world to the real one,” he said.

I understand Dan's antipathy toward Harvard. But during my single term teaching here, between births and coyotes and birds and happily engaged students, I can't say I share Dan's assessment.

I walk up to Adams House, where I wheeled Hadley over the cobblestones during her first weeks, loudly lulling her to sleep. Sean Palfrey, who is Teddy Roosevelt's great
grandson, was the Adams House “master” when we were there, and he showed me the crib the young TR was rocked in. Hadley's was a rare, poetic beginning, as we were renting a room that was usually occupied by the poet Seamus Heaney. “All children want to crouch in their secret nests,” Heaney once wrote. We found the poet's things-to-do lists and notes on how to program the VCR and took them as a blessing.

It was during that luscious spring that I became, for the first time, a teacher as well as a father. In the years since I have become the sort of animal known as a professor, but from the beginning I vowed that I would bring wildness into the classroom. I brought in coyote skulls and bird feathers, and tried to keep in mind that most of the time when I was a student I'd been bored to death, and to remember just how dead the assigned reading often felt to me. Early on I learned that one good way to break students out of the deadly apathy of the classroom is to literally break them out. Taking classes outdoors, really outdoors, does wonders, and I've made it a staple of my teaching for years. It's amazing how much more animated grad students become about books, for instance, when they discuss them after a couple of drinks around a bonfire, after kayaking out to a deserted island where they will spend the night in a tent. I can't legally recommend skinny dipping at midnight with those same students as a pedagogical tool, but, theoretically at least, it is not ineffective. The point is to get outside, to engage, to make some kind of contact.

Last fall I taught a class of both grad students and undergrads called “When Thoreau Met Darwin.” The two men may seem strange bedfellows at first, but there is more overlap than you might think. Of course Thoreau and Darwin never actually met, but their great books,
Walden
and
The Origin of Species
, were published within three years of each other, in 1856 and 1859, respectively. And while it is unlikely that Darwin ever read a sentence of
Walden
, Thoreau read
The Voyage of the Beagle
with keen interest. Then in 1860, two years before he died at forty-four, Thoreau got his hands on Darwin's
Origin.

Many once believed that Thoreau's last years were wooden ones, his transcendental fervor having died out. Thankfully Robert D. Richardson, the author of
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
, came along to overturn this misinterpretation. In fact, reading Darwin sparked Thoreau to a massive study of the leafing of Concord's trees and the blossoming and fruiting of plants, a comprehensive phenological chronicling of his hometown that promised a new beginning in Thoreau's writing, a movement away from the more personal focus of
Walden
and toward a wider, biocentric view of nature. It was a movement that mirrored Darwin's ideas, ideas that transformed
Homo sapiens
from the central role in the world's drama into just another player.

One of the real pleasures of reading the two men at once was the way that both of their minds wandered freely over disciplines. For instance, Darwin, as well as studying ornithology, geography, history, and a dozen other fields, was also a hell of a writer—amiable, straightforward, and as clear as he could be given that he was trying to explain something fairly technical and entirely new. It doesn't hurt that when he needs to he can draw on his seven year study of barnacles and drop a mean crustacean reference. Or that he can reference fantails or short-faced tumblers or pouters from his decades-long study of pigeons.

Like Darwin, Thoreau was immensely curious. Richardson writes of Thoreau's inspired reaction to reading
Origin
: “That his interests were still expanding, his wonder still green, his capacity for observation, expression, and connection still growing is the most impressive evidence that his spirits this January were still on the wing.”
²³
But while Thoreau wrote constantly, he shied away from the professionalism that the title of writer implied. Writing was part of a larger project called living. “The head is an organ for burrowing,” he writes. His was a lifelong experiment in burrowing, working his way down through the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that allusion which covers the globe.”
²⁴
For his part, Darwin was perhaps history's greatest
connector
, his interests extending from barnacles to pigeons to how “the presence of feline animals in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!”
²⁵
For many years Darwin was, like Thoreau, a reporter to “a journal, of no very wide circulation.”
²⁶
This last quote is Thoreau's punning reference to the fact that he was the only one who read most of what he wrote. And while Thoreau had his journals to report to, Darwin had his private notebooks, which for twenty years kept the secret of natural selection to themselves while the world waited. It is there he pieced together the great puzzle, a puzzle that would forever change how human beings thought of themselves.

The students in the class were very sharp and you could see the electricity in the air as they made unexpected connections between science and literature. While they had to labor their way through
Walden
, you could watch the impact that Thoreau made, particularly with his pronouncements of nonconformity, about living a life different (and perhaps
better!) than the life expected of them. Yes, you could almost see the kids thinking, there are other choices, other ways. As much as I liked my grad students, it was the undergrads who were the real pleasure, watching them come to terms with what these strange ideas might mean for their lives.

I don't want to stretch the term “wildness,” to make its meaning too elastic, but certainly one of the things they were thinking about was how they might live a wilder life—a life less predictable, less standard issue, less like the life they were expected to live. Would they end up going through with it? Who knew? But at least it was a possibility, part of the equation, and at least some new ideas were at play in their minds. That was enough. One night we gathered around one of those bonfires out on a nearby island and I was amazed, and impressed, when, rather than devolving to topics like sports or the latest party, the students kept talking late into the night about Darwin and Thoreau.

One thing the students kept mentioning, and one thing that wound its way like a stream through everything we talked about in the class, was that both books, in their different ways, reinforced the fact that human beings are part of the animal kingdom.
You are an Animal
might as well have been the course's subtitle. At least that was what everything we read during the term seemed to shout at us. And what good does it do to admit to this wildness, this animality? Well, maybe it doesn't do much good but maybe there's this: Maybe it's healthy to have our definitions come in line with our reality. And maybe there is another reason that understanding that we are animals is vital. Maybe we need to keep reminding ourselves that, as John Hay said, we are still part of this world.

Reading Thoreau and Darwin back to back certainly
helps reinforce this fact. Obviously Darwin's way of reminding us of our animal natures is more overt, if more polite.
Um, excuse me. Did you notice this little remnant of a tail we all have, and how it just so happens that these bones suggest that we might have common ancestors?
Stephen Jay Gould, in the first essay of his first collection,
Ever Since Darwin
, quotes what he calls a “remarkable epigram” from one of Darwin's notebooks: “Plato says in
Phaedo
that our ‘imaginary ideas' arise from the preexistence of the soul, and are not derivable from experience—read monkeys for preexistence.”
²⁷
Read monkeys! Of course Darwin was never so direct in his great book, only hinting that this whole evolution thing might actually apply to humans. “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” is about as far as he would go.
²⁸

Thoreau, with little patience for evidence early in his career, was more brash. He points to the effluvia of what we call society and shows how we, by considering ourselves above the natural world, have diluted and perverted our natural strengths. As an essayist, Thoreau begins with Montaigne's central assertion of humility that we are “just another animal” and that, even on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our asses.
²⁹
He reminds us that, at core, our main challenges on Earth remain the getting of food and fuel and fire, something many of us are now remembering again as such things become scarce.

What does it really mean to say, through science or art, that we are just another animal? Different things to different people. Some see it as sacrilege, others as a way to justify our aggressive or territorial impulses. Maybe a better use of this information is in moving toward a greater humility, and an ability to see beyond our own merely anthropocentric needs. Maybe this can lead to not taking ourselves
quite so seriously. After all, DNA puts the lie to our myth of specialness. If it is trite to say that we are brothers and sisters with other members of the animal world, all united, then it is also simply and biologically true. But an acceptance of our own animal nature is just a starting place, and from that
base
base we can build upward. Our reaction needn't be, “Hey, we're animals, don't expect much of us.” For along with humility, we can also feel some deserved confidence, since the animals we happen to be have developed not just enormous brains and opposable thumbs and complex languages, but an inherent and dazzling ability to be flexible, to adapt almost from minute to minute. Gould goes so far as to crown flexibility our defining trait, saying that it “may be the most important determinant of human consciousness.”
³⁰
We change therefore we are.

What thrills me here is the yolking of the base to the sublime, the animal to the intellectual. It's easy for our thinking to grow thin and brittle when we philosophize, to forget that we are creatures who shit and fuck and die. On the other hand, as animals we are capable of doing things like developing theories of evolution and writing books about going to live in the woods. For me the acknowledgment that we are just another animal is no less than the foundation of what it means to be human. Some may see this idea as a celebration of the anti-rational, but I don't think this is so. It is
reasonable
to understand that we are not rational, to understand that instinct, emotion, and dreams drive us, and I would argue that this acknowledgment of what we are, far from being anti-rational, can lead to a much greater reasonableness. It is when we make false claims to rationality, when we stuff down that which is deemed irrational, that things start to go haywire.
Montaigne wrote that “supercelestial thoughts lead to “subterranean conduct.”
³¹
It is the reasonable human being who acknowledges that a streak of unreason is part of what makes us who we are.

Some might say this is a reductionist view of man that stamps out spirit and hope and beauty. I don't think so. Evolution does not deny the miracle. Evolution
is
the miracle.

Let's say for a minute that we actually take this notion that we are animals seriously. Let's say that we don't just pay it lip service, but follow through and ask: If we are animals how might we live well as animals? Be a “good animal” Emerson said. But Ralph didn't leave an instruction manual. How exactly do good animals live?