The next day, talking informally to a small group, he pulled out of his wallet a much-loved photo of his thirteen-year-old son. He spoke as carefully as he had before, but this time his voice was sad, worried, and fatherly. His son, he said, had become so frightened about climate change that he was debilitated, depressed, and disturbed. Some might have suggested therapy, Prozac, or baseball for the child. But in this group one voice said gently, “What about the Transition Initiative?”
If the Transition Initiative were a person, you’d say he or she was charismatic, wise, practical, positive, resourceful, and very, very popular. Starting with the town of Totnes in Devon, England, in September 2006, the movement has spread like wildfire across the U.K. (delightfully wriggling its way into The Archers, Britain’s longest-running and most popular radio soap opera), and on to the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The core purpose of the Transition Initiative is to address, at the community level, the twin issues of climate change and peak oil—the declining availability of “ancient sunlight,” as fossil fuels have been called. The initiative is set up to enable towns or neighborhoods to plan for, and move toward, a post-oil and low-carbon future: what Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Initiative, has termed “the great transition of our time, away from fossil fuels.”
Part of the genius of the movement rests in its acute and kind psychology. It acknowledges the emotional effect of these issues, from that thirteen-year-old’s sense of fear and despair, to common feelings of anger, impotence, and denial, and it uses insights from the psychology of addiction to address some reasons why it is hard for people to detoxify themselves from an addiction to (or dependence on) oil. It acknowledges that healthy psychological functioning depends on a belief that one’s needs will be met in the future; for an entire generation, that belief is now corroded by anxiety over climate change.
Many people feel that individual action on climate change is too trivial to be effective but that they are unable to influence anything at a national, governmental level. They find themselves paralyzed between the apparent futility of the small-scale and impotence in the large-scale. The Transition Initiative works right in the middle, at the scale of the community, where actions are significant, visible, and effective. “What it takes is a scale at which one can feel a degree of control over the processes of life, at which individuals become neighbors and lovers instead of just acquaintances and ciphers. . . participants and protagonists instead of just voters and taxpayers. That scale is the human scale,” wrote author and secessionist Kirkpatrick Sale in his 1980 book, Human Scale.
How big am I? As an individual, five foot two and whistling. At a government level, I find I’ve shrunk, smaller than the X on my ballot paper. But at a community level, I can breathe in five river-sources and breathe out three miles of green valleys.
Scale matters.
We speak of economies of scale, and I would suggest that there are also moralities of scale. At the individual scale, morality is capricious: people can be heroes or mass murderers, but the individual is usually constrained by inner conscience and always constrained by size. While a nation-state can at best offer a meager welfare system, at worst—as the history of nations in the twentieth century showed so brutally—morality need not be constrained by any conscience, and through its enormity a state can engineer a genocide. At the community level, though, morality is complex: certainly communities can be jealous and spiteful and less given to heroism than an individual, yet a community’s power to harm is far less than that of a state, simply because of its size. Further, because there are more niche reasons for people to identify with their community, and simply because there is a greater per-capita responsibility, a community is more susceptible to a sense of shame. Community morality involves a sense of fellow-feeling, is attuned to the common good, far steadier than individual morality, far kinder than the State: its moral range reaches neither heaven nor hell but is grounded, well-rooted in the level of Earth.
STARTING WITH a steering group of just a handful of people in one locality, the motivation to become a Transition community spreads, often through many months of preparation, information-giving, and awareness-raising of the issues of climate change and peak oil. In those months, there are talks and film screenings, and a deliberate attempt to encourage a sense of a community’s resilience in the face of stresses. When members of the steering group judge that there is enough support and momentum for the project, it is launched, or “unleashed.”
Keeping an eye on the prize (reducing carbon emissions and oil dependence), Transition communities have then looked at their own situation in various practical frames—for example, food production, energy use, building, waste, and transport—seeking to move toward a situation where a community could be self-reliant. At this stage, the steering group steps back, and various subgroups can form around specific aspects of transitioning. Strategies have included the promotion of local food production, planting fruit trees in public spaces, community gardening, and community composting. In terms of energy use, some communities have begun “oil vulnerability auditing” for local businesses, and some have sought to re-plan local transport for “life beyond the car.” In one Transition Town there are plans to make local, renewable energy a resource owned by the community, in another there are plans to bulk-buy solar panels as a cooperative and sell them locally without profit. There are projects of seed saving, seed swapping, and creating allotments—small parcels of land on which individuals can grow fruit and vegetables.
“The people who see the value of changing the system are ordinary people, doing it for their children,” says Naresh Giangrande, who was involved in setting up the first Transition Town. “The political process is corrupted by money, power, and vested interests. I’m not writing off large corporations and government, but because they have such an investment in this system, they haven’t got an incentive to change. I can only see us getting sustainable societies from the grassroots, bottom-up, and only that way can we get governments to change.” In the States, the “350” project (the international effort to underscore the need to decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million) is similarly asking ordinary people to signal to those in power. If change doesn’t come from above, it must come from below, and politicians would be unwise to ignore the concern about peak oil and climate change coming from the grassroots.
The grassroots. Both metaphorically and literally. Transition Initiative founder Rob Hopkins used to be a permaculture teacher, and permaculture’s influence is wide and deep. As permaculture works with, rather than against, nature, so the Transition Initiative works with, rather than against, human nature; it is as collaborative and cooperative in social tone as permaculture is in its attitude toward plants and, like permaculture, is prepared to observe and think, slowly.
One of the subgroups that Transition communities typically use is called “Heart and Soul,” which focuses on the psychological and emotional aspects of climate crisis, of change, of community. Importantly, people are encouraged to be participants in the conversation, not just passive spectators: it is a nurturant process, involving anyone who wants to be a part. Good conversation involves quality listening, for an open-minded, attentive listener can elicit the best thoughts of a speaker. Giangrande says that the Transition Initiative—which has used keynote speakers—is also exploring the idea of keynote listeners as “a collaborative way of learning how to use knowledge.” When I asked exactly what that would involve, he couldn’t be specific, because it was still only an idea, which is revealing of the Transition process, very much a work-in-progress. The fact that they were trying out an idea without being able to predict the results has a vitality to it, an intellectually energetic quality, a profound liveliness.
The Transition Initiative describes itself as a catalyst, with no fixed answers, unlike traditional environmentalism, which is more prescriptive, advocating certain responses. Again unlike conventional environmentalism, it emphasizes the role of hope and proactiveness, rather than guilt and fear as motivators. Whether intentionally or not, environmentalism can seem exclusive, and the Transition Initiative is whole-heartedly inclusive.
While in many ways the Transition Initiative is new, it often finds its roots in the past, in a practical make-do-and-mend attitude. There is an interesting emphasis on “re-skilling” communities in traditional building and organic gardening, for example: crafts that were taken for granted two generations ago but are now often forgotten. Mandy Dean, who helped set up a Transition Initiative in her community in Wales, describes how her group bought root stocks of fruit trees and then organized grafting workshops; it was practical, but also “it was about weaving some ideas back into culture.”
In the British context, the memory of World War II is crucial, for during the war people experienced long fuel shortages and needed to increase local food production—digging for victory. In both the U.K. and the U.S., the shadow of the Depression years now looms uncomfortably close, encouraging an attitude of mending rather than buying new; tending one’s own garden; restoring the old.
To mend, to tend, and to restore all expand beautifully from textiles, vegetables, and furniture into those most quiet of qualities; to restore is restorative, to tend involves tenderness, to mend hints at amends. There is restitution here of community itself.
FOR ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY, people have engaged with the world through some form of community, and this is part of our social evolution. Somewhere deep inside us all is an archived treasure, the knowledge of what it is to be part of a community via extended families, locality, village, a shared fidelity to common land, unions, faith communities, language communities, co-operatives, gay communities, even virtual communities, which, for all their unreality, still reflect a yearning for a wider home for the collective soul. The nineteenth-century artist William Morris spoke of the gentle social-ism that he called fellowship: “Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.”
People never need communities more than when there are threats to security, food, and lives. The Transition Initiative recognizes how much we need this scale now, because of peak oil and climate change. But beyond this concrete need, the lack of a sense of community has negative psychological impacts on individuals across the “developed” world, as people report persistent and widespread feelings of loneliness, isolation, dispossession, alienation, and depression. Beyond a certain threshold, increased income does not create increased happiness, and the false promise of consumerism (buy this: be happy) sets the individual on a quest for a constantly receding goal of their own private fulfillment, while sober evidence repeatedly suggests that happiness is more surely found in contributing toward a community endeavor. (The Buddha smiles a tired, patient smile: “I’ve been telling you that for years.”) Community endeavor increases “social capital,” that captivating idea expressing the value of local relationships, networks, help, and friendships. A rise in social capital could be the positive concomitant of a fall in financial capital that a low-carbon future may entail.
Many people today experience a strange hollow in the psyche, a hole the size of a village. Mandy Dean alludes to this when she explains why she was drawn to the Transition Initiative: “One of the awful things about modern culture is separation and isolation; we’ve broken down almost every social bond, so the one bond left is between parent and child. In this extreme isolation, we don’t interact except with the television and the computer. We’ve lost something, and we don’t know what it is, and we try to fill it with food and alcohol and shopping but it’s never filled—what we’ve lost is our connection to our community, our place, and nature. Stepping back away from that isolation is very healing for people; getting people into groups where they can do things together starts to reverse that isolation.”
FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, nation-states have attacked communities. Earliest and most emblematic were the enclosures: when governments passed laws to privatize common land, the spirit of collectivity was undermined as surely as the site of it. The vicious system of reservations for Native Americans robbed people of communities of land and stole from them the communal autonomy central to their cultural survival. Indigenous people all over the world have found their language communities assaulted, fracturing even their ability to speak. From the monster-enclosures of colonialism to the subtle but strangulating enclosures of Time, through which people ceased to “own” their own time, instead being corralled into the factory-time of industrial capitalism, the idea and the actuality of community has been eroded in countless ways. “There is no such thing as society”—the most sociopathic lie ever uttered by a British prime minister—was Thatcher’s summing up as she and Reagan broke the unions, and for decades agribusiness has destroyed the lives and dignity of campesinos in South America, while neoliberalism has wreaked havoc on communities across the world. And there are seemingly trivial examples that nonetheless are cumulatively important; in contemporary Britain the mass closures of pubs tear the fabric that knits communities together.
The colonial powers practiced the policy of “divide and rule,” usually dividing one community from another, but in contemporary society there is a more insidious policy of “atomize and rule.” The world of mass media fragments real societies into solitary individuals, passive recipients of information, consuming the faked-up society that television, in particular, provides, and one result of this is that the public, political injustices that communities have habitually analyzed and acted upon (food-poverty, housing-poverty, fuel-poverty, or time-poverty) have been rendered as merely an individual’s private problems.
It’s interesting (and not a little sad) that although the French Revolution announced that it stood for three things, only two of these (Liberty and Equality) have survived in political parlance while the third, Fraternity, has been made to sound both quaint and unnecessary. For decades, the voice of the State has declared that community solidarity is occasionally dangerous (unions are “too powerful and need to be destroyed”) or, like fraternity, rather parochial. What, though, could be more parochial than the voice of the mass media? Rejecting the rainbow of pluralism (the magnificent myriad Other upon Other upon Other, the Pan-Otherness by which all communities are Other to someone), the mass media broadcasts itself in mono. Narrow. Singular. Very, very parochial in its tight and exclusive remit.
In the long fetch of the wave, the Transition Initiative should be seen as a new formulation of a very old idea. We are ineluctably and gloriously social animals. We want fellowship. We flock, we gather, we chirp, we howl, we sing, we call, and we listen. If the Transition Initiative is empowering for communities, that is because there is an enormous latent energy there to be tapped, so that communities may be authors of their own story, hopeful, active, and belonging, rather than despairing, passive, and cynical.
Naresh Giangrande, in Totnes, tells me about a session they are designing on the theme of Belonging. Belonging, of course, is a lovely boomerang of an idea—where do you belong? Can that place belong to you? “Through the Transition Initiative,” says Giangrande, “we can talk about things in public which are normally only talked about privately. We all have a deep wound about belonging to the Earth.”
The Transition Initiative, says Giangrande, is “a movement that could be world-changing. And it is heartwarming to see how good-natured and good most people are—it revives my sense of community. It completely contradicts the image of human nature in the media, portraying it as greedy and selfish, competitive, nasty, and unsocial. That’s a self-reinforcing prophecy. We’re setting up the reverse. And we’re asking: will you join us?” People have flocked to do so. At the time of this writing, there are 146 Transition Initiatives, and by the time you read this there will be far more.
One of its techniques is in strengthening all that is associative, and attempting to democratize power, with a fine understanding of that particular social grace which seeks to create what Martin Buber called The Between.
What is it, The Between? Fertile, delicious, and powerful, it is the edge of meeting. The cocreated place of pure potential, a coevocation of possibility. The delicate point of meeting between you and him. Between them. Between us. What is the geometry of The Between? I could explain best if we went down to the pub, you and I (mine’s a glass of red wine, anything as long as it’s not Merlot, yeuch, that’s like drinking cold steel), and the geometry of The Between is as simple and direct as the line of our eyes across the table. It’s horizontal, equal, fraternal. We might have a chat with a couple of the old farmers, and my pal the vicar might be there with his guitar and best of all is when the harpist plays, which he does, very occasionally.
Warm with conviviality and wine, I might wander home and switch on the television (except for the fact that I gave it away some years ago), and Sky News would be showing me a parade of celebrities, each making me feel that little bit more insignificant. Celebrity culture is an opposite of community, informing us that these few nonsense-heads matter but that the rest of us do not. Insidiously, the television tells me I am no one. If I was Someone, I’d be on telly. In this way, television dis-esteems its viewers, and celebrity culture is both a cause and a consequence of the low self-esteem that mars so many people’s lives. So, the unacknowledged individual is manipulated into a jealousy of acknowledgment, which is why it is so telling that huge numbers of young people insist that when they grow up they want to be a celebrity. They are quite right. (Almost.) That is nothing less than they deserve, for we all need acknowledgment (but not fame). We all need recognition (but not to be “spotted” out shopping). We all need to be known, we need our selves confirmed by others, fluidly, naturally. A sense of community has always provided these familiar, unshowy acts of ordinary recognition, and the Transition Initiative, like any wise community, offers simple acknowledgment, telling us we are all players.
“MISTAKEN, APPALLING, AND DANGEROUS” is how the Transition Initiative has been described, which is the kind of criticism you covet, knowing that the speaker is an oil industry professional and author of The Myth of the Oil Crisis. Others have criticized it for being insufficiently confrontational. There are also criticisms from within: a tension between those who prefer fast action and those who prefer slow consideration, for the movement is both urgent and slow. It is transformatively sudden, and yet uses the subtle, tentative questioning of long dialogues within communities, a very slow process of building a network of relationships within the whole community.
In the language of climate change science, there are many tipping points, where slow causations are suddenly expressed in dramatic, negative consequences. The conference I attended when I met the scientist speaking of his unhappy son was called Tipping Point, and in a sense the Transition Initiative places itself as a social tipping point, with dramatic and positive consequences where the sudden wisdom of communities breaks through the stolid unwisdom of national government.
“We’re doing work for generations to come,” says Giangrande. You can’t change a place overnight, he says, but you have to begin now in the necessary urgency of our time. “We’re facing a historical moment of choice—our actions now [are] affecting the future. Now’s the time. The system we know is breaking down. Yet out of this breakdown, there are always new possibilities.” It’s catagenesis, the birth of the new from the death of the old. The process is “so creative and so chaotic,” says Giangrande. “Let it unfold—allow it—the key is not to direct it but to encourage it. We’ve developed the A to C of transition. The D to Z is still to come.” Brave, this, and very attractive. It is catalytic, emergent, and dynamic, facing forward with a vivid vitality but backlit with another kind of ancient sunlight: human, social energy.
]]>During his recovery, he read me The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White—the story of Louis, a trumpeter swan born mute, unable to make the honking cry that marks his species. As a fluffy gray cygnet in Canada, Louis doesn’t mind, but when he migrates to the Red Rock Lakes in Montana, he finds he is unable to woo a mate. In a dramatic scene of broken glass and a fainting salesgirl, his father steals a trumpet from a music store in Billings to give his son a voice. Anxious to pay off the debt, Louis gets a series of gigs playing trumpet at a camp in Ontario, leading the Swan Boat in the Boston Public Garden, and performing jazz in a Philadelphia night club.
White waded fearlessly into the lives of animals, and the book pulled me in with its wildness. Though critics say Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web are more polished, the characters of those novels inhabit our world: Stuart lives in Manhattan with human parents; Wilbur needs the farmer to fill the slop trough. But The Trumpet of the Swan reaches far beyond the barnyard. The largest swans on Earth, with a wingspan reaching eight feet, so graceful, so strong, so scorning of human attention, the trumpeters occupy a universe that brushes only briefly against our own. The book’s second chapter has no people at all, just frogs, red-winged blackbirds, skunks, chickadees, and two swans building a nest at the cusp of spring, when “every creature knew that a better, easier time was at hand.”
In 1977, the summer after my father’s second operation, the family left California for a driving tour of the West. We stopped to visit family friends in Montana and Colorado. Whether my father felt finally well enough to visit, or because he felt ill enough that he might not have another chance, I don’t know. When asked, he just said, “We decided we better go see everybody.”
And between camping and fishing and visiting, we took a 250-mile detour to the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge to see the swans because, as my mother said, “You and your father read that book.” What did I expect? Maybe to watch a cygnet gobble pond weeds. Maybe to hear the famous call. Maybe to be hauled out of my daily life on powerful wings. The box of photos is lost, memories only scraps. Of the trip, my father remembers a rusty-backed sandhill crane. My mother remembers the swans as fenced off and far away. Much closer were the stinging insects that sought out every inch of flesh. “I was hysterical, running into the tent, zipping it closed,” she says, adding, “It was unbelievably isolated except for all of the ornithologists.”
I remember only a small, brown mouse that ran over the trail. The color of earth, it stopped right at my feet, wary too late. Even so still, it was all movement, fur fluttering along its sides as it breathed, blood pounding through ears no bigger than my pinky fingernail. Could I touch it? Then it skittered away, taking shelter in sticks and dead leaves.
MY FATHER’S PARTIAL DEAFNESS gave him a sense of remove, like he was half in another world already. All the days in the hospital, future uncertain, enhanced his distance. In my dreams, he often just walked away. But reading me to sleep, he fully inhabited the tales of wily sailors and the fantasy birds that flocked to them. In The Arabian Nights, Sinbad encounters rocs, monstrous eagles that blot out the sun and feed on snakes. In The Odyssey, goddesses move like birds, rushing upward, breaking the ocean surface, diving like gulls. He once told me if he could be anyone, it would be Odysseus, but most of the time we didn’t talk beyond the unfolding story. A year or so ago, back in California for a visit, I found all the books my father read me on a shelf in my childhood bedroom. I piled them up and took them home.
The thirty-year-old paperback of The Trumpet of the Swan was among them. Battered and stained, the cover showed a black-haired boy waiting breathlessly on a log as a cygnet pulls on his shoelace. Pages fanned out at the bottom where the binding was ripped away. I turned them carefully so the old glue didn’t give up its hold.
Stories heard in childhood sink deep. Each word falls like a stone to the muck at the bottom of the mind, unimpeded by currents of distraction or critical distinctions. Characters and plots, with all their turns and complexities, become part of the architecture of the brain itself, as synapses leap to accommodate them.
To meet each image, all these years later, was to come across an unexpected reflection. The vixen in her den, dreaming of her kits. Sam, the boy who helps Louis throughout—his calm competence and the way he moves through the woods, “putting one foot in front of the other and making very little noise.” (The thud of my first-grade adoration for Sam rushed back, the way I copied his walk and echoed his journal style.) The young swans racing over the water surface, feeling for their wings. “Ko-hoh,” the call of a mated pair as they arrive at their Canada breeding grounds.
As I closed the book, it seemed I had been chasing those swans all my life, though I’d long ago forgotten what I was pursuing. When I became an adult, I’d moved to Montana as soon as possible. I wrote natural history for a living. I had an abiding faith that quiet and observant was the way to be. But I’d never caught a glimpse of the actual birds. I wanted to go back, to retrace White’s steps through the Red Rock Lakes. Not at all a birder in a field-guide, life-list kind of way, I would borrow a spotting scope, ignore unscripted mice, and see the real swans this time.
IT’S DUSK WHEN I COME TO MONIDA, a tiny collection of boarded-up buildings at exit 0 on the Montana-Idaho border. A former cowboy town once raging with saloons, it now flaunts only faded paint on abandoned storefronts, decades-old offerings of REPAIR and OIL and ICE CREAM. Husks of buildings hunch in wind-whipped grass. There’s a pay phone, like a stunted pine, if anyone needs to make a call to say she’s arrived at this remote outpost.
To get to Red Rock Lakes, one turns at Monida and drives thirty miles on a dirt road that grows increasingly pitted. As the car bumps and shudders in the ruts, frightening pronghorn lingering by the fence line, a wide flat valley falls away to the north. The town of Lakeview rises to one side—a few unlit cabins, the refuge headquarters—and fades back into the marsh.
At Upper Red Rock Lake, I pitch the tent in the dark, unpack my sleeping bag, my flashlight, and the evening’s reading. Quiet spreads, and is beat back by squeaking nylon, rustling pages. The national wildlife refuge brochure warns that trumpeters can be hard to find. Many nest north of Yellowstone these days, and at Red Rock Lakes they build in the most out-of-the-way places. I have copies of White’s letters, a new edition published in 2006, and his biography, written by Scott Elledge.
The whole life is there, his driving through the West in a Model T in his twenties, working for The New Yorker, living on a Maine farm, but not much about trumpeters until this sentence in a letter about the recently published The Trumpet of the Swan: “[It] took a lot of gall to write it, as I have never in my life laid eyes on a Trumpeter Swan, either in or out of captivity.” He never visited the Red Rock Lakes either.
In a letter dated February 17, 1969, White described the months spent drafting the manuscript as “a long, cold, grim winter.” His wife, Katharine, had heart trouble and severe osteoporosis that weakened her spine. She could barely walk. As he picked through trumpeter-swan life histories, a different kind of flock was on his mind—the nurses crowding his house to tend her. Ill himself and in his seventies, he bluntly wrote a colleague that he hoped his third children’s book—Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little had both been bestsellers—would pay for it all.
Regret seeps in as I read this, a sadness that I didn’t leave the author and his backstory alone. It is mixed with a twinge of betrayal that he didn’t see any of the swan life he described. The feeling is unjust. The Trumpet of the Swan is a children’s story, after all. Louis can spell “catastrophe” and eats watercress sandwiches at The Ritz. But still. Isn’t first-hand observation the cornerstone of writing and natural history? E. B. White’s books taught me so.
To fuel his research, White asked an old friend, Howard Cushman, to scout out the Philadelphia Zoo and its captive trumpeter swans. White knew, maybe from a newspaper article, that in 1965 five trumpeter cygnets had hatched at the zoo. He asked Cushman to take photographs and describe Bird Lake. He also told his friend to look for jazz nightclubs, though he wouldn’t tell him why.
White paged through reports by Edward Howe Forbush, a naturalist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Wilston Banko, a longtime manager of the Red Rock Lakes Refuge. Reaching farther back, he read John James Audubon’s missives from a time of abundance. Audubon drew with trumpeter-swan quills, tough feathers he liked for their strength and flexibility. He kept a wounded swan captive for two years. It ate bread from his wife’s hand and harassed his turkey, dogs, and children before escaping. He canoed with Shawnee hunters who took fifty in one day, and watched flocks of swans resting on a frozen Mississippi River, eyeing the wolves creeping up, letting them get temptingly close, before leaping into the air. In Audubon’s painting of the trumpeter, the body is a solid white mass against the robin’s-egg blue of lake and sky. The eye is all intensity as it peers down at some irritant in the water, a portrait of peace anchored by a glare.
Despite these secondhand accounts, White had a clear notion of his subject. When Cushman reported that the trumpeting of the swan was less than spectacular, White refused to believe it. “Your brief ‘yarp’ was probably a polite acknowledgment of tossed peanuts,” he wrote back, saying he would go with the glorious noise described by Audubon and others. The sound recorded by Banko, who attributes its description to Forbush, who cites E. S. Cameron as saying it was the Kootenai name for the swan. The call White heard so clearly: ko-hoh.
Swans may have been on White’s mind because the country was surging with optimism for an animal once given up as extinct. Nineteenth-century hunters had targeted the big flashy birds. The Hudson Bay Company offered hundreds of swan skins to the London market, mostly from trumpeters. Swans’ down lined wool slippers and fluttered in feather boas. Collectors wanted eggs. Buyers sought live swans for menageries.
In an 1895 photograph taken near Red Rock Lakes, a boy holds a rifle slung over his arm. Soft bodies of waterfowl are lined up at his feet and along the base of the rough log cabin behind him; they dangle from nails on the cabin wall, lie settled on a windowsill as if asleep. A trumpeter swan hangs by its head, the weight of its body pulling the neck full length, wings slightly spread. Settlers at the Red Rock Lakes earned fifty dollars per swan caught, crated, and shipped off to zoos and private collections.
By the early decades of the twentieth century, the disappearance of trumpeters seemed a foregone conclusion, despite the fact that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made it illegal to hunt them. In his 1925 Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, Forbush wrote feelingly about trumpeters “traversing a continent on wings of the wind, their long lines glistening like silver in the bright sunlight,” but then reports, matter-of-factly, “The Trumpeter is a valuable bird and apparently harmless, but doomed.” By 1935, only seventy-eight breeding trumpeter swans showed up in a census of the entire United States, most living near Red Rock Lakes. That year, the government designated forty thousand acres of southern Montana marsh as a national wildlife refuge.
To everyone’s surprise, the combination of a refuge and a hunting ban worked. In 1963, Audubon magazine printed an article entitled “Long Fight to Save the Trumpeter Swan.” Not long afterward, Biological Conservation ran the story “The Trumpeter Swan, Olor buccinator: A Conservation Success and Its Lessons.” A population of thousands was discovered in Alaska. By the late 1970s, almost four thousand trumpeter swans lived in North America. This victory is the foundation of The Trumpet of the Swan, written just as the tide was turning in the species’ favor.
These days, transplanted and captive-raised trumpeters anchor a Midwest population of 4,600 at last count. Farther north, 25,000 breed in Alaska, and 4,700 more live in Canada, some of which fly south to the Red Rock Lakes for the winter.
THE NEXT MORNING, amid a cacophony of high reedy tweets, chains of honks, clonks of woodpeckers against dead aspen, a flock of white birds floats near the western edge of Upper Red Rock Lake. But the scope reveals white pelicans, dipping grand beaks into the water.
It’s a heady time of year. Many birds trail lines of hatchlings. A young man from Butte drives up in a truck with a horse trailer, leans his head out the window to chat about his ride into the mountains, telling how he always comes down in June to look at the elk and moose that have dropped their young in the stands of aspen clustered near the creeks.
The lakes rest like shards of thin slate, scattered in the broad plain between the Centennial Mountains and the Gravelly Range. The shallow waters are infested with leeches, riddled with sedges, lined with rotting plants slow to decay in the cold. Mosquitoes and horseflies dart over the surface, seeking a blood meal. The town of Paradise is to the north and west, at the junction of the Flathead and Clark Fork rivers, and Eden sits among the coulees and buttes in the center of the state, but for a trumpeter swan, the Red Rock Lakes are heaven. The lakes and their surrounding marshes are so attractive, in fact, that some trumpeters don’t ever leave. Instead of migrating, they linger all winter at the refuge, where warm springs keep ponds ice free. In the early days of the refuge, people scattered grain in the cold months, making a trip south even less attractive.
Today, the “tri-state trumpeters” (which include the Red Rock Lake birds) number around five hundred, and some worry that one harsh winter or virulent disease could dispatch them all. They are the only group inhabiting their original breeding grounds in the lower 48. They are not captive-bred. They have not been relocated or reintroduced. They are tied to these lakes, perhaps even on a genetic level, in a way that a bird brought from Canada to the Midwest and set free is not.
For decades, biologists have been trying to get these malingerers to migrate to warmer climates in Utah, Oregon, southern Idaho—to re-create either a genetic impulse lost when the population narrowed to less than a hundred, or migratory knowledge lost when parents were shot as they flew into hostile territory. Managers have tried scaring birds off the lakes, or boxing them up and shipping them away as the snow starts to fall. On the East Coast, they’ve experimented with imprinting young trumpeters on an ultralight plane and flying it south.
All this effort is complicated by the fact that Utah has long had a hunting season for tundra swans, which look like trumpeters but are smaller. If you dissect a dead tundra swan, its esophagus has one less kink, so it whistles rather than trumpets. More recently, the state opened a limited season on trumpeter swans as well. So sometimes, when a swan heads south, it is shot, all that work of prodding it into flight wasted.
I walk up the dusty road to a small pond, aware of my parents’ indulgence, coming all the way out here with two young children because one loved a certain book. My father is seventy-four now, older than White when he wrote The Trumpet of the Swan. His shock of white hair is thick and churned by cowlicks. The single, small, gold-hoop earring he acquired days after retiring as an electrical engineer gives him the look of a weathered pirate. As he’s grown older, the deafness has grown more pronounced, but face to face, in a quiet room, we might talk. He’ll ask me what I’m reading. If we go look for birds now, they are closer to my parents’ home: the snowy plovers my mother monitors for the National Park Service. They huddle behind the driftwood and seaweed and trash that washes up on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the plovers are claiming a strip of sand bordered by a highway.
Not far from Upper Red Rock Lake, a pond is staked off by signs warning viewers not to come closer as swans will abandon their nests—a mess of roots and sedges likely built on top of a muskrat lodge—at the slightest human provocation. White dots bob on the surface. A moment to set up the tripod and adjust the focus, and there they are: two adults and, right up against their chests, five cygnets.
There is a whiff of the nineteenth century in the perfect S curve of their necks, the way they slip over the water. (In The Trumpet of the Swan, Louis’s father admires his own smooth movements, saying, “Here I glide, swanlike,” and his mother replies, “Of course you glide like a swan. . . . How else could you glide? You couldn’t glide like a moose, could you?”) As one swan tips to pull pond weeds from the bottom, the huge sphere of torso and wings seems to require a frame of bustles, hoops, and stays. When it rights itself, the swan looks like a picture painted on the side of a teacup.
Here, from the shore, observation and imagination feed one another. White, the writer, gathered details from Banko, the refuge manager, who cited Audubon, the artist, whose paintings bred a nationwide passion for native birds. The swans through the scope are, at the same time, assemblies of DNA and meat and blood and instinct, as well as the mythical creatures hatched by White’s pen and fledged by my father’s voice, two sick men, talking into life these bold birds that fought off extinction, summoning their fierceness and dreamy vitality.
On the pond, the heads of both birds flatten; necks turn into snakes about to strike. The male and female peer in every direction: the shrubby shoreline, the ducks paddling nearby, straight down the throat of the spotting scope. A coot pops up from underneath the water, an insolent splash in the middle of the knot of cygnets, scattering them like dandelion seeds. One swan spreads its wings, curves of muscle visible in the sleek chest, kicking up the water, half herding, half slapping, and chases the little bird away. The trumpeter fluffs its feathers, settles them back in place. The cygnets huddle around. They go back to gliding, swanlike.
I am glad to see them.
]]>YES, COAL.
clean, carbon neutral coal
I drove another two blocks and parked my truck next to the governor’s mansion, where, in a small rock garden, red and white begonias spelled out: hope.
Coal and hope—for a moment, I considered the rhetorical and symbolic proximity of those two words. Recently, while the shadow of climate change lengthened and the lie of free markets unraveled, I had begun to doubt the promise of either to deliver on a future I want to inhabit. No coal-fired power plant in West Virginia, nor anywhere else in central Appalachia, sequesters carbon, nor do they extract from the bituminous ore its mercury and asthma-inducing particulates. A 2008 report from the Government Accountability Office warns that U.S. carbon-capture research is still dramatically underfunded and underdeveloped. So for some time, “clean, carbon neutral coal” will exist in name only—a lie on a billboard. As for hope, even that idea had been losing, at least for me, its audacious potential, its ability to navigate the shoals of public cynicism and despair. Here, in this domestic flower bed, hope looked at best like a decorous sentiment—sweet but irrelevant, certainly no match for Big Coal.
Some years ago, Wendell Berry warned me that, to fight the coal industry, one must “accept heartbreak as a working condition.” Since then, I’ve watched coal operators dismantle one mountain after another across central Appalachia. I’ve watched them dump entire mountaintops into the valleys below, strangling and poisoning the region’s healthiest streams. I’ve watched the previous administration rewrite the Clean Water Act to make this dumping legal, and I’ve watched industry insiders take control of, then undermine, the federal agencies whose job it is to prevent such abuse. Which is to say, there’s been more than enough heartbreak to go around, and it has made me leery of anyone trading in hope and promising change.
Friends from the coasts tell me I’m too pessimistic, too doom-and-gloom. Maybe so, but for too long it seems like environmentalists around here have been caught up in some kind of circular Appalachian three-step: 1) fight the good fight; 2) lose the good fight; 3) go have a beer and take consolation in the fact that at least you fought the good fight. Over time, this story of our struggle to save these imperiled mountains starts to sound like the larger story of Appalachia, a tragedy of the commons that repeats itself with an unnerving relentlessness: industrial aggressors buy off the politicians and the police, rob the region of its wealth, then blame the people of the mountains for their poverty and stubbornness in the face of “progress.” I had come to Charleston, the center of coal country, looking for a new narrative.
In his recent book The Last Refuge, David Orr writes of the environmental movement, “The public, I think, knows what we are against, but not what we are for. There are many things that should be stopped, but what should be started?” That day last fall, under the capitol’s gilded dome, some coal field residents from southern West Virginia had gathered to offer their answer: a wind farm. They wore symbolic green hardhats and held signs that said:
YES, WIND.
truly clean and carbon neutral
Jesse Johnson, the progressive Mountain Party candidate for governor, gave a fiery speech in which he suggested we stop pulverizing and burning coal, and instead invest in carbon-composite technology. Then a bluegrass band called the Long Haul started playing, and someone up on stage said that was about right—fighting the coal industry in West Virginia is indeed a long haul.
This particular attempt to fight Big Coal began in 2006, when a group of citizen-activists called Coal River Mountain Watch teamed up with Orr to commission a study of wind currents along the top of Coal River Mountain in Raleigh County, West Virginia. WindLogics, a firm out of St. Paul, conducted the feasibility study and found strong, recurrent winds sweeping through the valleys and peaking across the tops of these close-shouldered, sprawling mountain spurs so characteristic of the southern Appalachians. Using Google Earth software, and working in alliance with the American Wind Energy Association and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the citizen-activists of Coal River Mountain Watch constructed a computer model of a wind farm that would accommodate 220 turbines. If built, these turbines could generate 328 megawatts of energy annually, enough to power more than 7 percent of West Virginia homes.
What’s more, Coal River Mountain Watch calculated that construction of the wind farm would create two hundred jobs over two years and around fifty permanent on-site maintenance jobs, which would generate $40 million in local spending over the first two years and $2 million every subsequent year. Annual county tax revenues could reach $3 million, with state revenues coming in at around $400,000. Adding the amount of coal-based energy the wind farm would displace to the tons of coal that would be left in the ground at Coal River Mountain, project coordinator Rory McIlmoil calculated that 86 million tons of carbon dioxide would be kept out of the atmosphere—truly sequestered—during the wind farm’s first twenty years. Downstream Strategies, a consulting firm out of Morgantown, would later confirm these numbers. Bottom line: more jobs, more tax revenue, less CO2, and far fewer health problems that result from contaminated water and coal dust.
There was only one snag, but it was a big one. Massey Energy, out of Richmond, Virginia, had already leased the mineral rights beneath the six thousand acres where the wind farm would stand, and Massey was indeed planning to exercise those rights by leveling most of Coal River Mountain. A spokesman for Massey issued this statement: “We encourage the Coal River Mountain Watch to do what any responsible energy producer would do: identify and acquire a site for their project and obtain the permits and infrastructure necessary to make that project happen.” There are, however, two problems with this statement. To imply, for one, that Massey is a “responsible” producer of energy represents a considerable disregard for the facts. Between 2000 and 2006, the company violated the Clean Water Act more than 4,500 times, racking up $20 million in fines from the EPA (the maximum fine could have been $2.4 billion). When security concerns were raised about some of Massey’s underground mines, CEO Don Blankenship wrote a memo to employees that read: “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal.” A few months later, two miners died in a Massey mine fire caused by a buildup of flammable coal waste along a conveyer belt. Cleaning the belt might have prevented the fire, but the mine foremen were too busy running coal to stop for that.
The second, more fundamental problem with Massey’s statement is that the people who live around Coal River Mountain are not trying to become energy producers. They are trying to keep the mountain that frames and defines their communities from being blown apart. A wind farm, it turns out, looks like the best way to make that happen.
“Coal River Mountain is the last of our mountains in our community,” longtime resident Bo Webb told me at the rally. “Everyone’s life revolves around that mountain. Hell yeah, we’re fighting for it. I don’t know why the governor is so perplexed by that.” The governor in question is Joe Manchin, who had tangled with Don Blankenship before and seemed uneager to re-enter the fray. Over three thousand calls to his office in support of the wind farm had failed to move him. Thus a sense of urgency surrounded the rally. A long procession of coal field residents stepped to the mike and urged Manchin to get off the dime and rescind the Massey permits. They said they were not against coal, that their fathers and grandfathers had been underground miners, and that they were proud of that tradition. But mountaintop removal was destroying Coal River Valley. Lessie Maynor said a Massey holding pond had collapsed behind her house in 2001 and washed away “everything we had worked for, for the past forty years.” Charles Ballard said the strip mining was “messing up every damn thing we have in these mountains.” They were citizens of West Virginia, they said, and they had the right to live in peace, with clean air and clean water, and without fear of blasting and flooding. They wanted something else for Coal River Valley.
When the rest of the country thinks about southern Appalachia, it often thinks of the past—of backwardness even. That image benefits the coal industry immensely, making it much easier for companies like Massey to justify irreparable damage that would never be tolerated in, say, the Adirondacks. These West Virginians were tired of living on the receiving end of that attitude. They were tired of nineteenth-century stereotypes and nineteenth-century sources of energy. Now they had a plan, a blueprint for how to disentangle the region from the world’s most toxic industry.
It all sounded pretty impressive to me. The people of Coal River Valley were calling for a new kind of economy, one that was both socially and ecologically just. It was a more honest economy, whereby the “externalities” of doing business—the mine waste, the toxic water, the flooding—were not off-loaded on the people who, unlike Don Blankenship, actually had to live in the coal fields. At a time when 60 percent of the world’s ecosystems are being degraded by human impacts, here was a plan that maintained both the integrity and the diversity of the Appalachian Mountains. At the onset of peak oil and radical climate change, here was a plan that worked with, rather than against, the ultimate system of exchange—the economy of nature.
OUTSIDE THE COAL RIVER Mountain Watch office in Whitesville, West Virginia, Matt Noerpel hands me a motorcycle helmet and we head for Sycamore Hollow, a few miles away. It’s October, and the first fall color is coming to the poplars. We stop at the home of Bacon Brown, an elderly man who has collected nearly nine pounds of ginseng root from these hillsides since the official ginseng season began in September. On the Asian market, the herb will fetch him a tidy profit. Traditionally, many mountain families use their ginseng money for Christmas presents; unfortunately, ginseng is one more local economy that is disappearing along with these forests and mountaintops.
Beneath Brown’s carport, Noerpel unlocks two ATVs. Within minutes, we are careening along a steep trail that leads up the ridgeside. As I follow Noerpel’s long mane of red hair, my enormous Kawasaki four-wheeler leaps over fallen tree limbs and heavy cobble. Once we reach the ridgeline, we head west to the site where Massey is planning to begin mining. As we cross a wide haul road cleared for coal trucks, I see a sign warning of the blasting to come. A few miles farther on, we are speeding under unusually tall sassafras trees, and then we dip down to a small clearing where the trail, an old logging road, ends. The autumn color along the ridgetops abruptly drops off at a man-made “highwall,” a steep precipice where half of the mountain has been sliced away by explosives. We climb off our ATVs and walk to its edge, where the deciduous broadleaf forest plunges down into a cratered emptiness that looks like nothing so much as a bombing range.
A hundred feet below, the entire Brushy Fork watershed has been buried beneath one of the largest slurry impoundment ponds in the world. The black ooze called slurry, or sludge, is the toxic byproduct left over when coal is cleaned for market. The Brushy Fork pond contains 6 billion gallons of slurry, six times the amount that recently broke through a dam in Tennessee. The nine-hundred-foot wall that holds all of this slurry back is the highest dam in North America. It is also a reminder that, in fact, “cheap” energy carries a very high cost that most Americans do not recognize because it is hidden in poor, remote places like the coal fields of Appalachia.
At the end of his influential book Collapse, Jared Diamond lists what he considers the twelve most serious environmental problems we face, the ones that would most likely cause a nation to topple. Of these twelve, ten—deforestation, species loss, erosion, coal-burning, harm to underground aquifers, misuse of sunlight, toxic chemicals, alien species, global warming, and overconsumption—can be tied directly to mountaintop removal strip mining. A wind farm, by contrast, could begin ameliorating every one of them. There is certainly still an environmental impact, and there is some troubling evidence suggesting that bat populations are declining in some places because of wind turbines (bats like to mate at high altitudes). That said, I would direct wind critics to its alternative: this slurry pond and the miles of leveled mountains and toxic mine sites all around it.
I look up at the ridgelines beyond the slurry pond and try to imagine them covered with wind turbines—220 of them staggered along the peaks and side spurs of Coal River Mountain for thirty-six miles. A mere 267 acres would have to be cleared for the turbines, compared to the 6,450 acres that would be lost to mountaintop removal, and with a wind farm, the nine miles of streams that would be buried by mountaintop removal would remain healthy and full of life. I decide the tall white turbines would look quite elegant spinning slowly above the treeline. They would stand like sentinels, guarding the mountain from bulldozers and trucks carrying explosives.
A few days before my visit, Noerpel had done some independent research at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and found that Massey, in its rush to start mining up here, had not received approval for revisions to its permit. The understaffed DEP—whose job, in effect, Noerpel was doing—issued a statement that any blasting would be illegal. Coal River Mountain had been granted, in Rory McIlmoil’s words, “a stay of execution.”
Even if Massey did start blasting along this ridgeline, the majority of the strongest wind is farther southeast. And while Massey has also leased the mineral rights beneath that part of the mountain, there is still time to find a developer to turn that wind into energy and profits. But, as Noerpel says, “Once Massey Energy gets started, they’re hard to stop.” He lets out a rueful laugh. “They’re hard to stop anyway.”
I DROP MATT NOERPEL off at the modest Coal River Mountain Watch office and follow Coal River Road along a narrow valley floor framed by steep ridgelines. The road ends at the home of Lorelei Scarbro, the community coordinator for the Coal River Wind Project. Scarbro lives in a modest wooden house built by her late husband and surrounded in part by a small orchard they planted together. She wears her graying hair cut short and she doesn’t seem much given to small talk. People around here know and trust her. Still, organizing isn’t easy in a place where Massey holds sway and where the air is thick with intimidation; some activists I’ve talked to say they have received anonymous calls warning that a family member employed by Massey might be fired if the activism doesn’t stop.
Scarbro got started by making a large batch of apple butter in a hundred-year-old copper pot and taking jars of it door to door. Soon there was enough support for the wind farm to begin holding meetings in Rebecca Chapel, the same small church Robert Kennedy visited in 1968.
Scarbro distills her organizing goal down to this: “We’re trying to save the community.”
Her own property borders Coal River Mountain and sits right below the ridgelines that Massey Energy is proposing to flatten. This rolling land was handed down through her husband’s family, many of whom are buried in the hillside cemetery you can see from Scarbro’s front porch. Up behind the cemetery rises Pond Knob, one of the highest ridges on Coal River Mountain. It would generate the most megawatts of wind energy, and it also holds the greatest lodes of coal. Like many deep miners, Scarbro’s husband died from black lung after working thirty-five years underground. Now Lorelei Scarbro worries that she could develop silicosis if Massey starts blasting apart the thick layers of sandstone—the “overburden”—that lie between the top of the mountain and the thin seams of coal below.
The off-site damage caused by mountaintop removal strip mining is enormous. A recent EPA study found that 95 percent of streams near surface mines had been degraded and contaminated by sedimentation and the leaching of heavy metals. Many mountain families rely on private wells for their drinking water, and many of those are cracked and poisoned by the blasting. It’s not uncommon, Scarbro told me, for her neighbors who live around active mining to find black water running through their taps. And to make matters worse, coal companies are allowed to inject mining waste laden with heavy metals into old underground mines, which many suspect is seeping into the water supply (the EPA recently denied this, even while admitting to having done no research into the matter). Highly abnormal levels of kidney failure have been reported throughout the community of Prenter Hollow, just west of Scarbro’s place; an eight-year-old child developed a kidney stone, and a sixteen year old died of cancer. The DEP denied that there had ever been underground injections of mine waste in that community until Bobbie Mitchell of Coal River Mountain Watch produced a document to the contrary. When someone from the DEP asked Mitchell where he found such a document, Mitchell replied, “Your office.”
All of this often leads outsiders to ask the question that makes Scarbro angriest: Why don’t you move?
The simplest answer is that, once mountaintop removal begins, those who live around it can’t move because their property loses nearly all of its value. But the question is insulting and condescending on a deeper level. It implies that the culture of Appalachia, so rooted in a sense of place, is of little value compared to cheap energy. Standing beside her late husband’s headstone, under a large chestnut oak, Scarbro says, “We mountain people feel a connectedness to the land. It’s a survival instinct. It’s hard to explain that to people who are not attached to the place where they live.”
The question shouldn’t be, Why don’t you move?, but What kind of economy will preserve this community?
The answer, I think, can be found right here, where the watersheds of Appalachia could serve as a model for a new economy. By its very nature, a watershed is self-sufficient, symbiotic, conservative, decentralized, and diverse. It circulates its own wealth over and over. It generates no waste and does not “externalize” the cost of “production” onto other watersheds, other streams and valleys. In a watershed, all energy is renewable and all resource use is sustainable.
The watershed economy is the exact opposite of a strip mine. It purifies air and water, holds soil in place, enriches humus, and sequesters carbon. That is to say, a watershed economy improves the land and thus improves the lives of the people who inhabit that particular place. It is an economy based not on the unsustainable, shortsighted logic of never-ending growth, which robs the future to meet the needs of the present, but rather on maintaining the health, well-being, stability, and conviviality of the community. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, the watershed offers us an operating manual we should have been reading long ago.
AFTER LEAVING Lorelei Scarbro’s, I pass a barn along Coal River Road, where a fading metal sign reads: prove you are against coal mining. turn off your electricity. It doesn’t surprise me, nor does it surprise me that some of the more visible voices of Coal River Mountain Watch have received death threats and encountered other forms of intimidation (A sign on Scarbro’s door reads, warning: trespassers will be shot. survivors will be shot again.) To many living outside the Appalachian coal fields, blowing the top off a mountain seems ludicrous, an act of industrial aggression wholly lacking in subtlety or nuance. But things aren’t that simple in communities where most jobs come from coal. In Raleigh County, some people feel that to call for the end of strip mining is to take food from their children’s mouths. They become angry, and the industry only stokes their belief that environmentalists are to blame for declining jobs and persistent poverty.
One of the more inspiring aspects of the wind farm proposal is that it has the potential to break the long and frustrating impasse in the jobs-versus-environment debate. In addition to the construction and maintenance jobs, the wind farm could potentially bring far more mining jobs to Coal River Mountain. While turbines staggered along its ridgetops would stave off mountaintop removal, a highly mechanized form of mining that requires few workers (less than 1 percent of West Virginia’s employment comes from surface mining), there would remain the opportunity to extract the region’s low-sulfur coal through underground mining, which could create far more jobs.
“We’re not telling them they can’t mine,” Bo Webb told me. “We’ll put the windmills on top, they can mine coal underground, and everybody wins, right?” It would seem so.
The problem, from the coal operator’s perspective, is that if too many people see wind turbines spinning across the peaks of Coal River Mountain, they might stop believing the industry’s hundred-year-old canard that coal is the region’s only hope. In the forty-five years since Lyndon Johnson stood on a miner’s porch to welcome him into the Great Society, central Appalachia’s poverty rate has barely moved from 30 percent, the highest rate in the nation. Historian Harry Caudill used to say that poverty was eastern Kentucky’s only tourist industry. In February of this year, ABC’s Diane Sawyer took her viewers on that tour once again. It was the most watched episode of 20/20 in five years; Americans apparently like poverty tours—the trashed-out trailers, the mothers and miners hooked on painkillers, the kids with bad teeth. But what wasn’t on display, because it is harder to find and to film, is the systemic cause of that poverty—namely, a single industry that has dominated the region for a century and fought every attempt to raise the region’s standard of living. Central Appalachia has stayed poor because it was made to stay poor by an industry that broke unions, bought off politicians, and despoiled the land and water.
Thus the potential of the wind farm reaches far beyond Coal River Mountain, because it could finally lay to rest Big Coal’s false promises by offering a more compelling future—a future where jobs are not based on a finite resource, they do not cause black lung or black water, and they contribute to the solution, not the cause, of the climate crisis. After all, once Sweden decided to abandon a carbon-based economy, its GDP began to grow three times as fast as ours because of investment in alternative energy. Van Jones, special advisor for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and author of The Green Collar Economy, has shown that “we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time.” In Oakland, he helped create entry-level jobs for poorer people that had them performing energy audits and improving energy efficiency in homes. While replacing coal with wind and solar power is obviously crucial, Jones points out that “the main piece of technology in a green economy is a caulk gun.”
Or a shovel. Patrick Angel, who heads up the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative, has called for a massive tree-planting effort across all of the abandoned mine land throughout the mountains. Fast-growing willow trees could be planted and harvested for biofuels, while slower growing hardwoods could support a sustainable forestry movement while also contributing to the emerging carbon-credit market. Now that the dream of corn ethanol has passed, other abandoned mine sites could be planted with a more promising biomass such as switch grass, a high-yield perennial that thrives on marginal land.
What about mounting solar panels on south-facing valley fills, of which Appalachia has plenty? Rory McIlmoil has done some computations and figures that 20 percent of West Virginia’s energy could come from thirty-thousand acres of barren mine land fitted out with photovoltaics. Energy from those panels, coupled with the wind energy from the mountaintops, could be fed into a direct-current “smart grid” so that the region’s sources of energy become radically decentralized, along with the profits from that energy. Then thuggish corporations like Massey Energy would no longer wield so much power or cause so much havoc and heartbreak.
Still, change comes slow to coal country. On the same November day that the United States elected a new president who had made renewable energy a fundamental part of his campaign, West Virginia governor Joe Manchin easily won re-election as well. Days later, Massey began blasting near the ridgetop where Matt Noerpel had taken me four-wheeling.
Bo Webb lives in the valley below. Webb, who served as a Marine in Vietnam, sat down and started writing a letter to President Obama. “As I write, I brace myself for another round of nerve-wracking explosives being detonated above my home,” Webb began. He said he was out of options. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned a prior court ruling that required thorough environmental impact studies on land permitted for mining, and on his way out the door, George W. Bush had overturned a rule prohibiting mining around streams.
“I beg you to re-light our flame of hope and honor,” Webb wrote the president, “and immediately stop the coal companies from blasting so near our homes and endangering our lives. As you have said, we must find another way than blowing off the tops of mountains.”
On March 24, two weeks after Webb sent his letter to President Obama, a seismic wave rolled across Appalachia, and it had nothing to do with explosives. The Environmental Protection Agency, in an abrupt reversal of policy, announced that it would re-examine all mine permits that might violate the Clean Water Act—including almost all the permits on Coal River Mountain. In a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers, Lisa Jackson, the new head of the EPA, wrote that she had “considerable concern regarding the environmental impact these projects would have on fragile habitats and streams.”
When I saw the headline “EPA Signals Mining Crackdown” in the Lexington Herald-Leader, the words almost didn’t make sense. They had really done it. The activists of Appalachia had actually beaten back Don Blankenship and opened a clearing for a serious consideration of wind development. It was by no means a final victory; this battle won’t end quickly or cleanly. But more good news came on March 31, when U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin issued an injunction that voided certain valley fill permits and blocked the Army Corps of Engineers from issuing new permits for valley fills in southern West Virginia. The message was clear: the Corps was finally going to have to answer to someone other than coal operators. Suddenly, that four-letter word planted in Joe Manchin’s flowerbed back in Charleston seemed not so frivolous. It was beginning to look like it might hold its own against the forces of Big Coal. It might even prevail.
Forty-two years ago, Wendell Berry pondered the concept of hope while camping in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, which the Army Corps of Engineers was then threatening to dam. “A man cannot despair,” Berry concluded, “if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility.” To imagine—it is perhaps the most powerful moral force we posses. It maps a future that is worth finding, a place where we want to dwell. Then it calls us to enact that vision. It could happen on a mountaintop in West Virginia. It could happen in the heart’s own private landscape. It could happen.
]]>In a way, we already know this. The “equity question” was taking the stage (for example, the discussion about “green jobs”) even before President Obama’s inaugural, wherein he told us that “the world has changed, and we must change with it,” and, “we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.”
But climate justice—particularly international climate justice—will not come easy, and it cannot fall to Obama alone to explain why. This is a job for the climate movements, and in the U.S. particularly they’ve made little progress in raising critical questions of American global responsibility. Even the environmental justice movement, a clear voice for solidarity, has avoided the radioactive core of the problem: the tangible international obligations that the American people must accept before any real climate mobilization can become possible. There’s still time, but not much. If anything is certain, it’s that this coming year, as the climate negotiations finally get serious, can’t just be a year of tactics and pragmatism. The December showdown in Copenhagen, even if it succeeds in mapping the way forward, will only be a stop on the road. We’ve got to use it to deepen the conversation about justice and solidarity.
The divides are terrible and deep, even more so internationally than here at home. The economic divides, in particular, are wider and more desperate. And insofar as these divides—North versus South, rich versus poor, developed versus underdeveloped—are the roots of the climate impasse, they are as well the grounds upon which the battle to break it must be fought.
What is needed is an emergency global mobilization. And to do its proper part in such a mobilization, the U.S. must shoulder its fair share of the costs. It must do so, moreover, even as it strains with equal vigor on the domestic front. The hope, of course, is that all this effort can be composed into a green New Deal that snowballs into a great transition that not only stabilizes the climate but lifts up the poor as well. And a great hope it is, but not one that can stop at our shorelines. There is only one atmosphere, and it is globally that the battle to stabilize the climate will be won or lost.
Any true climate mobilization must solve the problem of developmental justice. It must open ways forward for the poor, and this despite the fact that greenhouse-gas concentrations are already far too high, leaving almost no “atmospheric space” to support the energy and food production, water purification, reimagined cities and settlements, transportation, and health services that will be needed if the poor are to have an honest chance at decent lives. Be clear here—if the poor, clustered in the world’s developing regions, don’t see better futures flowing from an international climate accord, then while it may be negotiated and even ratified, it will not stand.
So who pays? The answer must be “the rich,” or at least “the unpoor,” which is to say that the climate transition will not be cheap, and those who have the capacity to pay must do so. This must be true regardless of whether they live in rich countries like the U.S. or developing countries like China. Such an arrangement won’t be easy to contrive, but it has to be our goal. Nothing else will work.
]]>The question stuck with me for a few reasons. The first is that it’s the world, not our world. The notion that the world belongs to us—instead of us belonging to the world—is a good part of the problem.
The second is that this is pretty much the only question that’s asked in mainstream media (and even among some environmentalists) about the state of the world and our response to it. The phrase “green living” brings up 7,250,000 Google hits, or more than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards combined (or, to look at it another way, more than a thousand times more than the crucial environmental philosophers John A. Livingston and Neil Evernden combined). If you click on the websites that come up, you find just what you’d expect, stuff like “The Green Guide: Shop, Save, Conserve,” “Personal Solutions for All of Us,” and “Tissue Paper Guide for Consumers.”
The third and most important reason the question stuck with me is that it’s precisely the wrong question. By looking at how it’s the wrong question, we can start looking for some of the right questions. This is terribly important, because coming up with right answers to wrong questions isn’t particularly helpful.
So, part of the problem is that “looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe” makes it seem as though environmental catastrophe is the problem. But it’s not. It’s a symptom—an effect, not a cause. Think about global warming and attempts to “solve” or “stop” or “mitigate” it. Global warming (or global climate catastrophe, as some rightly call it), as terrifying as it is, isn’t first and foremost a threat. It’s a consequence. I’m not saying pikas aren’t going extinct, or the ice caps aren’t melting, or weather patterns aren’t changing, but to blame global warming for those disasters is like blaming the lead projectile for the death of someone who got shot. I’m also not saying we shouldn’t work to solve, stop, or mitigate global climate catastrophe; I’m merely saying we’ll have a better chance of succeeding if we recognize it as a predictable (at this point) result of burning oil and gas, of deforestation, of dam construction, of industrial agriculture, and so on. The real threat is all of these.
The same is true of worldwide ecological collapse. Extractive forestry destroys forests. What’s the surprise when extractive forestry causes forest communities—plants and animals and mushrooms and rivers and soil and so on—to collapse? We’ve seen it once or twice before. When you think of Iraq, is the first image that comes to mind cedar forests so thick the sunlight never reaches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this extractive culture; one of the first written myths of this culture is of Gilgamesh deforesting the plains and hillsides of Iraq to build cities. Greece was also heavily forested; Plato complained that deforestation harmed water quality (and I’m sure Athenian water quality boards said the same thing those boards say today: we need to study the question more to make sure there’s really a correlation). It’s magical thinking to believe a culture can effectively deforest and yet expect forest communities to sustain.
It’s the same with rivers. There are 2 million dams just in the United States, with 70,000 dams over six feet tall and 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall. And we wonder at the collapse of native fish communities? We can repeat this exercise for grasslands, even more hammered by agriculture than forests are by forestry; for oceans, where plastic outweighs phytoplankton ten to one (for forests to be equivalently plasticized, they’d be covered in Styrofoam ninety feet deep); for migratory songbirds, plagued by everything from pesticides to skyscrapers; and so on.
The point is that worldwide ecological collapse is not some external and unpredictable threat—or gun barrel—down which we face. That’s not to say we aren’t staring down the barrel of a gun; it would just be nice if we identified it properly. If we means the salmon, the sturgeon, the Columbia River, the migratory songbirds, the amphibians, then the gun is industrial civilization.
A second part of the problem is that the question presumes we’re facing a future threat—that the gun has yet to go off. But the Dreadful has already begun. Ask passenger pigeons. Ask Eskimo curlews. Ask great auks. Ask traditional indigenous peoples almost anywhere. This is not a potential threat, but rather one that long-since commenced.
The larger problem with the metaphor, and the reason for this new column in Orion, is the question at the end: “how shall I live my life right now?” Let’s take this step by step. We’ve figured out what the gun is: this entire extractive culture that has been deforesting, defishing, dewatering, desoiling, despoiling, destroying since its beginnings. We know this gun has been fired before and has killed many of those we love, from chestnut ermine moths to Carolina parakeets. It’s now aimed (and firing) at even more of those we love, from Siberian tigers to Indian gavials to entire oceans to, in fact, the entire world, which includes you and me. If we make this metaphor real, we might understand why the question—asked more often than almost any other—is so wrong. If someone were rampaging through your home, killing those you love one by one (and, for that matter, en masse), would the question burning a hole in your heart be: how should I live my life right now? I can’t speak for you, but the question I’d be asking is this: how do I disarm or dispatch these psychopaths? How do I stop them using any means necessary?
Finally we get to the point. Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped—whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men fighting in alliance with the natural world—are not going to care how you or I lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people. They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent. They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. They’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not enlightened. They’re not going to care what sorts of excuses we had to not act (e.g., “I’m too stressed to think about it” or “It’s too big and scary” or “I’m too busy” or any of the thousand other excuses we’ve all heard too many times). They’re not going to care how simply we lived. They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.
They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy. They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. They’re going to care whether the land is healthy enough to support them.
We can fantasize all we want about some great turning, and if the people (including the nonhuman people) can’t breathe, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but that we stop this culture from killing the planet. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this. The land is the source of everything. If you have no planet, you have no economic system, you have no spirituality, you can’t even ask this question. If you have no planet, nobody can ask questions.
What question would I ask instead? What if, instead of asking “How shall I live my life?” people were to ask the land where they live, the land that supports them, “What can and must I do to become your ally, to help protect you from this culture? What can we do together to stop this culture from killing you?” If you ask that question, and you listen, the land will tell you what it needs. And then the only real question is: are you willing to do it?
]]>Because we have not allowed ourselves to ask this question and instead limited ourselves to haplessly trying to turn off sources, our experience has been like Mickey Mouse’s in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”: for every berserk broomstick that he hacked in half, two more took its place, implacably carrying buckets of water that, one by one, created a universal deluge. Similarly, for every polluting source that we turn off (or “mitigate,” since we can’t seem to really turn off anything), another two pop up in its place. For example, at the very moment that we seem to have become serious about reducing our use of petroleum, here comes coal from the ravaged mountaintops of West Virginia and tar sands from Canada, the dirtiest and most destructive energy sources of them all. These rounds of mitigation and evasion are what pass for problem-solving.
Environmentalism is also reluctant to think that its problem may not be of modern origin but something as old as humanity itself. It is committed to a sort of “presentism” in which the culprits are all of recent vintage: Monsanto, Big Oil, developers of suburban sprawl, the modern corporation, you know, the usual suspects. But bad as these things can be (and that’s very bad), they are not the unique creators of our problems. And they are not evil, or, as we descendants of the Puritans like to say, “greedy.” Simply blaming these entities for traditional moral failings is not adequate to the true situation. At most, by doing so we create an environmentalist melodrama of evildoers opposed by forces of good. (Big Oil versus the Sierra Club.)
After all, isn’t it true that what corporations and the individuals who run them try to do is something very human and very familiar? Even admirable? They try to be creative (or innovative, as they like to say). They try to grow. They revel in discovery. They delight in complexity. They have always been major benefactors to education and the arts. (For instance, the merchant capitalists of the Italian Renaissance were also the facilitators of humanism. Where the bankers went, the artists were not far behind.) They try to exercise critical analytic skills in evaluating the world in which they act. They try to help their friends. They try to make the people who are most important to them prosper. They have an astonishing capacity for creative adaptation, even if it is only in the name of preserving their own dominance. In short, they try to win. They try to thrive. We should all be so committed to the risk of “living large.” The problem is not with these qualities as admirable human qualities. The problem is with what exactly it is that they’re trying to help thrive.
My claim is that what is behind these activities is not the stereotypical capitalist mentality of cold logic, a lack of normal feelings, and an unbridled appetite for gain. Rather, I see the Barbaric Heart. First, it is important to say that in associating capitalism with the barbaric I am not merely name-calling. This is so because, as I’ve already suggested, there is something admirable about the astonishingly complex world that capitalism has made. No amount of human or electronic computation can encompass the complexity of the psychological and material world that market capitalism has brought into being. What economists call the “spontaneous order” of the free market stretches if not infinitely then at least unimaginably. At one end there is the miracle of digital technology (are we really supposed to believe that hundreds of hours of music can fit on a device the size of a cigarette pack?). This digital world gets tinier and more powerful every year, and it is substantially the product of capitalist ingenuity. I have to admire it even if, as a person who has spent his life among books, I mostly fear and dislike it. At the other end, there is the continental roaming of shoppers among millions of products that is as vast, in its own way, as the primordial movement of animal herds stretching from horizon to horizon on the Serengeti. Imagine a satellite image illuminating all the activity at shopping malls in the United States on a typical American Saturday afternoon. From a vantage in space, it would look like North America was flowing and glowing with strange life. If you could for a moment exclude the other consequences of this activity (environmental, social, military), you might be tempted to call this vision beautiful. (As in the ambiguous shots of Los Angeles freeways in the movie Koyaanisqatsi. The slow, winding flow of headlights comes to look like a natural phenomenon, like watching the northern lights.)
To say that there is something barbaric at work in these accomplishments is to say that there is also something admirable about the Barbaric Heart itself. The Barbaric Heart is not the opposite of the civilized. In fact, the Barbaric Heart is civilized, for all the good that does it, and has always happily clad itself in the decorous togas of Rome (as the Ostrogoth King Theodoric did), the pinstripes of Wall Street, and the comfy suburbanity of L. L. Bean. The Barbaric Heart has always wanted to look nice even when it didn’t (consider the leisure suit). The barbaric is admirable for its sheer strength, its daring, its energy, and its willingness to take risks. It is taller than we are. It is prouder in the way that a beautiful animal is proud. It is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, a “blonde beast.” (He mostly thought that was a good thing, or at least better than being a slave.)
Unhappily, beyond its strength and pride and willingness to take on difficult tasks, there is something dangerous to itself and others in the Barbaric Heart. The Barbaric Heart is a great and energetic actor, but it is no better at questioning itself about the meaning of its actions than capitalism is at asking why the unlimited growth of the Gross Domestic Product is good. Capitalism does not ask, “What’s the economy for?” Capitalism merely asks it to grow. (It’s as if the only alternative to “growth” was “recession,” and no one is allowed to be for that.) Nonetheless, questions are in order. The Greek that opens the Gospel according to John reads, “In the beginning was Logos.” What is the logos (the spirit, the logic) of the Barbaric Heart? In short, in what name does it act?
THE NATURAL MODE of reasoning for the Barbaric Heart is simple enough to describe. It was the logic not only of the ancient northern hordes, clothed in animal skins, but of the Roman Empire and the Western civilization that followed as well. (That must be our first deconstructive insight: the barbarian is not an “other” to be driven away in the name of civilized virtue.) For the Romans, virtue simply meant success, usually military success. Valor. That was the heart of Romanitas. For the Roman forces under Scipio Aemilianus at the end of the Third Punic War against Carthage, the routine was well understood: half of the time would be devoted to violence, to killing every human and dog and cat that crossed their path, and half the time would be given to plunder, to the transfer of every valuable material thing back to Rome, especially gold and silver things. Roman violence was above all orderly. As a consequence, as Polybius wrote, Rome “billowed in booty.”
This is the barbaric calculation: if you can prosper from violence, then you should go ahead and be violent. In short order the Barbaric Heart is led to conclude that in fact prosperity is dependent on violence. Therefore, you should be good at violence, for your own sake and the sake of your country. That was Roman virtu. Which is a way of saying that the barbaric itself is a form of virtue, especially if you think that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues, just as, in order, athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and capitalists do. Ultimately, these types are all the same. The athlete, the soldier, and the businessman all want to “win,” and by whatever means necessary.
Even though the warlike Romans understood every victory as a divine confirmation of their character, virtue in fact has very little to do with what the gods think. Virtues are specific to cultures. Barbaric virtues have been challenged by competing ethical organizations like the Stoic virtues of honor, integrity, simplicity, loyalty, and moderation, or the Christian virtues of selflessness, compassion, reverence, humility, faith, and hope. There have been other articulations of virtue as well. Humanism and the Enlightenment advocated the virtues of fraternity and equality before the law. Environmentalism has used all of these articulations at one time or another in its increasingly desperate effort to gain moral traction. What these forms of virtue have in common is that, unlike the Barbaric Heart, they are concerned with articulating a sense of the whole.
For the Barbaric Heart, on the other hand, there is nothing that is as real as the self-interested Ego, His Majesty the Sovereign Self. What else could care so blindly about “winning”? But it also feels, at some dark recess of the heart, how pathetically empty this Self is. So the Barbaric Heart grasps at things to fill that emptiness. The histories of ancient warfare always claim that the surest inducement to the warrior to fight was the prospect of being able to cart off the enemy’s silver and gold (and women). Plates, jewelry, the objects in temple shrines, precious ornamentation applied to buildings, anything that glittered. With such a prospect at hand, death meant nothing. Through the “right of conquest” (the unwritten law of the ancient world that trumped all written laws) the warrior might at last feel full and real. He might also participate in glory. Why, he could even become virtuous in this way (or, as we still say, a “hero”).
Ironically, through this logic the Barbaric Heart also committed not only itself but all of the human and natural world to what the Greeks called tragedy. Tragic fate, for the Greeks, was the understanding that once you put a certain principle in motion, that principle would play itself out. Completely out. And so, as in Aeschylus’s tragedies, humans pursue what they perceive to be their own interest only to become “the slave of their own destruction,” an apt expression of our current situation on multiple fronts, economic, military, and environmental.
What is tragic is that the bloody end, “the great wound swimming upwards” like a shark (Aeschylus again), is unintended but no less inevitable for that. We don’t intend that the pursuit of personal wealth should lead to the bankruptcy of an entire nation, but bankrupt we are. We don’t intend that our strategic military actions should lead to an endless and uncontrollable spiraling of violence, but it does. We don’t intend that the pursuit of our happiness should lead to the extinction of animals, desertification, drought, famine, mass human migration, violent storms, but all that is presently “swimming upwards” regardless of what we intend.
THERE ARE TWO THINGS that the Barbaric Heart, for all its brutal blond beauty, doesn’t get. First, it doesn’t look at itself. It is frustrated by questions like “What makes life worth living?” Or it assumes that the answer is obvious: “Winning! Of course.” It doesn’t even wonder what its relation to other barbarians might be. It doesn’t know about solidarity beyond a blind submission to the tribe (the ancient form of that perverse form of loyalty we call patriotism). But it has very little understanding of why self-interest should be sacrificed to a universal good, whatever that is.
Second, the Barbaric Heart doesn’t understand, except at the very last moment of anguished recognition, how suicidal its activities are. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is full of descriptions of the awful moment of animal awareness when the barbarian realizes that he has gone, once again, too far and brought about his own destruction. For example, after the disastrous battle of Hadrianople in 378 AD at which two thirds of the Emperor Valens’s Roman army was wiped out in its own moment of barbaric folly, the Gothic armies were, as usual, unrestrained, abandoned to passions, and generally given over to what Gibbon called “blind and irregular fury.” Their “mischievous disposition” consumed with “improvident rage” the crops and the possessions of the local inhabitants. Eventually, an army of the Goths was surprised by the remaining Romans while “immersed in wine and sleep,” and there followed in turn a “cruel slaughter of the astonished Goths.” Thus, the anguish of the Barbaric Heart.
Is it too much to say that, a little more than a millennium and a half later, you could see the same surprise and anguish on the faces of the managers of international investment securities as the housing bubble burst and lenders, insurers, bond markets, and hedge funds all came close to evaporating as billions upon billions of dollars disappeared virtually overnight? All around them are the homeowners in foreclosure, just like the peasant villagers in 378 looking at the smoking ruins of their little homes.
THE BARBARIC HEART is a pure emptiness, an emptiness that doesn’t know itself as empty. It is an emptiness that has turned upon itself. It is a mouth that chews. It is a permanent state of war against all others but also, most profoundly, against itself. One part violence, one part plunder, and eventual anguish and regret.
The Barbaric Heart cannot be punished for its excesses. It cannot be “shown the light of day.” The proposals of the environmental community for better systems of transportation, cleaner smokestacks, purer foods, and jail time for corporate polluters—none of that changes the Barbaric Heart. If it is frustrated by the activities of others (those troublesome tree-huggers), it simply concludes that it will be more cunning and violent next time. As Nicholson Baker reports in his controversial book Human Smoke, in May of 1941 Lord Boom Trenchard considered the ineffectiveness of a year of daily bombing of the cities of Germany. What next? “Trenchard’s answer was: more. More bombing. Relentless nightly bombing—heavier bombers, more bombers.”
If the Barbaric Heart cannot be shown the errors of its ways, or even simply learn from its own tragic mistakes, then it must be displaced. That is, we should not seek to alter what the Barbaric Heart desires, for what it desires is what we desire: to be secure from outside threat, to protect its people (whether a tribe or a ruling class of elites), to thrive, to take pleasure in its world, etc. What we can do is make it seek by a new route what it constantly, unalterably seeks. What displaces the Barbaric Heart in this way is what I will call, for lack of a better term, thoughtfulness. (This is an inexact term, I know, but it has always been to the idea of “thinking” that philosophy has turned to confront the self-interest and violence of the barbaric. Thoughtfulness offers the Barbaric a better way to think about what it means to thrive.) In our current circumstances, thoughtfulness’s first task is the acknowledgment that we have been lying to ourselves. Just about every aspect of what we happily call American culture is a form of lie that we retell ourselves every day. The great virtue of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, for example, was its determination not to believe the lies of violence and avarice any longer. Its prophetic howl erupted from a culture of mere consent. The poem introduced an internal realignment of American culture accomplished through what we now refer to as the counterculture of the 1960s. The Barbaric Heart for a time stood naked and exposed in its deceitfulness and violence. It was a “bright shining lie,” in Neil Sheehan’s phrase. For a moment, the usual logical appeals of economists and politicians for the necessity of violence and the supremacy of efficiency and profit were found to be not only insufficient but morally repugnant.
In the end, the one important task of thoughtfulness is to invent a spiritual principle, a logos of its own, that can contest the energies (and tyrannies) of the Barbaric Heart. But thoughtfulness’s primary attribute is not its ability to provide a superior Truth or an irrefutable logic. Thoughtfulness’s primary attribute is aesthetic. That is, what thoughtfulness proposes as an alternative to the self-serving violence of the Barbaric is beauty. “Don’t think profit,” it argues, “think beauty. The beauty of the polis, the beauty of culture, the beauty of human beings freed from the slavery of regimented work, and the beauty of an untrammeled natural world.” Through the aesthetic, thoughtfulness seeks Homo humanus as opposed to Homo barbarus. It seeks a culture in which humans can become what they really are. Not slaves, and not instruments of violence, but beings intent upon the beautiful as a social principle. That’s the logos of our better selves. And yet we seem reluctant to claim it.
The idea that we are trying to create a culture whose primary satisfaction is its beauty is not really such an extravagant thought. When we say that we desire a world in which nature is intact and animal life thrives; when we say that we desire human communities in harmony with nature; and when we say that within those communities human beings should be able to live in dignity, so that they can be something more than worker-consumers, we are arguing for a reality that is first aesthetic. Environmentalists argue for such a reality all the time. It is what they propose in the place of a barbaric culture of profit and violence. Even so, we are often seduced by the economic and scientific appeals to efficiency, sustainability, and prosperity, in spite of the fact that we suspect that these appeals are actually part of the problem. But in our heart of hearts we are not fooled. What we want is the beautiful. We say it with a smile on our faces when we go for a hike, or when we visit an “eco-friendly” town full of bike paths and locally owned shops with a mountain vista in the background. We do not say of such places, “I’m grooving on this system’s ecological balance.” Or, “The Green Economy is working well.” We say, “It’s beautiful here!” And yet when we set out to make our most public arguments for nature, we seem almost embarrassed to say that what convinces us is the argument of the beautiful. The thoughtfulness of the beautiful. In fact, I’m embarrassed right now!
What is it that makes such an argument so difficult to make? If what we want is the beautiful, why do we feel that our most persuasive arguments will be made by scientists, environmental engineers, regional planners, and sustainability economists? In part, it is the fact that we have been intimidated by all those who would say that such thinking is “unrealistic,” by which they really mean “does not concede the brutal fact of the enduring triumph of the Barbaric Heart.” By this measure, to be realistic is to say, “We plan to win by conceding the game to our adversaries before the contest has even begun.”
Second perhaps only to toxic landscapes, the most thoroughly degraded aspect of our culture is its art. This is so obvious that it hardly needs comment. One has simply to say “television.” Nevertheless, it is art, or the aesthetic, that prohibits the temptation to mourn the death of the world we were born into. Art is not a call to passive contemplation (a trip to the museum) but to the activity of human creation. It is this that should replace Adam Smith’s famous “division of labor,” the work that promises only tedium and despair and passivity in the face of destruction. Environmentalism should be about a return to the aesthetic, and I don’t mean the beauties of a mountain vista. I mean a resistance to the Barbaric Heart through a daily insistence on the Beautiful within individual lives, within communities, and in our relation to the natural world.
IN VIRGIL’S AENEID, when Aeneas and the faithful Trojan remnant sail from Troy for the shores of Italy, they, in a sense, never leave Troy. They are never not Trojans because they take with them their “household gods,” those figures and myths that provide them with identity. And when they land in Latium and begin to set up a new home, they do not feel themselves on strange shores. They are always at home. They bring the fullness of the past to meet the fullness of the present in productive beauty. By contrast, we’re not even at home at home. We’re strangers on our own shores, thanks to the way in which corporations and their franchises have colonized our cities and towns, turning them into one big McSame.
Historians often wonder what it was like for the Romans to live under the rule of the Goths in the sixth century. Barbarians in the Senate, barbarians in the market, barbarians in the temple, barbarians in the countryside. The constant presence of the violently alien. Well, perhaps it was like living with Best Buy and Costco and Barnes and Noble, in our Big Box world. In both the ancient world and the present, it is like living, in Nietzsche’s mordant phrase, “estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs.” But somehow when we look on the ugliness that this reality brings, we see a “high standard of living.” Those enchanted by the malignant dwarfs (CEOs? MBAs?) do not think to ask, “What makes life worth living?” The answer is obvious: “The high standards, of course!” A very strange conclusion for a people who are the living witnesses of so much permanent destruction.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there is no need for environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. The very notion of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer). What is called for is the discovery or invention of our own “household gods” that might speak powerfully to us. “Gods” that will keep us in touch with a sense of the depth of our own past and call us creatively to what we might call our primordial aesthetic passion: our deep desire to be the creators of our own world.
We ought to discover that there is something superior to the Barbaric Heart, a Universal that is not only Nature but human capacity and creativity as well. We ought to discover that we are a part of this One, an animal among animals. Ours should be a Dionysian world that refuses the cold comfort of both the capitalist manager and the ecologist technician. The Dionysian does not so much refuse these worlds as laugh in dismissal. Its world is indulgent and ecstatic and curiously impersonal. It is not an animal lover; it is simply happy among animals. It is not a nature lover; it is nature. It doesn’t pity the plight of the polar bear; it romps in the snow. It is a thoughtful and beautiful animal, but it is an animal. The Dionysian fucks, eats, looks for the ecstasy of transcendence, and worships the same gods that the animals worship. Not the God that gives laws, but the gods that encourage living things to thrive.
We are that strange and wonderful animal that has the metaphysical comfort of knowing that she is part of the tragic chorus of natural beings. We are members of that faith that knows that life is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable. And the mark that we will leave upon the world will not be the mark of brute force clothed in the false virtues of the barbarian but the mark of the ultimate realist, he who makes his own world, demanding the impossible and calling it Beautiful.
]]>Millennia ago, an unknown artist painstakingly chiseled a human face out of rock, carving huge, haunting eyes and an expression vivid in intensity. It is probably the oldest artistic representation of the human face anywhere in the world. As priceless as it is unknown, it is one of hundreds of thousands of rock carvings spread across eighty-eight square kilometers in Western Australia’s Burrup peninsula, known as Murujuga to Aboriginal people. Some carvings are at least thirty thousand years old, and the site may be twice the age of the famous, enigmatic cave paintings of Lascaux, France, which are perhaps twenty thousand years old.
The carvings jump with life—outstretched hand- and footprints, birds, wallabies, emus, whales, turtles. For the Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo, Ngarluma, and Yindjibarndi peoples, now custodians of those lands, the engravings speak of the Dreaming, that subtle, diffuse, living past, re-created in the present through song; the carvings refer directly to current ceremonies. Telling stories that reach back beyond the Ice Age, depicting creatures long extinct, such as the fat-tailed kangaroo and the Tasmanian tiger, to Aboriginal people this is a “prehistoric university.” Spiraling in meaning, pecked, hewn, carved from adamantine rock, the area is the world’s largest and oldest rock-art gallery.
Nowhere else on Earth is there a continuous record of human culture such as this, emblems of song cycles that listeners of land can still hear. Aboriginal people have frequently told me how land has voices, voices of luminous intensity. There are people everywhere in the world through whose acute hearing the land can ring with song.
Wilfred Hicks, an elder of the Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo, says: “The spiritual force is alive in the thousands of rock engravings that are to us a spiritual source of energy—we can hear and see this energy when we are among them.” But what is a source of sacred energy to Aboriginal Australians is a source of literal energy for Woodside Energy Limited. One particularly sensitive part of the site, to Aboriginal people, is earmarked for an explosives factory and a liquefied natural gas project. About a third of the Burrup peninsula has already morphed into the strange petroglyph of industrial infrastructure, including one current Woodside gas facility plus a quarry and a fertilizer plant. Of the carvings, up to a quarter have already been destroyed. That, says Hicks, is like “our bible torn apart.” In the 1980s, when Woodside constructed its gas plant, by the company’s own admission “sites and engravings that could not be moved were recorded and then destroyed,” probably, they said, pulverized and used as gravel, landfill for their plant. Nineteen years later, an estimated two thousand carvings were found lying face down in the dirt in a locked compound described by one elder as a “cemetery.” That’s a telling word, speaking of a culture that understands kinship between all things, even stones, and speaking of the lifelessness of the dislocated engravings.
It is a triple lifelessness, for the stones, torn out of their context, no longer sing. The land, emptied of the rocks, has less vitality, and people too are affected. “Once the rock has been moved, the spirit of that rock has been broken,” says Hicks. “It’s the same as moving someone from their grave. The spirit mourns, it cries for the place it was forced to leave. The archaeologists say that they can ‘salvage’ the engravings, but they are talking from a foreigner’s point of view. You cannot salvage the spirits of our land. Disturbance of these spiritual forces will lead directly to illness and death in our communities.”
Aboriginal people say that once a piece of rock art is removed, a song line is destroyed. In part, this is a story about how one culture’s deafness can be effectively “louder” than another culture’s song. Language is lodged in the relationships between words: you cannot fence off a pile of verbs, smash pronouns, scatter adjectives in the sea, and expect language to hold its meanings. In the language of land, meaning is lodged in the relationship between rocks and rivers, objects and sites. Dislocate one part and you fracture all, first making the land into a dissonance of broken grammar, and then into a silence.
In part, this is a story of the parallel treatment of land and its people. The rock art was created by the Yaburara people, whose descendants were cruelly massacred in a planned attack by white settlers in 1868. In contemporary Australia there were many times when I saw Aboriginal people, long dislocated from their lands, literally lying face down in the dirt, victims of alcoholism and cultural scorn, pulverized by racism and poverty into social landfill for white constructions. Until 1967 Aboriginal Australians were legally classed as “flora and fauna.” Unsurprisingly, given this background, some indigenous people have reportedly accepted a large amount of money to “help supervise” the destruction at the Burrup peninsula, giving the project a veneer of cultural sensitivity.
In part, this is a story about the indigenous human being, born to belong in the metaphorical, metaphysical, metamusical, metatemporal, metaminded world. Belonging, in other words, to life, implicitly carved into the contours of the Earth. In part it is the story of one worldview that, for all its dominance, writes its own bitter tragedy by relegating humanity into a lonely, literal, and solely material realm where matter is all that matters and there is no kinship with the Earth.
This is also a story of erasure. An erasure of history and ancestral memory. An erasure of significance, knowledge, and song. The erasure is dramatized quite literally, for over the coming century the physical depth of any remaining carvings is likely to grow shallower as they are eroded by acid emissions from chemical works.
But there is another kind of erasure. The erasure of importance, of attentiveness. Despite the World Monuments Fund listing Burrup/Murujuga as one of the world’s most endangered sites, and committed archaeologists pressing for World Heritage listing, it is highly unlikely that you will have heard about this situation.
When the Taliban dynamited the sacred ancient Buddhist statues of Bamiyan, there was a furor in the press. When Munch’s The Scream was stolen, there was an international hue and cry. If some dumbcluck set fire to the libraries of Cambridge, or Stonehenge was bulldozed and used as landfill for an office block, or the temple at Lhasa was demolished for a shopping mall, or someone took a sledgehammer to Michelangelo’s David, the heartfelt distress of so many would be internationally reported, and the outrage and fury would create a media firestorm.
But an equivalent crime against the human spirit is happening at Murujuga. Seeming to operate a casual cultural apartheid toward these indigenous spiritual, artistic, intellectual, historical, and symbolic values, virtually all of the world’s press has ignored this issue, though there has been a sturdy campaign to bring it to the attention of the media.
Is art not Art if the hands that sculpted it did not sign it with an individual name? Is history not History if its tellers are more at ease in song and ceremony than in the vaults of a museum? Is spirituality not part of World Religion if those who believe in it locate their spirits in rocks and land rather than bible paper and abstract heavens? Is a human face somehow not fully human when it belongs to people who in living memory were classed as animals? The acid emissions erode, as the acid omissions corrode.
]]>If this plant were put back in operation, even in its 1907 condition, it would produce enough power for about a hundred homes. But it won’t be, and following the sluiceway upstream, I came to the reason: a demolished dam. It’s a sight that would please many environmentalists. Standing there, clutching my light sconce, I had to wonder if maybe it shouldn’t.
IT WOULDN’T PLEASE VERNE. Verne Tower is aptly named, a Martello man: white Stetson, black jeans, work boots built like tanks. His millipede mustache is in danger of being upstaged by his caterpillar eyebrows. He lives in western Massachusetts, where he has farmed or built things his entire life.
Verne is one of those paradoxical men New England mints, the kind with black-rimmed fingernails and graceful hands, a man equally likely to rebuild your truck engine and to say, “I heard a great story on NPR.” Cutting stone is his line today; his low workshop is flanked by redoubts of marble, awaiting appointments with his saw.
“There is no free ride,” he also says.
Sometime in the mid-‘80s, a man named Paul Eckhoff contacted Verne. Paul had bought a crumbling dam and paper mill on the Kinderhook River just across the New York state line. He was in the process of restoring it to make hydropower, and he needed a good craftsman to do some steelwork. Verne went out to Chittenden Falls to take a look. “I’ll help you out for a couple of weeks,” he told Paul. He continued helping for twenty years.
When it came to hydroelectricity, Paul and Verne were autodidacts. They figured out how to restore one of the powerhouse’s main turbines. Then they designed and built another powerhouse for the opposite side of the river. Verne became the plant supervisor, and he and Paul became good friends.
Verne went on to get involved in restoring a dozen or so hydro sites in New England. He built a historic Shaker turbine from archival drawings. He constructed an old-fashioned overshot water wheel. He fabricated control panels from metal lockers and powerhouses from scrap steel. He donned scuba gear to search for a turbine blade that had spun off into the Kinderhook and buried itself in gravel.
Another thing Verne likes to say: “It’s not rocket science.”
One sunny summer day, I drive with Verne to Valatie, New York. The Hudson River valley town is postcard perfect. At its center, a glassy millpond froths over a dam about three feet high, then races in multiple streams down another twenty feet of rocky waterfall. To one side, a concrete sluiceway diverts some of the water into the basement of a white clapboard house: the powerhouse. Verne helped rehabilitate this hydroelectric plant, and he’s showing me around.
“This is cute,” I say.
“Oh, it’s adorable,” agrees Verne.
The powerhouse is locked with a padlock. The combination is written on the siding. Inside, the generator sounds like a sewing machine. It’s painted green with red trim. The powerhouse consists of four small rooms stacked on top of each other. On top, there’s a small apartment for the caretaker. The room we enter holds the generator and controls. The next room down contains the penstock, arching its neck to deliver water to the room below, which is the waterbox, a concrete cube filled with water and a spinning turbine. We can’t go in the waterbox, but we climb a ladder down to a deck outside it. The turbine hums behind the wall. Below us, draft tubes empty noisily into the tailrace, a sylvan channel that reconnects with the river. Above us, power lines take 110 kilowatts of power to the surrounding homes, lighting around a hundred of them.
LIKE SO MANY HYRDO SITES IN THE NORTHEAST, Valatie’s power plant used to be a textile mill. Most mid-sized New England towns were once mill towns. Peterborough, New Hampshire, was. The history of Peterborough’s ruined power plant is a history, in miniature, of America’s electricity industry.
Peterborough’s dam was built in 1853 to impound water for the local sawmill’s water wheel. When the area ran out of trees, the sawmill closed. In 1887, the private Peterborough Electric Light, Power and Heat Company refitted the mill to generate hydroelectricity. The town bought the plant in 1902. This was typical; many towns considered electricity, like water, to be a public resource. The pages of the Peterborough Transcript document the town’s pride in its power plant. A plant manager’s resignation, a new dynamo, smokestack repairs: all were front-page news. So were dry spells; people were expected to conserve when the Nubanusit ran low. “We trust we will all again do our bit,” opined the Transcript in February 1918, when the town was experiencing a cold-weather water shortage. Conservation wasn’t restricted to hydropower. The same cold snap led to a coal shortage too, and the federal Fuel Administrator instituted a program mandating “Heatless Mondays.”
Heatless Mondays ended when the war did. But Peterborough’s low-water alerts and other more regional calls for conservation ended when power stopped being made locally.
As the market grew, power generation and distribution were increasingly done by larger companies at fewer sites. A small town like Peterborough could afford to buy a small hydro facility, but building a coal-fired power plant, or a huge hydroelectric dam, required more capital. Transmitting power over greater distances required complicated infrastructure. In short, power was best handled by the powerful. Samuel Insull, an early electricity magnate, called it a “natural monopoly.” In 1912, Peterborough’s power plant was sold to the larger Keene Gas and Electric, which linked it to power plants in nearby Dublin and Keene.
Throughout the 1920s, the nation’s small electric companies were rolled up into larger and larger monopolies. Eventually, in response to public outcry, the monopolies became utilities—some public, some private—but all highly regulated. The utilities saw economies of scale in operating a few huge power plants, rather than numerous small ones, especially since oil and coal, the main fuels for the large plants, were plentiful and cheap. They acquired small hydro sites and began shutting them down. Peterborough’s hydro plant was switched off in 1926, just two years after Keene Gas and Electric was absorbed into a new statewide utility, the Public Service Company of New Hampshire, owned by Samuel Insull. With large power plants and a growing transmission network, PSNH had plenty of power to sell without small plants. In fact, a year after closing Peterborough’s plant, the company announced a rate reduction to encourage greater electricity use. Within five years, residential consumption had nearly doubled.
Small hydro plants were decommissioned throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s. Without upkeep, they decayed and crumbled. Many, like Peterborough’s, were forgotten.
They were remembered in the late ‘70s. On the heels of the OPEC oil embargo, President Carter’s administration devised incentives to encourage renewable energy development. The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 required utilities to buy power at market rates from small producers. Hydrologists got excited and went around looking for promising sites. That’s when Paul Eckhoff bought Chittenden Falls. There were many others. In 1980, John McPhee profiled small hydro developers, including Eckhoff, in The New Yorker. That same year, the New England River Basins Commission listed eighty-two hundred sites where still-existing or former dams could produce significant amounts of electricity. Two Peterborough sites were redeveloped in the early ‘80s, but not the old city plant. Its dam had already been destroyed.
Few things are as beautiful as falling water. That beauty has been making power for thousands of years—first mechanically, with waterwheels, and then electrically, with turbines and generators. Generator, from the Latin generare, to produce, is a misleading word. No device can produce energy; it must convert it from something else. The burning of coal converts millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight into heat. A hydroelectric plant converts the kinetic energy of falling water into electricity.
The process is simple. A sluiceway diverts water from a river into a downward-slanting tube called a penstock with a turbine at the bottom. The distance the water falls is called the site’s “head.” The water spins the turbine, which in turn spins a magnet centered in a conductor made from tightly wound wires. This produces an electrical current. That current travels out of the powerhouse on wires and joins the electrical grid. The water exits the turbine through draft tubes and rejoins the river via the tailrace.
Many hydroelectric plants use dams to create reservoirs. Big dams—Glen Canyon, Hoover, Grand Coulee—store water until demand for electricity is high, at which point the engineers who control them release it. These huge structures, called storage dams, have turned rivers like the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Tennessee into strings of elongated, stepping-stone lakes, transforming the landscape and displacing residents both human and wild. The dam the Chinese built at Three Gorges flooded 140 towns and 13 cities, displaced well over a million people, and turned the Yangtze River into a holding tank six hundred kilometers long. When the reservoir was filling up, scientists could detect a wobble in the Earth’s rotation. Because these facilities transform river habitats so radically, the power they produce is not considered renewable by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Today, most of the hydroelectric power in the U.S. is produced by a handful of large storage projects. Yet according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the vast majority of the roughly 2,540 hydroelectric facilities generating power in the U.S. are small, “run-of-river” facilities. “Small,” according to FERC, is anything less than thirty megawatts, though most are far smaller; “run-of-river” means a power plant that doesn’t store water, but operates with available streamflow. The Department of Energy considers run-of-river hydroelectricity to be renewable, and many states have made it eligible for green power incentives. The amount of power these plants contribute to the national grid is small, but it could be bigger.
How much bigger is the subject of a 2004 report for the Department of Energy, prepared by the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. Using topographical maps to assess the nation’s undeveloped small hydropower, it catalogued places where rivers could turn in-stream hydrokinetic turbines, or where water could be diverted through penstocks and turbines and returned to the river. Excluding sites that would require new dams and those that were either protected or too remote to be developed, it declared there were about thirty thousand megawatts of potential power to be gained from small hydro in the fifty states. That’s about six times the amount of electricity produced by Niagara Falls, or enough to power 30 million homes.
Now, in an age of rising seas and rising oil prices, interest is growing again in small hydro—especially in the Northeast, where many rivers were powering mills a century or more ago. Developers big and small are looking for sites to restore or retrofit. This has some environmentalists worried. That’s because the sites with the most power potential often have an impoundment, such as a millpond, to raise the water level upstream of the powerhouse, increasing the head. These impoundments are made with dams. And therein lies the rub.
There’s just something about a dam. Dave Brower fought to obstruct them. Edward Abbey dreamed of exploding them. Derrick Jensen dreams of exploding them still. John McPhee wrote that for environmentalists, the Devil’s world is ringed with moats of oil and DDT, but its absolute epicenter holds a dam. The treacherous wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings powers his evil orc factory with a dammed river. “Free the river!” cry the Ents: big explosion, triumph of good. Nothing says eco-warrior like killing a dam.
WILLIAM FAY IS IN THE BUSINESS OF SAVING DAMS. He got involved in small hydro during the late ‘70s resurgence.
A sort of elder statesman of hydroelectricity, he is a licensed inspector of dams and hydroelectric plants as well as a plant owner. He has two children, Will and Celeste, who are starting out in the business too. They have rehabilitated a small plant in Winchendon, Massachusetts, and on an uncharacteristically gray August day they agree to show it to me.
Will and Celeste share a family resemblance and a tendency to complete each other’s sentences. They are sitting on the tailgate of their pickup, swinging their legs, when I arrive. A light rain is falling. Both wear small, wire-rimmed glasses and an intense yet cautious earnestness. Except for their grubby jeans and mud-caked feet, they seem like the kind of young people who might knock on your front door with Bibles, only their gospel is falling water. They have been in the church since childhood.
“It’s just what we did,” Celeste says.
The younger Fays have a company called French River Land. William Sr. maintains a website for the company that makes small hydro look like the best opportunity for family fun since the invention of Monopoly. It features Will and Celeste rigging I-beams, scrambling around on penstocks, scuba diving in forebays, hoisting fourteen-thousand-pound rotors with cranes, and performing every manner of repair on a variety of lovingly described turbines. They’re the Von Trapp family of hydropower! I thought when I saw it. I had to meet them.
As we contemplate their small powerhouse, Will and Celeste seem eager to explain the rigors of their vocation. They have to find sites and acquire them. They have to invest capital, sweat equity, and time into getting a site up and running. Then there’s the permitting process. “It takes between a year and two years and at least $60,000 to get your FERC license,” Will tells me. Will and Celeste are luckier than most. Having grown up in the hydro community, they have friends who are architects, environmental engineers, electrical contractors. They trade favors.
Celeste recently got her degree in civil engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Will is in his final year in the same program. The Winchendon plant is their first solo rehabilitation project. The ninety-kilowatt dam and its powerhouse are located on a nine-acre brown puddle called Tannery Pond. William Sr. bought the site in the early ‘90s and never got around to restoring it. He let Will and Celeste take over. They did it by hand and on a shoestring: repaired the leaky dam, installed a rebuilt turbine, and debugged the controls. The whole project took three years. Their first month in operation, they made ninety-three dollars.
“This project makes $30,000 a year, gross,” Will says.
“We don’t usually make any money,” adds Celeste.
The Fays visit the plant often. They do all the repairs and upgrades themselves. They pull dead deer and beavers off their intakes, along with tires, cans, and pieces of furniture. Winchendon is a depressed former mill town, and the Fays have had two powerhouse break-ins; the first stripped them of every inch of copper wire in the place, and the second relieved them of $25,000 worth of tools. The Winchendon police got the tools back. Recently, someone tried to get in with an axe, but the metal door held firm.
“Hydro is so fun,” Will says. He’s not being sarcastic.
The Fays walk me out onto their dam, showing me the gates they built above the intakes so they could drain the plant for maintenance without draining the pond. We visit the spillway and gaze at the bypass reach—the part of the river that doesn’t go through the turbines. According to their license, the Fays have to send a minimum of six cubic feet of water per second through their bypass reach whenever there’s enough water to do so. The plant has a float system that monitors pond level and turns the turbine off and on to keep them in compliance. It’s off now, but not for lack of water. They’ve turned it off so we can talk without the noise. They ask if I want them to turn it back on. I do.
Will climbs the upended pallet they use as a ladder to the powerhouse. He flips a switch, and the turbine groans awake. Within a minute, it’s whirring like a wet jet engine. From the underside of the cement-block building, water splashes into the tailrace. Will comes to the door of the powerhouse. “It’s on,” he says. “It’s making electricity. It’s actually sending it out into the grid.” He pauses, a slight smile on his face, like someone hearing distant music.
“It’s cool,” he says at last. “It feels good.”
PRESIDENT CARTER’S TAX INCENTIVES for renewables didn’t survive the ‘80s. Oil got cheap again, and the utilities decided to shed their contracts with small power producers. Once again, they bought up small hydro plants, this time solely to shut them down. They would scuttle the penstocks, or fill the intakes with cement. They would destroy the dams.
They were aided by environmentalists.
A flurry of new regulations—wildlife protection, the Clean Water Act, wetlands conservation measures—made operating a dam increasingly onerous.
“Hydro can, if it’s not done right, be . . .” Celeste gropes for the word.
“Detrimental,” Will says.
One thing that can be detrimental is a significant reduction of water in the bypass reach. Whether it’s a few feet or a few miles long, the bypass reach is what keeps the river alive. If too much water is diverted through the powerhouse, river hydrology will change and habitat can be devastated. The river can also be negatively affected if the water re-entering it from the tailrace is warmed, de-oxygenated, or stripped of its sediment. The licensing of hydro plants by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is meant to minimize these impacts. FERC requires license applicants to communicate with state and federal natural resource agencies and water quality agencies, as well as local stakeholders such as Indian tribes, conservation groups, and landowners, before even submitting an application. The list of parties who must be consulted varies from state to state, but it’s long; the Massachusetts list includes 13 federal agencies and 118 separate state and local groups. These groups are invited to weigh in on the license and what mitigation steps should be mandated. FERC is required to consider both environmental and developmental values in deciding whether to award a license.
As is typical, the Fays’ FERC license mandates not just minimum flows in the bypass reach, but also fish escapements to let fish get over the dam and trash racks to keep river life (and damaging things like logs or tires) from entering the penstocks, all of which Will and Celeste built themselves. In addition, they voluntarily drilled holes in their draft tubes to re-oxygenate tailrace water.
“We bend over backwards to help the environmentalists, and yet we’re still seen by about a third of the people out there as damaging the environment,” Celeste says.
Verne Tower voiced a similar frustration. The environmental activists of the ‘70s, he explained, put in place a lot of regulations that make small hydro difficult to develop today. Those activists were Verne and his friends: “I got involved in this industry because I thought it was a sociologically, environmentally bene-ficial endeavor, a way to mitigate some of the impact I’ve had on the world,” he told me. “And I’ve had people just about throwing rocks at me.”
THE FOLKS AT AMERICAN RIVERS don’t typically throw rocks, but if they did, they would throw them at dams. Formed in 1973, largely to fight big dam projects, American Rivers was originally focused on getting undammed rivers protected under the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Then, in 1997, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission decided not to relicense a hydroelectric project at Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine. American Rivers joined a broad coalition of conservation groups that helped plan and engineer the 1999 destruction of the 917-foot-wide dam, launching a new phase in river restoration: dam removal.
Today, annual reports and newsletters from American Rivers include dam-elimination beauty shots: dams being exploded by dynamite, dams being pounded by hydraulic hammers, dams being chewed up by backhoes. Since 1999, the group has offered guidance and technical know-how in the removal of over seven hundred dams. Most have been low-head dams, around five to fifteen feet high. American Rivers calls them “dams that don’t make sense.”
That phrase implies that some dams do make sense, which gives me a glimmer of hope. Maybe there’s some common ground between small hydro enthusiasts and river activists after all. I travel to Washington and meet John Seebach, director of American Rivers’s Hydropower Reform Initiative. With conservative hair and wonkish spectacles, John looks less like an eco-warrior than like someone who works a few blocks over, at the Treasury Department. There’s a stack of studies on his desk; the pen next to them is red.
I raise the topic of small dams on old millponds, secretly hoping John will offer up his approval for an adorable power plant like Valatie. The opposite turns out to be true. Small dams are John’s least favorite kind. “If you’re a utility and you’re trying to get 15 percent of your portfolio from a bunch of five-hundred-kilowatt or even one-megawatt projects, that’s a lot of dams,” he says. He pulls two bar charts up on his computer and toggles between them. They show number and capacity of FERC-licensed projects by size. Big dams are far fewer, but produce the vast majority of the power.
“The footprint of all these little dams adds up and chokes up a watershed,” he says. “A big plant provides a lot more power.” That extra capacity means big plants are more profitable. And more profit means they can afford to mitigate the harm they do to the river with measures like fish hatcheries and smelt barging.
He concedes that, done right, small hydro plants can preserve riparian habitat and provide for fish passage. But for John, “done right” is the hitch. Doing it right requires money, and John just isn’t sure the economics add up. As projects get smaller, their price per kilowatt-hour ramps up. Private producers and communities may like the idea of small hydro, but as costs increase, John worries they’ll be tempted to relax environmental standards. That temptation might only grow as more and more states institute renewable portfolio standards—minimum percentages of power that utilities must generate with renewables.
“It’s been kind of a frustrating thing for us—or for me personally,” he says, “because there aren’t clean lines between people who want to protect the environment and people who don’t. If all you care about is the river, it’s clear. But if you care about other things—power use, global warming—then it’s not a clear answer. I think that’s why I keep coming back to cost.”
Cost is a highly rational way to make decisions. Big dams may not be ideal, but they’re efficient. Small dams do less harm, but their economic benefits may not outweigh the harm they do. One thing this assumes, of course, is that there’s no relationship between our centralized power grid and our profligate use of power. But it isn’t easy to connect the action of running your microwave to the burning of a hunk of coal two counties away. In the era of Big Energy, power has retreated from the public eye.
People who go off the grid learn to re-see it; when you’re making your own watts, turning on a light or a television has a tangible cost. Heatless Mondays become something to consider. Maybe TV-less Tuesdays too. Recently, when avalanches took out transmission towers that brought hydropower to Juneau, Alaska, the city was forced to run on diesel generators. The price of electricity increased from eleven cents a kilowatt-hour to fifty-three. Within weeks, consumption dropped by 30 percent. But it may not have been just about price. The hydropower plant was nearly thirty miles away; the diesel generators were all within the city limits. And they were dirty. By the time the transmission towers were repaired, the generators had pushed Juneau to the limit of its air-quality permit. Power use was suddenly a cause with effects you could see.
On the other hand, people can see a free-running river, and they like it. Augusta, Maine, home to the former Edwards Dam, loves its renewed waterfront, which has even attracted condos and new businesses. In an American Rivers documentary, a developer calls Augusta “the next upscale old-port development.”
American Rivers likes to point out that the three and a half megawatts of power lost by removing Edwards Dam could be made up by replacing seventy-five thousand incandescent light bulbs with energy-efficient ones. Sadly, that didn’t happen; since Augusta’s river was freed, electricity consumption in Maine—as in all states—has steadily increased. To help meet the demand, five new natural gas power plants were built in Maine in the three years following the removal of Edwards Dam.
“IT WOULD BE NICE if something happened when you flip a switch, so that you had some idea that you just blew up the top of a mountain to get coal,” says Lori Barg, principal of Community Hydro, a small hydro consulting firm. She founded the Vermont Small Hydro Association, an organization enabling small hydro developers to share information and work together for regulatory change. She also just bought a small hydro site herself—an eighteenth-century milldam.
Lori talks a lot about “distributed power”: generating power at thousands of small sites, in a variety of renewable ways, rather than at huge centralized plants. Such a system would not only favor low-impact, greener power, but it would be less “brittle,” meaning less subject to cascading failures when one big plant goes down. It would reduce transmission losses, too, because the shorter the distance power has to travel, the less is lost in the process.
“We’re losing one or two times as much power as we’re using in the end,” Lori says. “If you want to start looking at the economics, is a kilowatt-hour generated in Boston the same as a kilowatt-hour generated in Peterborough, when you have so many losses along the way? It’s like having a leaky bucket.”
In January 2008, Barg’s Vermont Small Hydro Association ran afoul of American Rivers generally and John Seebach specifically. The association lobbied the Vermont state legislature to pass a bill calling for reforms to small hydro regulations, including a reduction in streamflow requirements for bypass reaches. In short, its members wanted the state to let them take more water out of the river. The default minimum standard they wanted was called “7Q10”: the amount of water in the river during the lowest seven-day period that could be expected every ten years. Conservation groups countered that this was like using the worst smog week of the decade to benchmark clean air for Los Angeles.
Describing this bill to me, John Seebach said, “When you see the small hydro people agitating for lower flow requirements, that tells me that, essentially, developing the project to current environmental standards is going to make it uneconomic.” If the economics don’t make sense, he concluded, development doesn’t. “You don’t kill the environment to try to save it,” he declared.
“I’m an environmentalist,” Lori Barg tells me. “And I guess I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think there’s a way to do low-impact hydroelectric development. The biggest environmental issues have been around fish passage. Do dams block fish passages? Yeah, they do. But not every fishery is an anadromous fishery. There are also environmental problems that you have to look at when you look at dam removal. A lot of dams contain a lot of hazardous waste and sediments.”
Hearing her speak, it occurs to me that in spite of all the numbers zinging back and forth, the differences here are as emotional as they are intellectual. John sees a dam as a noose, choking the river. Lori Barg, like Verne, like the Fays—like me, in fact—actually likes old dams.
There’s a critical question for environmentalists at the heart of the small hydro conundrum: what constitutes the natural state of a landscape? Is it early agricultural pastoral? Is it the landscape the colonists first encountered, much of it already transformed by Native Americans? Or is a landscape only beautiful if it’s completely denuded of all traces of the human hand? Nineteenth-century writers called landscapes reshaped by humans “improved.” A dammed millpond was an improvement on a free-running brook, because it bent the landscape’s beauty to human use. When I mention this to Verne Tower, he nods. “I am of that school myself,” he says.
No one can deny that any dam changes the ecology of a river. Water upstream of a dam is slowed and often warmed. Sediment accumulates, changing the cobbled river bottom into pond muck. Fish populations often shift from cold-water species like trout and salmon to cool-water species like bass, or even warm-water species like largemouth bass, pickerel, and bluegill. Anti-dam activists see this as a problem that should be solved with backhoes and dynamite. Advocates of restoring old hydropower sites argue that these ecological changes can’t be rectified, or that in some cases they shouldn’t—that the newer ecosystem has been around for a couple hundred years and has value of its own, even before you factor in the site’s potential for making clean power.
The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that dams should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. There’s no one-size-fits-all-dams solution to balancing the need for power with a facility’s ecological effects. Some dams should definitely go. Others might be worth keeping. The question is, how do we calculate worth? Is it pure financial return, or is there some value in reconnecting people to their power?
It’s hard to imagine people putting up with Heatless Mondays from Entergy or Exelon. But Heatless Mondays from the local hydro plant, when they can see for themselves that the river’s running low? That sort of thing worked rather well in the past. Maybe it could work again.
CHITTENDEN FALLS CRASHES down twenty-five feet of vertical rock with six feet of dam on top. Verne Tower takes me to see it: the first hydroelectric site he worked on, the one he helped Paul Eckhoff restore. Four years ago, Paul walked out of his home, slipped on the ice, hit his head, and died ten days later—undone, in the end, by water. Verne grows sad thinking of his friend as we walk around the power plant the two of them built.
The wooden ramp that leads to the powerhouse is painted green with red slats. Inside, two generators are spinning loudly, producing four hundred kilowatts. The floor above the penstock shakes with thudding water. Across the river, a small powerhouse astride a steep penstock is generating another two hundred kilowatts. Verne and I tromp through the grass and a snake slithers over my toe.
Looking at Chittenden Falls is like stacking the deck. The place is gorgeous, both the natural setting and its human improvements. The waterfall is a tall, smooth barrier that would have been an impasse to fish even before the dam. Clearly, the small hydro folks have been showing me their exemplary sites. But at American Rivers, I had asked John Seebach to find me an injurious small hydro installation, one that had completely denuded its bypass reach, or destroyed its river ecology. I wanted to see small hydro at its worst. He promised to come up with one and send it to me. He never did.
Later, I called Fred Ayer, executive director of the Low Impact Hydropower Institute, a nonprofit organization formed—in part by American Rivers—to create standards and certify green hydroelectric facilities. I asked him for the same thing: a power plant that would make me rethink my enthusiasm for small hydro. “That’s funny,” he said, “John Seebach called the other day asking for the same thing.” Fred couldn’t think of one either. It would have been easier, he told me, twenty years ago. But today, plants that were dewatering their rivers have, in most cases, been forced to stop. Environmental regulation has worked.
That doesn’t mean everyone is happy. Though they talk readily about compromise, in their hearts, the opposing camps are as opposed as ever. There are those who speak for the river and those who speak for the dams. I wonder, as I watch Chittenden Falls surging down its smooth face, if emotional deadlock is not exactly where the small hydro debate should stay.
Power use is not merely a function of policy; it has its poetry too. But we have grown deaf to its song. What was once an art—a marvel that connected us to place through the mechanics of wind, water, or sunshine—has been reduced to mere need. And at that point, the only question becomes how to get more. “I’ve learned this,” Verne Tower tells me. “When the public gets the power, unless the price dictates to them how they use it, they are going to squander every bit of it.” He’s right of course. Price can promote conservation. But so can reconnecting people with the sources of their power.
Silently, we drift out along the sluiceway that channels water to the larger powerhouse’s penstocks. Like the paper mill’s sluiceway a century ago, it’s made of wood. I ask Verne if there were cost or efficiency reasons to build it of wood again. Verne contemplates his handiwork. “We could have fabricated it out of steel,” he says. “But it wouldn’t have looked as nice.”
]]>“Come on,” he mutters to the ground. “Come on, give me something.”
I am looking too, crouched near him, hoping for a sign, a clue about how to get through this landscape. Around us, pale, bare cliffs tower one above the next. Canyons plunge into inescapable, winter-cold depths. Dirk and I have been walking for several days through this land, an untrailed, remote quarter of the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona. This mode of travel has been our mutual pastime, wandering for weeks or months on end into the wilderness, seeing what might become of us.
We’re balanced on a platform of rock, geologic scaffolding, not a single living thing visible around us, no shrub or sprig of grass. The land looks elemental, the very bones of the Earth.
Dirk pushes his fingertips into parched blowsand and unearths a bighorn sheep dropping. The small, oval scat is exactly what he was looking for. It means there is a passage, a way through.
“Somebody’s been here,” Dirk says. Bighorn sheep navigate this territory, traveling finger-width ledges, leaping chasms. Their habitat, known as escape terrain, is convoluted country where predators cannot reach. The only hitch is you have to learn to move like an acrobat, every sense elevated at every step.
Dirk crushes the dropping and it falls apart like a pinch of sawdust.
I WOULD BE LOST without Dirk. Not to say I can’t navigate my way through here on my own, but he has an uncanny skill for finding routes. He can find his way through the impossible.
Dirk used to work as a street cop. His history is a menagerie of car accidents and gunfire. It might be why he is such a good route finder, fifteen years spent negotiating the underworld of an American city, trying to find his way out alive.
When I first met Dirk, he had just left the Denver police force. He moved to the desert, appearing in the wilderness like a shipwreck victim. That is where I found him, or he found me. I was living out of the back of my truck and spending months at a time in the wilderness. We began walking together.
He told me he got out because he thought he was going to get a bullet through his head at any moment. More important, he was afraid he would go mad if he stayed in the city. He left and took a job as a river outfitter in Moab, Utah.
I was attracted to his uncanny alertness and ease of control. It was like traveling with a mountain lion by my side. As we journeyed through canyons, he told me that being out here was not so different from being a cop. Subtle observations are required if you want to survive. Nothing is taken for granted, no dry wash, no water hole.
Dirk told me this sort of awareness is like walking into a bar and trying to figure out who has a gun, who can kill you. I said to him there is a penetrating silence in the desert that has nothing to do with police work. Forces shaping the land are ancient, the wear of time, the lure of gravity. Dirk laughed, called me “nature boy.”
Our friendship stuck. For more than fifteen years we have walked together, traveling without maps or compasses, traversing nameless mazes to see what we can do with our bare hands and some rope.
WE SLEEP AMONG red stone monoliths, hemmed in by a sky full of winter stars. Morning comes slowly, constellations fading into the blue. I rise, throw on some warm clothes, and sit in my nest of gear to watch the sunrise. Dirk walks over wearing gloves, coat, wool hat. A drop of snot hangs like a cold jewel from the tip of his nose. He stops before me, opens a large book titled The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. It is over seven hundred pages long, the heaviest single item we are carrying across the reservation. With pages laid open to either side of his forearm, Dirk reads to me.
“Man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock and water and sky are constants.” He pauses, moves his finger down the page, continues the quote. “Walk on gaunt shores and avoid the people; rock and wave are good prophets.”
Few might understand Jeffers’s words as well as Dirk. He has seen the dream of man, busted down its door with his shoulder. He leveled a handgun on a man emerging from a gas station robbery, a man who refused to stop even as Dirk shouted, a man who reached into his back pocket and pulled out what looked like a weapon but turned out to be a pair of pliers, and who stopped only when Dirk pulled the trigger and blew apart his left shoulder.
Dirk flips the huge book of poetry shut and tosses it onto my bag. It lands like a slab of wood.
“Your turn to carry it.”
We lift our heavy winter packs and move deeper into the country, climbing through towers and shadowy alcoves of sandstone. Late in the day we come upon a bald dome of rock sloping down into oblivion. A misstep would be fatal. You would slide down the face for a few seconds, and then you would become airborne. Then, as far as I can tell, you would vanish into shadow, consumed by the Earth.
There is nothing to anchor off of, so we cannot use rope. This is a bare-handed route.
I go first, happenstance of our order, keeping my weight close to the rock face and not looking down. Suddenly, I hear a sound behind me, a sickening rasp of fabric scraping across rock. An inhuman language hisses from between Dirk’s teeth. I know the sound. He is falling.
I turn my head, trying not to throw myself off balance, and I see Dirk gliding uncontrollably down the rock. He drags his fingers, desperately hunting for something to hold. His left leg extends below him, his boot catching aberrations in the rock, slipping past them.
I whisper, “No.”
Dirk is my key, the one thing that keeps me safe in these bottomless places. If he falls I will spend the rest of my life hunting for his bones in the depths below.
I hear a sharp bite of air from Dirk’s lungs. It is the last sound, all of his life given to the rock. His knuckles turn white and hard as he wills himself into the bending cliff, his face crushed by muscles. He slows by sheer resistance, and at the final edge, he grinds to a halt.
Emptiness lingers beneath him as he hangs by friction. He grits his teeth and slides one boot across, fingers creeping. By tiny increments, he moves along the face, and finally reaches a ledge no wider than a spoon handle. There, about twenty feet below me, Dirk stops and lets out a breath, spreading his arms against the wall. His cheek presses against cold sandstone. His lower lip wilts open, saliva bright on the rock. I wait several seconds, saying nothing. Dirk looks up to me and nods. He is okay.
“CONSCIOUSNESS IS a motherfucker every goddamned day,” Dirk once told me. “We all have to build walls inside of ourselves, come up with answers, do whatever we must to keep from going stark-raving mad.”
He said, “Sure, I danced the edge. I mean, there is some madness you’ve got to work with. Going to some woman who had her geraniums stolen when ten minutes ago you were fighting fucking tooth and nail for your very life, some goddamned shoot-out, bar scene . . . whatever it was. And you have to put on this face that says, Oh yeah, I’m perfectly sane and rational now. How many geraniums were stolen?”
Though Dirk seemed sane to me, over years of walking together I got the sense that he had chewed his leg off in a trap to get here.
He would often speak of a beast dwelling inside of him, something he once conjured like a demon to get him through his cop years. It was the only way to survive, peeling out of his own humanity to become a creature of instinct and ferocity, beating the crap out of someone with a nightstick in order to protect himself. He said we all have the beast, and some of us let it out, some of us befriend it, work with it. But it changes you. You become it. It is not something you necessarily control, but something you live with. It never goes away.
I could see this beast just behind his eyes, his own private brutality. Though I was curious about this facet of him, there was something deeper that drew me to Dirk. It was his ceaseless, almost childlike searching, turning every stone to find what it means to be human in this world. As we walked together he dissected his beast and everything else about himself.
Dirk let wind, sun, and rock wear him down. He traveled so hard that at times his fingerprints disappeared, replaced with smooth nubs, more climbing tools than digits. He was stripping away layers of who he was, removing the obligatory identities of his past in search of what he called Real Self.
Meanwhile, I watched him. I filled notebooks about him, writing down his words, his actions. He was a maze that I traveled through.
At one point I went to Denver to try and understand his former landscape. At ten in the morning I sat in an unmarked police car parked two blocks off Colfax Avenue. It could have been any city. At a certain point they all look the same. Bail bonds storefronts, check cashing, XXX video. Drunk guy on the corner wearing a torn sweater, hand rummaging in his coat pocket.
Not far from here a former partner of Dirk’s was shot in the head, left to die in the street. Near that an elderly man was stabbed forty times with an ice pick, and near that the violent end to a high-speed chase, all parts of stories Dirk had told me over the years.
Behind the wheel next to me sat Casey, a homicide detective who once worked with Dirk. Casey brought me here because something is always going on, Colfax being the main avenue into downtown.
Casey gave running commentary on whatever caught his eye, pedestrians who might be carrying concealed weapons, people tripping on crack or methamphetamines.
“Her, there,” Casey said, lifting his finger off the steering wheel. It was a woman wearing a tight and uncomplimentary dress on a street corner two blocks away.
“Prostitute,” he said. “If she’s any good she’ll spot us.”
The woman suddenly peered in our direction as if overhearing.
“Now she’s going to leave,” he said.
The woman turned on her heels and moved quickly out of our view.
“Like clockwork,” Casey marveled.
I understood, then, why Dirk was so drawn to the canyons we walked. They, too, are like clockwork. You come to know their timing and intricacies, the way boulders hang on each other, cracks through cliffs, routes in and out of oblivion.
Casey said, “Dirk was always the one asking questions. He had a bigger picture of the world, and it made him different. At the end of the day he wanted to know why we were doing this, why we were working as cops, why any of this was happening to begin with. It makes sense he needed to escape.”
I smiled, hearing how Casey used the word escape. He obviously did not understand why Dirk left. Most people think you go to the wilderness to flee something. But in the desert there is nowhere to hide. Your body stands on smooth, naked domes of rock. Even in the deepest shadows of canyons you are exposed, every move a question and an answer.
I know why Dirk came to the desert. He was not so much running from something as toward something. Having seen enough of humanity, he wanted a greater realm to move through.
OVER THE YEARS, as Dirk dug away at himself, his boundaries ultimately began to unravel. He started having blackouts and flashbacks. It would not take much to trigger them, a hit of dope, a song on the radio, a nightmare. Sometimes they would happen in the desert and he would get dangerous, dancing across huge exposures of rock he had no business being on. He called these moments “trances.” All he remembered of them were episodes of either psychotic ecstasy or unimaginable terror.
In one instance, he was trancing under a tree when he looked up and saw an eternal, glimmering heaven, all the voices of time bound into a canopy of branches and leaves. In another episode he found himself raving in hell, jumping up and down on the hood of a parked patrol car right before he was handcuffed and thrown in the back.
Of that episode he recalls lying on the patrol car’s bench seat, looking through the open door at a cop looking in on him.
“Are you a human being?” Dirk asked.
The cop said, “Lucky for you, I am.”
“Hell,” Dirk complained to me, “it was the fucking job that trained me with the tools to undertake this kind of truth-quest in the first place.”
I did not know if Dirk was on the verge of prophethood or if he was becoming an utter lunatic. I worried for a while he was going to kill himself.
Trying to understand what he was going through, I sought help from Dr. Katherine Ellison, the matriarch of police psychology, whose early psychiatric studies in the subject changed the way law-enforcement agencies handle emotional trauma. Dr. Ellison spoke with a jocular grace as she explained how violence and unpredictability have damaged the minds and lives of so many police officers. She told me that cops tend to have the same problems as disaster victims, suffering an assortment of shudders, nightmares, panic attacks, and suicides.
To Dr. Ellison it sounded like post-traumatic stress disorder—the pigeonhole of PTSD. She told me there might also be something glitched in the left anterior temporal lobe of his brain, a region of hallucinations and memory. She thought he should be checked for seizures.
I told her I was worried for him. Dirk kept a gun from when he was a cop, a black semiautomatic .45 caliber. It was often nearby. Dr. Ellison confirmed my fear, explaining that the suicide rate for cops is twice the national average, and they generally kill themselves with whatever gun they used in the line of duty.
To offer perspective, she said, “You must remember, police are just working-class people, like any of us. They are ordinary people who have responded to extraordinary pressure.”
But to me, Dirk is no ordinary man. He seems to be living a mythical life, a hero’s journey like those recounted by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. For fifteen years it had been Dirk’s profession to travel into the urban underworld like a shaman, carrying an assortment of talismans—a couple handguns, a concealed knife, a nightstick, a badge. Daily, nightly, Dirk and all the other blue-suited cops would rise back to the surface, to their patrol cars, their headquarters, where they would write reports as if reciting stories, tales of man, nature dreaming.
There is another, lesser-known term besides PTSD. It is post-traumatic growth syndrome, the idea that life-rending events might actually serve to elevate your understanding of yourself and the world around you.
When I spoke to Dr. Ellison I wanted to believe that Dirk was more than an ordinary victim, not simply a man going mad. There had to be something deeper. He did not seem crushed by PTSD. Instead, he was steadily making his way through an unknown world. I asked her, “Could it be that he is on a journey?”
“Of course he is,” Dr. Ellison said.
WHEN I AM ALONE in the desert, far from any other human, I sometimes wonder how many of them are out here. How many cops are cast adrift in the wilderness around me, sanding off their fingerprints, bending themselves back into the shape of the Earth. I met another one once, a man named Neal who had also worked as a Denver cop not long after Dirk had left.
Neal told me that all cops need a methodology, a system that works for them. Otherwise they go crazy. His system was rivers. He took his kayak out whenever he could and buried his daily horrors in the roil of whitewater. That kept him going for seventeen years, but finally he had to quit when he realized he could not keep both his job and his sanity. He barely made it out alive.
Neal resigned, filled out the paperwork, and was about to leave when all hell broke loose. Three days before Neal turned in his badge, a pair of outrageously armed teenagers marched into a high school in his district, where they pulled off what was at the time the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.
Charging onto the campus of Columbine High School, Neal did not have time to calculate. He found himself suddenly pinned down by sporadic gunfire from classroom windows. Neal and a few other cops took shelter behind a cinder-block wall, where they found several students, all of them shot, some dying. A young football player lay gasping with four entry and exit wounds through his torso. Neal could not help him. There was nothing that could be done.
Inside the school, an elaborate massacre was taking place, the two young assailants using pipe bombs and an arsenal of guns. Meanwhile Neal remained trapped behind his cover. He had no idea what was happening, just erratic gunfire and bleeding teenagers. Explanations did not come across his radio. No one knew.
When sharpshooters finally arrived to return fire, Neal and the other cops began running wounded students out on their shoulders, an act of bravery that won Neal a glittering silver medal and a touching letter from the police department. He’d given up the football player for dead when at the last second he saw the young man’s chest barely rise for a breath. Neal enlisted the help of a coach, and they hauled away the 260-pound kid. Meanwhile, the two assailants killed themselves inside the school amid the bodies of their classmates.
“It was absolute presence in the midst of unbelievable psychotic bedlam,” Neal explained. “The closest thing I have to compare it to is kayaking class IV rapids. At that level mistakes can easily be life threatening or at least very injurious. You’ve got total focus. Yet rapids can be scouted and assessed and portaged if need be. Columbine could not.”
The Columbine High School massacre was on a Tuesday. Friday was Neal’s last day of work. On Saturday he put his kayak onto the San Juan River. His memory of the trip through red gorges in southeast Utah is spotty, a blur of motion, his mind numb from unabated panic. All he really remembers is the swiftness and muddiness of river water, and the sandstone that slid past day after day, occasionally opening to let in nameless side canyons. It is all that needs remembering.
FOR A TIME Dirk’s blackouts worsen. I am there for one of them, holding him, demanding that he keep eye contact with me. Then I see the beast come out, his fingernails gripping at my flesh before he breaks into garbled weeping. I imagine the tightrope he walks, the pitfalls of his journey. I am not a religious man, but after this episode I pray for him, standing in the desert alone, saying his name out loud. Make it through, Dirk. Come on, make it through.
After fifteen years heading a river outfit in Moab, he quits and moves to a West Texas border town. Twenty-six years of marriage end in divorce. He takes odd jobs, moves in with a raw, jumpy, intellectual woman from Manhattan with house cats. As far as I can see, he is falling off the map.
A few years pass since our last journey together, then I start getting letters from him. They are cryptic and weirdly brilliant. For the first time in a long while, I see oracular clarity return to his words. Here is one:
Two days ago, sprucing the neglected yard,, though only We will know the difference,, two junk cars next door have hosted a hundred generations of vermin,, the alley behind is mexico-chic, shreds of paper, plastic, old screen, bottles, rusted metal, weeds. But my nature is as much Mine as theirs is, all excrete as they may. I clean the border of our alley fence and gate. Buried in dried thistle, wet and dried many times overlie forty to sixty pages of surprisingly white crinkly book pages, still bound to each other but lacking any cover. From standing height and haunted youth I recognize the biblical attributes. I close my eyes as i lean down to pick up the pages and leaf through them blindly, thoroughly until my right index finger rests where it should.
I’ll die here in this land. I won’t go across the Jordan. But you are about to cross over it. And you are about to take that good land as your own. Be careful. Don’t forget the covenant the Lord your God made with you. Don’t make for yourselves a statue of any god at all. He has told you not to. So don’t do it.
I think, Dirk is no sacrificial Moses. Regardless of how I once saw him, he is, indeed, an ordinary man who has seen extraordinary things. He is, like any of us, on a hero’s journey through his own life. Carefully reading his letters, I come to believe Dirk is going to make it to the other side.
DIRK DRIVES HIS PICKUP from Texas to meet me in northern Arizona, where we put on backpacks and walk into the desert once again. It has been four years since we last walked together, the longest break Dirk and I have ever taken from each other.
We travel across bare rock and sand, listening to each other’s footsteps. When we come to old rainwater in a bedrock hollow, we both get down on hands and knees to drink. It is good to be with an old friend.
Dirk tells me his trances have subsided, or at least have integrated themselves into the rest of his life. He says every moment now feels charged to him, senses prickled, consciousness as much a motherfucker as it ever was, but without so much unstoppable panic. In fact, he seems to have earned an air of electrified serenity.
I laugh, tell him he cut that one pretty damn close. For a while there I did not think he was going to make it.
“It was worth it,” he says.
We have nowhere in particular to go, days of wandering ahead of us. We move from one waterhole to the next, playing out our old rituals, palms on stone, shoulder blades pitched toward the sky, our heads nearly touching. The water is cool and crystalline. We come up smiling, beards dripping into our laps.
I look at my friend, at his hands butchered from the sun, hands that have punched and torn and pulled triggers. I look at his steel-blue eyes and am reminded of what it is like to have a strong companion in these wild places.
We spend days meandering through sun-dazzled rock, then return to my truck parked in red sand next to a fence. We disgorge gear onto the ground. Dirk lays his black .45 handgun on the tailgate, treating it with the acquaintance of a wallet or a journal.
I pick up the gun, safety on, barrel tucked into a black leather sheath. Dirk watches me, making sure I don’t do anything foolish.
“When was the last time you fired it?” I ask.
Dirk gestures toward Denver, hundreds of miles away.
“Let’s shoot it,” I say.
Dirk laughs. “Don’t be stupid, nature boy.”
Then I dare him. He scowls at me.
We take the gun into the open desert behind the truck. He levels it on a dry horizon, fixing the sight on a metal boundary sign forty feet away.
“The W in WILDERNESS,” Dirk says.
The gun pops. A spark of sand erupts in the distance. It is a clean miss.
He looks at the gun, mystified. The second bullet, which should have slid into place, is jammed. Then he looks back at the sign, puzzling over how he could have missed by so much.
Dirk clears the chamber, knocks the magazine back into place, and hands me the gun. I am not a gun person. I grew up hunting, but even then, the boom and the kickback were frightening. I take the gun anyway. It was part of the bargain.
Sweat softens my palms around the solid metal butt. I hold it up the same as Dirk, level its sights on the sign. I expect the recoil to knock me back, but it is a sturdy gun, and it merely gives a quick jolt. A three-hundredth of a second later the bullet pierces the sign, putting a hole just above the W in WILDERNESS.
I lower the gun, dismayed. Dirk stares at the hole in the sign, squinting in the sun.
“Well, shit,” Dirk says with his trickster’s grin—the smile of a madman, a desert apostle. “I guess you can be the cop now.”
The gun feels curiously inviting in my hand, a little taste of empire. I ask Dirk if I can have it.
Dirk stops grinning. He reaches out his hand.
“No,” he says, and he takes his gun back, sliding it into the holster, the two of us facing each other under a turquoise sky.
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This is the home of Cheeta, the former show-business chimpanzee and namesake of an organization called Creative Habitats for Endangered and Threatened Apes (C.H.E.E.T.A), founded by Dan Westfall, Cheeta’s long-term, live-in caregiver. Their house, which is shared by various dogs, birds, a pair of orangutans, a few monkeys, and a couple more chimpanzees, is situated in a typical Palm Springs neighborhood—on a long flat street winding through the California desert, amid other houses built low to the ground and patterned one after another. Cheeta, now in his mid-seventies, lives like a retired Bob Hope, making paintings, riding around in a golf cart, and playing the piano.
In December of 2000, President Clinton signed into law the “CHIMP Act,” which allocated federal funds for the care of former research primates. The act also prohibited routine euthanasia and mandated chimpanzee retirement homes, thus setting primates apart from other nonhuman animals.
Eventually Dan and Cheeta walked through the house and out to the patio, where Cheeta immediately sat down in his plastic chair and started to eat. I was instructed to stay on the other side of the table—several feet beyond the table, in fact. I would not be shaking hands with, hugging, or even touching our host, who was powerful enough to pull my arm off my body if he wanted to. Looking down at the meal, I thought this particular spread seemed like a strange diet for a chimp, but Dan had assured me that this was the way Cheeta had eaten his whole life; this was what he knew. The soda was diet because Cheeta is diabetic and receives insulin injections every day.
After a few bites he began to look around, and I caught his eye. He looked directly at me, and I saw a depth that I am only used to glimpsing in another human’s eyes. To be in his presence, to sit across from him as if in conversation, felt strangely significant. I felt a welling-up in my chest.
He looked like any elderly retired gentleman as he sat in a chair at a table, handling cups and bowls. When Dan handed him an apple for dessert, Cheeta gladly took it in his hand and bit into it. He chewed his food, swallowed, and took another bite. I could see no difference in the way he ate his apple and the way I might eat an apple; his bite size was the same. I looked at the skin on his chest, visible through his hair, noticed his shoulder, his wrist, his feet hanging beneath the table. He was quiet as he ate. Cheeta’s life as a movie star and now as ambassador for chimpanzees came through human intervention. We plucked him out of the jungle when he was a baby and trained him to act in movies. Now, his mannerisms, mind, and indeed spirit blurred the line between human and chimp.
]]>Last fall, on a sunny afternoon, the phone rang while I was trying to meet a writing deadline. It was the nurse in my urologist’s office. She was calling to say that the pathologist had found, in the urine collected from my last cystoscopic checkup, abnormal cell clusters. And also blood.
After I hung up, I looked out the window of my small house where the sun still shone on the last of the marigolds and tomato vines. I looked down at my computer screen where the cursor still blinked on the same paragraph. I could hear in the kitchen the tomatoes still bobbing around in the stockpot that was steaming away on the stove. The world was still the same, but it felt to me a suddenly altered place.
I provided a second urine sample for further testing, and based on the results of that, a third sample that was sent out for genetic analysis. Ten days later, I got a call from the urology nurse. The results were normal.
So what am I trying to say here? Am I fine or not fine? Well, I don’t know. I’m living within that period of time known as watchful waiting. Much of my adult life has been one of watchful waiting. Watchful means vigilance, screening tests, imaging, blood work, self-advocacy, second opinions, and hours logged in hospital parking garages. Waiting means you go back to your half-finished essay, to the tomatoes on the stove. You lay plans and carry on within the confines of ambiguity. You meet deadlines and make grocery lists. And sometimes you jump when the phone rings on a sunny afternoon.
Thirty years ago I had cancer.
After I left the hospital, I went back to the university, resumed my life as a biology major, and began mucking around in the medical literature. It didn’t take me too long to learn that bladder cancer is considered a quintessential environmental cancer, meaning that we have more evidence for a link between toxic chemical exposures and bladder cancer risk than for almost any other kind of cancer, with data going back a hundred years. I also discovered that the identification of bladder carcinogens does not preclude their ongoing use in commerce. Just because, through careful scientific study, we learn that a chemical causes cancer doesn’t mean that we ban it from the marketplace.
I also learned that, in spite of all this evidence, the words carcinogen and environment rarely appeared in the pamphlets on cancer in my doctors’ offices and waiting rooms. Nor were these words used much in conversations I had with my various health-care providers, who were interested instead in my family medical history. I was happy enough to provide it. There is a lot of cancer in my family. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at age forty-four. I have uncles with colon cancer, prostate cancer, stromal cancer. My aunt died of the same kind of bladder cancer—transitional cell carcinoma—that I had.
But here’s the punch line to my family story: I am adopted. I’m not related to my family by chromosomes. So I began to ask hard questions about the presumption that what runs in families must necessarily run in genes. I began to ask, what else do families have in common? Such as, say, drinking water wells. And when I looked at the literature on cancer among adult adoptees, I learned that, in fact, the chance of an adopted person dying of cancer is closely related to whether or not her adoptive parents had died of cancer and far less related to whether or not her biological parents had met such a fate. But you would never know that based on the questions asked on medical intake forms.
So thirty years ago, as a college undergraduate, I made a bet. I bet that my cancer diagnosis had something to do with the environment in which I lived as a child. And I think I was right about this.
As I learned years later, while researching my book Living Downstream, the county where I grew up, along the east bluff of the Illinois River, has statistically elevated cancer rates. Three dozen different industries line the river valley there, and farmers practice chemically intensive agriculture along its floodplains. Hazardous waste is imported from as far away as New Jersey, and the drinking water wells contain traces of both farm chemicals and industrial chemicals, including those with demonstrable links to . . . bladder cancer.
TWENTY YEARS AGO, in the fall of 1988, when I was a graduate student in biology at the University of Michigan, I made another bet. I was working as an opinion writer at the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper there. My editor and I laid bets as to which system would collapse first—economy or ecology. I said ecology. I think I was wrong.
I think we were both wrong. They seem to be crumbling simultaneously.
Let’s compare our twin “eco” systems. Our economy and our ecology have in common, it seems to me, a number of shared attributes. Both are complex, globalized systems whose interconnections are little understood until something goes wrong. Who knew that mortgages in California could lead to bankruptcy in Iceland? But there it is. Who knew that the miracle of pollination depends on the synchronicity of time and temperature? But the ongoing decoupling of day length—which awakens the flowers—from ambient temperature—which awakens the bees—reveals that it is so dependent.
In both systems, eroding diversity creates fragility, as when financial systems merge and collapse, as when farming systems become monocultures and thereby vulnerable to catastrophic pest outbreaks. Damage to both systems is made worse by positive feedback loops. In the economic world, panic and fear drive investment decisions that lead to more panic and fear. In the ecological world, greenhouse gases raise temperatures that melt permafrost. Melted permafrost rots and releases more greenhouse gases.
Here’s a key difference, though. For one of our failing eco-systems, we became immediately engaged in drastic and unprecedented measures to rescue it—even though no one seemed to understand it very well. And for our other eco-system . . . well, it’s still widely considered too depressing and overwhelming to talk about in much detail.
As part of my work, I visit a lot of college campuses. Lately, I’ve been asking students to engage in a thought exercise: Imagine that ecological metrics were as familiar to us as economic ones. Imagine ecological equivalents to the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P that reported to us every day—in newspapers, on radio, on websites, on the crawl at the bottom of TV screens, on oversized tickers in Times Square—data about the various sectors of our ecological system and how they are faring. What are the atmospheric parts per million of carbon dioxide today? Has the extinction rate become inflationary? What is the exchange rate between sea ice and fresh water? What is the national deficit of topsoil?
Now imagine that the mainstream media were as interested in the thoughts of the president’s ecological team—most notably marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, who now leads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and climate expert John Holdren, the president’s new science advisor—as they are in the opinions of his economic team. Imagine if, in primetime interview after interview, these public servants provided us regular environmental analysis. On an almost daily basis, the American citizenry would be reminded that one in every four mammals now appears to be heading toward extinction. The Gulf Stream, which drives nutrient cycling in our oceans, is starting to get wobbly, while dead zones in the oceans are growing. The oceans, we would be informed, provide half of our planetary oxygen. Shoveling coal into ovens to generate electricity is loading the atmosphere with mercury, which rains down and is transformed by ancient bacteria into the powerful brain poison methylmercury.
Methylmercury is siphoned up the food chain, concentrating as it goes, so that nearly all freshwater lakes and streams east of the Mississippi are now unfishable, and we must advise women and children against eating tuna salad sandwiches.
Imagine that all Americans find out, whether they want to or not, that atmospheric loading of carbon dioxide is acidifying the ocean in ways that, if unchecked, will drop pH to the point where calcium carbonate goes into solution, and that will spell the end of anything with a shell—from clams and oysters to coral reefs.
Suppose that ecological pundits discussed every night on cable TV the ongoing disappearance of bees, bats, and other pollinators and the possibly dire consequences for our food supply. Suppose we received daily reports on the status of our aquifers. Suppose legislators and citizens both agreed that if we don’t take immediate action to bail out our ecological system, something truly terrible will happen. Our ecology will tank.
The fact that nothing close to this is happening is the difference between economy and ecology, both of which share an etymology: eco, from the Greek oikos, meaning “household.”
TEN YEARS AGO, I gave birth to a child. After twenty years as a solitary adult ecologist, I became a habitat, an inland ocean with a marine mammal swimming around inside of me. I became a water cycle. A food chain. A jet stream. My daughter’s name is Faith. I’ll leave it to you to imagine why an adopted cancer survivor might name a daughter Faith. My daughter is planning a career as a marine biologist. She wants to write her first book on the octopus. My son Elijah is seven. He is named for the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, who hails from my home state of Illinois. Elijah wishes to be the president, a farmer, or a member of the Beatles. He figures there are two job openings there already.
Since becoming a mother, I’ve made another bet. I am betting that, in between my own adult life and my children’s, an environmental human rights movement will arise. It’s one whose seeds have already been sown, and it’s one with a dual focus. First, the environmental human rights movement will take up with urgency the task of rescuing and repairing our ecological system upon which all human life depends. It is a movement that will recognize the truth of the following statement: “Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the Earth. . . . We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have.” Those are the opening sentences of a powerful new manifesto, “Law for the Ecological Age,” authored by attorney and biochemist Joseph Guth and published in the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law.
At the same time, this environmental human rights movement will take up with equal fervor the task of divorcing our economy from its current dependencies on chemical toxicants that are known to trespass inside our bodies, without our consent, thus violating, as some have argued, our security of person. Our current environmental regulatory apparatus does not require rigorous toxicological testing of chemicals as a precondition for marketing them, as we do, for example, for pharmaceuticals. It also makes it very difficult to ban chemicals once they are in commerce. Of the eighty thousand synthetic chemicals allowed into the market, exactly five have been outlawed under the Toxics Substances Control Act since 1976. Our current environmental regulatory apparatus allows economic benefits to be balanced against human health risks. It fails to take into account the fact that we are all exposed, to use Rachel Carson’s words, to a changing kaleidoscope of chemicals over our lifetimes and not just one chemical at a time.
In umbilical cord blood alone, 287 different chemicals have been identified, including pesticides, stain removers, wood preservatives, mercury, and flame retardants. Our current environmental regulatory apparatus does not take into account the timing of exposure. And yet the science clearly shows that toxic exposures during key moments of infant and child development—especially during the opera of embryonic development—raise risks for harm in ways that are not predictable by dose. Benzo[a]pyrene, an ingredient in tobacco smoke, diesel exhaust, and soot, can damage eggs in the ovaries. Exposure to pesticides in men can reduce sperm count. Thus, our environmental policies may be eroding our fertility. And if a pregnancy is achieved, exposure to certain chemicals raises the risk that it will be lost through miscarriage, or what we in the scientific community call spontaneous abortion. Evidence suggests that the pesticide methoxchlor has this power, as do certain chemical solvents.
And here is where I am interested in engaging the pro-life community in dialogue, because whether you see this problem, as I do, as a violation of women’s reproductive rights, or whether you see this problem, as many members of my own family do, as a violation of fetal sanctity, maybe we can all agree, pro-life and pro-choice, that any chemical with the power to extinguish human pregnancy has no rightful place in our economy.
When toxic chemicals enter the story of human development during the fifth and sixth months of pregnancy, when the brain is just getting itself knitted together, the risk may be a learning or developmental disability. Of the 3,000 chemicals produced in high volume in the United States, 200 are neurotoxicants and another 1,000 are suspected of affecting the nervous system.
Some chemicals, such as PCBs, have the power to shorten human gestation and so raise the risk for premature birth, which is the leading cause of disability in this country. After birth, some chemicals, such as certain air pollutants, can retard the development of the lungs in ways that impede later athletic performance. Some chemicals raise the risk for pediatric cancers, which are rising in incidence more rapidly than cancers among adults.
Some chemicals can raise the risk for early puberty in girls, which in turn raises the risk for breast cancer in adulthood. In short, chemical toxicants can sabotage the story of child development and so make urgent the need for restructuring our chemicals policy along the principles of precaution and green design. But toxic chemicals do not only discriminate against children, they may also discriminate against our elders. New evidence links environmental exposures to neurotoxicants to increased risks of dementing disorders in old age.
So I am betting that chemical reform will be a cornerstone of this new environmental human rights movement that I see getting under way. I am betting that my children—and the generation of children they are a part of—will, by the time they are my age, consider it unthinkable to allow cancer-causing chemicals, reproductive toxicants, and brain-destroying poisons to freely circulate in our economy. They will find it unthinkable to assume an attitude of silence and willful ignorance about our ecology.
In the same way, I look back on the life of Rachel Carson—my mentor in all this, who died when I was five years old—and find it unthinkable that she could not speak about her own cancer diagnosis, even while dying, as I have written about my diagnosis here. Thirty years of feminism lies between my life as an adult scientist and Rachel Carson’s. That human rights movement has ended the silence around the personal experience of cancer so that I have never had to fear, as did Carson, that my status as a cancer survivor will be used to impeach my science.
And in the same way, I look back on the life of Abraham Lincoln, whose portrait hangs in every schoolroom in Illinois, and marvel that our economy was once dependent on slave labor. Unthinkable. I believe our grandchildren will look back on us and marvel that our economy was once dependent on chemicals that were killing the planet and killing ourselves.
Now I am willing to concede the point that this environmental human rights movement that I am betting on is less an evidence-based prediction than a mother’s fervent hope that my children will never have to fear that the phone ringing on a sunny afternoon will bring bad news from the pathology lab. I’m willing to admit that this bet is a wish that my children will grow up in a world with a functioning Gulf Stream, and some ice caps, and a few coral reefs. And some octopi for my daughter to write her first book about. And some honeybees to help my son the farmer grow apples. It’s a wish that his polar bear Halloween costume not outlast the species.
Wishful or not, I am determined to win this bet because my children’s lives are inextricably bound to the abiding ecology of this planet, which is worth everything I could possibly wager. An environmental human rights movement is the vision under which I labor, from which I am not free to desist, and which may, if we all work together, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
May it be so.
]]>In the last decade, a new generation of moral leaders have begun to envision a more reflective approach to saving the world. Loosely termed the “reverence” movement, this current of activism has had a wide range of devotees—from redwoods activist Julia Butterfly Hill to former gang member Aqueela Sherrills, who organized youth in South Central Los Angeles to secure a historic truce between the Bloods and the Crips. There is no joint website, no blueprint of tactics, no manifesto of what to do or how. But those at the heart of the movement agree on one thing: being an activist can’t just be about being right or showing others how they’re wrong.
Van Jones, the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming the nation’s criminal justice system, says: “A reverence perspective is, at the end of the day, taking corrective steps to further enhance the beauty of others and the beauty of yourself.” This simple reformulation demands of its practitioners as much personal honesty as any spiritual pursuit. But it can produce surprisingly effective results within individuals, their organizations, and in the larger world. Orion Features Editor Laird Townsend talked with Mr. Jones at his office in Oakland, California.
Laird Townsend: Where does the idea of a reverence perspective come from?
Van Jones: It’s really Aqueela Sherrills’s idea. Aqueela and his brother led the effort to establish a successful peace treaty between warring gangs in Los Angeles in 1992. And going through that really deepened him spiritually. Then his son was killed—shot to death by a young man in the neighborhood. Aqueela had to walk the path of forgiveness in the wake of that, and arrived at the idea that we need a reverence movement, so that people have more respect for life.
LT: To transcend the fighting?
VJ: To hold a reverential perspective even in the midst of
confrontation. Sometimes it’s good to be passive and polite; sometimes it’s good to interrupt business as usual with protests, et cetera. I think it’s a huge mistake in a society as unequal and unjust as ours to primarily put the onus on oppressed people to be saints. I think that’s wildly unfair. But there’s been an addiction to the politics of confrontation among a certain tier of activists. Speaking truth to power, confronting injustices is a good thing, but when people start to use confrontational tactics in their own coalitions, their own organizations, then you have a movement that is too injured internally to play a healing role externally.
I think we’ve all been in situations where people have been shorter with each other, sharper with each other, meaner to each other than we should have been. The results have been less unity, weaker organizations, more brittle ties, collapsed coalitions. If you ask people what their actual experience of being on the left is, lots of people say, “Oh, we’re saving the world, blah, blah, blah.” I say: “No, no, no, what’s your experience—like, Thursday?” They say: “Oh, it was horrible.”
It’s like the difference between using diesel versus solar as your energy source. Anger is a messy fuel that eventually causes more problems than it can solve.
LT: So the reverence perspective also implies introspection?
VJ: Usually whatever the external thing is that we’re fighting, there is an internal manifestation of it. For instance, I’m challenging the incarceration industry. But there are ways in my own life that I’m punitive and unforgiving. So I want society to be rehabilitative and give people second chances, but I’m not that way myself. I think that people who want to change society have a double duty. We have to be willing to confront the warmonger within and without, the punitive incarcerator within and without, the polluter within and without, the greedy capitalist developer within and without. We have to really look at how we are—combative, punitive, self-destructive, greedy; we’re passionate about changing that in the external world, even as we enact it in our internal world and in our relationships with each other.
If you can figure out how it is that you’re like your target, it doesn’t necessarily give you any answers, but it’s the right question to ask. “How am I like my target?” opens up a different world of possibilities in terms of how I am going to relate to my target.
LT: And we activists need to relate to our targets differently?
VJ: We have this whole David and Goliath syndrome. If you’re an activist, that has a positive side: you want to confront unjust authority, fight against long odds, hold out the possibility of miraculous outcomes. And that’s a good thing.
But there’s a shadow side to David and Goliath, which is that there’s got to be some big mean other. You’ve got to be the small underdog all the time and there’s got to be some confrontation between absolute good (you) and absolute evil (the other). If you’re an activist then you know what I’m talking about; you know what it’s like when you try to lead a meeting and somebody’s got to challenge you on every point. You know what it’s like when you get everyone riled up to attack the mayor, and the mayor doesn’t show up, and everybody attacks you. It’s part of the toxic stuff that we’re playing with.
Also, you have to have enough respect to realize that Goliath has probably figured out the slingshot thing by now. So to continue to do the same thing over and over again, which is what we’ve been doing since the ‘60s, keeps us from being creative. And it’s probably going to yield worse results over time.
LT: Keeping it in the realm of metaphor, how do you approach Goliath differently?
VJ: There’s a way of being in conflict like a barbarian, and a way of being in conflict like a ninja. I think that we need a lot more ninja energy and a lot less barbarian energy. When it’s time to fight, you want to be as surgical and precise with your intervention as you possibly can be. You want to use just as much conflict as required, just as much force as required and no more. There’s a call for a wiser kind of warrior. Less wild, belligerent. More grounded, more dignified.
The other thing is, it could be that you’re just in the wrong book of the Bible altogether. It could be that it’s not really about David and Goliath; it’s really about Noah. The kinds of really serious challenges that are coming up will feel more like what happened down in New Orleans. It’s easy to say there’s an evil Goliath called George Bush who’s letting bad things happen to good people. But even if George Bush were to leave the planet, we’ve still got major, major climate destabilization to deal with. And so it could be that we need to figure out new ways to win—to be open to the possibility that sometimes we can win Goliath over to helping us build the ark.
We have so many mixed metaphors, it’s humorous, but I’ll throw a few more at you. Among social justice activists we have this view that spaceship Earth is really slaveship Earth, and there’s this incredible need to free people from exploitation. The slave revolt movie that most people have heard about is Amistad: righteous enslaved Africans stick up for themselves and take over the slaveship. It’s really a metaphor for the last century’s version of revolution; the people at the bottom rise up and take over slaveship Earth. But I say that if for whatever reason you look out and you notice the name of the ship is not Amistad, it’s the Titanic, you suddenly have a very different set of leadership challenges. Now you’ve got to not only liberate the captives, you also have to save the ship. If you try to deal with that from a position of outrage and confrontation, you’ll last about twenty-three seconds. A reverence perspective, where you’re really, really committed to saving all the life on board as sustainably as you can and as effectively as you can, is really the only approach that will work.
LT: But you’re talking about saving a society that doesn’t necessarily want to be saved ...
VJ: Suicide is another way to look at it. Suicidal economy, suicidal foreign policy. It looks homicidal, and it is. But it’s also deeply suicidal.
LT: What makes the economy appear homicidal and how is it suicidal?
VJ: It’s obscured from U.S. eyes sometimes: “Look at all these nice cheap sneakers.” We force people to work in production lines in horrible, brutal conditions, killing them when they resist—and wipe out whole ecosystems to make way for cash crops or mines. If you look at the way the economy works, it takes living things and turns them into dead things and calls them products. The faster it does that, the more economic growth you have. So if you zoom in on it, it’s homicidal—it’s destroying ecosystems and lives. You can’t keep doing this indefinitely. At some point either you or your grandkids are going to have to deal with the consequences, and they’re just starting to come due—from running the country on a credit card to the melting of polar ice caps.
LT: So where should environmentalists focus their energies?
VJ: There’s already a big countercurrent. It looks like a bunch of static at first. But if you look deeply enough you see that there’s a coherency—people taking different approaches, but for the same aspirations: so that we have healthy communities, and people’s daily work can be adding to the health of their communities and ecosystems. As Dan Carol of the Apollo Alliance and others have said, we need a Green New Deal. You have problem-makers in the economy: the warmongers, polluters, clearcutters, the incarcerators, despoilers—and we all participate in those economies of destruction. Then you have the problem-solvers, trying to create a politics of reconstruction: coaches, counselors, art instructors, solar engineers, organic farmers, permaculturists. The problem-solvers get pennies from the government compared to the dollars for the problem-makers. You want to move the government from the side of the problem-makers to the side of the problem-solvers.
LT: What would that look like?
VJ: You’re working in a factory; the water comes out cleaner than it went in. You drive a car; only air and water come out, because the engine is designed not to pollute. You go into the store; it’s owned locally and sells affordable products made locally by people who are paid well. Right now we go to a corporate franchise to buy products that are made by people who are poorly paid. The products are shipped all around the world at great expense—and 50 percent of that weight will be in the trash can the minute you unwrap it. It’s mostly packaging—not to mention the waste in petroleum or emissions to get it there. We have an extraordinarily wasteful society.
LT: Your work takes on what you call the incarceration industry, especially as it relates to juvenile detention. How is that related to conservation?
VJ: Putting a generation of kids in a prison is like clear cutting a forest. We deeply believe we have a throwaway planet—throwaway species, resources, neighborhoods, nations, continents. Young people and adults in prison have been thrown away as well. Once they’re outside the circle of people who deserve dignity and respect, then they can be preyed upon. The prisoners can be worked—in the South in the fields like enslaved people: Angola in Louisiana is a classic example. Or by big corporations here in California: Microsoft, for some of their packaging; Victoria’s Secret and United Airlines, for telemarketing orders. It’s complicated. Often prisoners feel better about having that opportunity than sitting in a cell or working for the state making license plates and furniture. But when you get out of prison, those companies are never going to hire you because you are a felon. The entire incarceration process is destructive of people and people’s spirits.
It also destroys communities. When you take a young parent away from a family, leaving behind a two year old who takes years off the lives of grandparents, and then throw that person back into the community with no resources, you’re not helping the family reintegrate the person. You’re making the community worse. You’re making it harder for families to recover from the mistakes anybody makes. Politically, it destroys those communities as well. In New York State they count you in the county you’re incarcerated in. That allows a congressional district around a prison—usually white and rural—to claim a bigger population and access to more congressional clout, even though incarcerated people can’t vote. Meanwhile, the community the prisoner came from will have less congressional clout. It’s further disenfranchisement.
But it’s all related. The polluters, the clearcutters, the incarcerators, they’re all enacting the same story: money is more important than life, and we have the technology or the guns to protect ourselves from any consequences of our heedlessness.
LT: And so this is where the reverence perspective comes in?
VJ: The reverence perspective promotes a restorative approach to the economy and to politics. It’s a rearticulation of our better wisdom, a rearticulation of things that have been a part of human consciousness for thousands and thousands of years—indeed, things that have allowed us to be around for those thousands and thousands of years. The ancient understanding of limits and consequences needs to find its way back into modern discourse. But a return to that wisdom requires the deepest possible changes—and those start at a personal level.
Activists have gotten trapped by “either/or,” which says that since ultimately there are real limits to our freedom under the present system, we have to change the system first. “I’m going to change them, and then I’m going to change me,” as opposed to saying, “Well, I’ve got to change both them and me, and probably the first step to changing them is changing me.” You do need a structural analysis to understand the way capitalism works, but you can’t do all your work from that perspective. The transformation that we seek in the world is very deep. In order for us to be in service to that, our transformation has to be very deep as well.
LT: The new generation of moral leaders, people who have become an effective force in their own right, people like yourself, Aqueela, Julia Butterfly, Latifa Simon of the Center for Young Women’s Development, Jody Evans of Code Pink—what distinguishes your work, or your approach to the work?
VJ: I think we’re all trying to be honest with ourselves, about ourselves, and our motives, however mixed. I think this newer crop of people is not trying to create an image of ourselves as flawless saints and, in fact, the opposite: we’re deliberately trying to tell on ourselves as much as possible. We confess as much as we accuse. The confessional quality, the unmasking quality, gives other people license to be human. Other people can feel that it’s okay that they have dirty laundry. That eliminates a lot of the posturing: people wanting to be more revolutionary than thou.
It’s a real leadership challenge to inspire people to take collective action based on shared motivations and at the same time stay human doing it, to avoid becoming self-righteous, other-blaming banshees. One thing that I know from my own experience is that demonization and deification are the same process, two sides of the same coin, and if you set yourself up to be deified, then you can’t be mad when the other half demonizes you. The idea that either you’re this egomaniac who’s only out there for yourself or you’re this pure martyr with no personal ambitions or desires—both of those are false.
You have to be willing to state the truth, even mixed motives. Like myself: on the one hand I want to help everybody, and on the other hand I’m the child of a somewhat turbulent upbringing trying to prove myself to myself. So once you put that out there, the weird ego-driven parts have a lot less power. It doesn’t go away, but it just doesn’t have the same ability to sneak around under the table to determine outcomes. Put it at the table along with everything else and then you can feed your ego appropriately without it causing a lot of chaos.
LT: Can you tell me what personal experiences have led you to some of these insights?
VJ: Just screwing up my own life: womanizing, crashing organizations and coalitions over my ego, self-destructing with someone else’s ego. All those disaster stories that you can tell from the perspective of “I was victimized.” But if you’re looking at it through the lens of a video camera, it looks like your own conduct helped to create the outcome. I’ve been practicing progressive activism on the left for twenty years—I’ll be thirty-seven this month. So that’s most of my life. Most of my wisdom now doesn’t come out of reaction to mean people at the bar or selfish people at the mall. Most of my life has been spent interacting with other people who are supposedly trying to change the world. And I’ve got just as many scars, and just as many enemies, and just as much conflict in my life as somebody who’s worked in a corporation. And that can’t be all everybody else’s fault.
LT: I’ve heard you say, “Based on my confession I’m inviting you to a higher place than me.” That encourages other people to transcend where you happen to be in that moment.
VJ: Yeah, that’s one way to climb a mountain range. Get as far as you can go and then help someone else climb above where you are. This is a collective process. Those of us who are doing this work are standing on the shoulders of pretty impressive people. Ella Baker, an indispensable organizer in the movement associated with Dr. King, used to say: give light, and the people will find the way. But she also said strong people don’t need strong leaders.
I think people have this image of somebody with a cape and a rod and a staff and all the answers. And my experience has been that whenever I’ve been in that mindset—more often than I’d like to admit—that’s usually the beginning of some awful farce. And then when I’m not doing that at all, when I’m just trying to be present to myself and understand what’s going on, all of a sudden people start wanting me to take on more responsibilities. And then I’ll hear that I’m a good leader from somebody, and that wasn’t what I was trying to do. I was just trying to help or be of service or be present or make an observation—just trying to assist.
LT: So that’s the best way to be effective?
VJ: If I can do something myself and make a big difference, I’ll do it. Often people will not make a change that they can make, even if it’s small, waiting for some other person—if only the mayor would do this, or Bush would do that, or if only somebody in the red states would understand this then everything would be fine. Those kinds of conversations I don’t find to be constructive. You know, for a while Nelson Mandela could only make a difference inside a cell. But look at the difference he made in the world by focusing there for more than two decades.
That’s the difference between the real giants of the last century and a lot of what we see now. You lose one campaign and you want to give up and move to Canada. That’s not the way. It has to be a protracted struggle. And part of that struggle is looking at the shadow side, the broken part of ourselves as activists in these movements. We have to stop seeing that as a distraction from the real work and start seeing it as part of the real work. If you don’t have those kinds of conversations that really look for error in yourself and in your cause, then your cause over the long term begins to lose power and lose persuasiveness.
I’m not saying we should only look within. If all you’re doing is navel-gazing then you’re not carrying out the mission either. I’m saying we have to both confess and accuse, we have to be able to look within and without, fight for changes both in society and within ourselves.
]]>“There’s nothing like Verdun. This is a place where the world changed,” says Christina Holstein, a British historian. Over 60 million shells were fired into this area between February 21 and December 18, 1916, killing 305,440 men out of 708,777 casualties.
In the forest, in among the ruin, unexploded bombs lie everywhere. I walk inexpertly on uneven soil, the edge of one crater intersecting another, snagging my boots on what at first I assume are brambles but quickly recognize as copious strands of needle-sharp barbed wire camouflaged by sprigs of new growth. I’m being led by a small band of démineurs from the Département du Déminage through territory honeycombed with a myriad of trenches, tunnels, and mines. The French Interior Ministry estimates that at least 12 million unexploded shells reside in the hills and forests that rise above Verdun.
I had begun by treading as lightly as possible on the soft leaf litter, but I can’t keep up this way and resign myself to crashing through the undergrowth like a Friday night reveler drunk on testosterone and cheap lager. Then I see it: a rusty brown cylinder, half buried in the earth, uniform and solid and immovable. My heart pounds, and in bad French an octave higher than usual I call out to Guy, ex-navy, ex-special forces, now second in command of the local Déminage. Guy Momper has been with the Déminage since leaving the French Navy over fifteen years ago. He’s a tall, lithe man, obviously fit with a stamina and flexibility that belies his real age, his only concession to which is his almost completely gray hair, cropped short in a military fashion. The other démineurs stop their search and crowd around the shell, flattening nettles, brambles, and wire with their boots.
I detect a sudden change of mood from one of enthusiastic adventure to one of seriousness and reverence. We are all looking down at a German 155-millimeter high-explosive artillery shell about a hundred pounds in weight, as long as your arm and as thick as your thigh. I can tell it has been fired by the grooves gouged into its copper driving band, a device designed to spin the shell as it shoots out of the gun barrel. The shell appears to be in good condition despite a thin patina of orange rust. Ninety-odd years ago this shell smashed into the ground at over a thousand miles per hour; it’s been lodged here ever since, waiting to be discovered.
“This is the type of bomb that killed our friends in December,” Guy says in English without looking up. Continuing to stare at the shell, he adds, “A very difficult fuse, one wrong move and . . . pop!” With a deep sigh, he moves deliberately toward the shell and ends up positioned with a foot on either side and both hands clasped firmly around its nose, in much the same way I’ve seen people chastise a naughty pet dog. A colleague stands by, a crow bar in hand, utterly transfixed by this ancient remnant. No one else moves. With a gentle but determined tug Guy has released the shell from its earthly slumber and now has it cradled gently like a newborn. The shell is placed gingerly and expertly onto a special rack in the rear of a Land Rover.
British, French, American, and German armies fired approximately 720 million shells and mortar bombs on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. Military experts estimate that as many as one in five rounds of ammunition fired by either side failed to explode. As a direct result of land contamination by unexploded ordinance, 16 million acres of France were cordoned o= at the end of 1918, including the 2 million acres around Verdun. Known as the Zone Rouge, they remain forbidden territory to this day. The Département du Déminage was created after the end of the Second World War to find, remove, and destroy shells and bombs from both wars. This activity has cost the department 630 démineurs to date, all killed while clearing unexploded munitions. At the current rate of clearance it is a conservative estimate that the Département du Déminage will still be finding these weapons nine hundred years from now.
Many of the shells fired contained toxic gas, and for the most part it is difficult for even the most experienced démineurs to distinguish which ones, excepting the rare occasion when the red, white, or yellow bands or crosses indicating that the munition contains gas are preserved. Often, with toxic shells held close to an ear, one is able to hear the bone-chilling swish-swish of the liquid gas as the shell is gently rocked from side to side. Shells suspected of containing gas are treated with extra caution and eventually delivered to a special bunker at the bomb depot near Pont-a-Mousson. The gas shells and bombs are particularly prone to leaking and are considered by the démineurs their most feared type of ammunition to handle, though perhaps fear is the wrong word, as the démineurs seem pretty fearless to me. In fact, I am utterly humbled by their selfless activities.
DECEMBER 2007: Laurent Flauder and Dominique Milesi from the Département du Déminage take a German 155-millimeter shell from the forest and place it in their Land Rover in exactly the same manner as Guy had during our tromp through the woods. They drive this shell and no doubt a few others some sixty kilometers to a depot in another part of the forest utilized specifically for storing old battlefield munitions. They travel along tirelessly pretty back roads, past the numerous cemeteries of French, German, and American war dead, through sleepy northern villages with their terra-cotta roofs and brown window shutters, not so much as raising a look from locals sipping afternoon pastis in the cafés that appear on almost every corner. On reaching the depot, they unlock the thick steel doors of a bunker, one of five high-ceilinged, windowless concrete structures somewhat resembling a largish house from the outside but with one main gallery space inside. The two démineurs in their static-free blue jumpsuits lift the shell from the Land Rover using a specially made contraption and walk with the shell between them toward a wooden pallet placed on the concrete floor.
All that remained whole of the men were the soles of their feet, bonded to the rough concrete, each pair facing the other in exactly the position they were in when the shell had suddenly and without warning detonated.
]]>A pinacate beetle can brighten my day. I connect to something nonhuman and am knocked happily out of myself. Many of us have this experience when we see a charismatic mammal like a deer or bear, raccoon or moose. Birds can have the same effect. Hawks, cranes, ravens, hummingbirds—they give us a thrill. They say: stop! look at how beautiful I am, how different from you. They make us feel grateful for being on such an interesting planet.
Insects can do this, too, if we shift our attitude—and spatial perspective. Insects are also wild creatures and have the advantage of being everywhere. If you are a lover of insects, you have many opportunities to love, and you will feel less lonely and discouraged than if you have chosen only to adore the vanishing Siberian tiger or your local threatened predator. You may become a connoisseur of anthills—or intrigued by spiders. Even the most familiar or seemingly insignificant insect can surprise you. (Viewed up close—I promise—the oak treehopper will make you gasp.)
Another beetle example (as the naturalist J.B.S. Haldane noted, God must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles since he made so many different kinds): Tiger beetles are often brightly patterned and look like small jewels. An Australian species is the fastest running insect in the world, going nine kilometers per hour or 170 body lengths per second. After a successful chase, tiger beetles cover their victims in a corrosive liquid that begins the process of digestion. Tiger beetle larvae are equally ferocious; these white grubs have horns on their backs, which they anchor to the sides of their tunnels, allowing them to lunge out and pull in prey with a single powerful motion.
In their way, tiger beetles are as charismatic as their mammalian counterpart. In their way. That’s the rub. The truth is that insects usually inspire repulsion more than admiration. They scurry away with an unpleasant sound. They have disgusting eating habits. That compound eye gives us the creeps. All those reflections. And all those legs! Mouthparts that drink blood? Hairy distended abdomens? Not before eating, please.
For most of us, insects are just too far outside the human aesthetic—alien, brutal, and uncuddly. This is also good. Because this is nature, too. I have learned (somewhat slowly) that if I want to have a relationship with the natural world, it can’t just be with the parts I pick and choose. The gorgeous mountain view makes my lover’s heart ache. But I also have to admire the rejuvenating aftermath of a forest fire, as “ugly” a landscape as any on Earth. I have to get to know the parts of nature that make me wince and turn away. Because turning away is not really what good lovers do.
So I’m paying more attention to insects. It usually requires getting down on my knees, much lower to the ground. A new perspective. And, inevitably, another beetle—this time, the giant North American rhinoceros beetle, with its jaunty horn and ability to lift its own weight hundreds of times over! Right here on my front porch! I feel that thrill of gratitude. I live on such an interesting planet.
]]>Captain Billy was at the wheel. I cannot tell you of a time when I did not know him. Back in high school we both wanted to run off shrimping. I figured to go to college first, then come back and quote Shakespeare while I pulled the nets, you know, “full fathom five” and all that. Billy reckoned to get right to it. He did but I got sidetracked. I was blessed to run boats from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay, but I never pulled a net. Forty-odd years later, standing on the end of that dock waiting for the PIF, I was fixing to get my chance.
]]>This is an excerpt from the article published in the March/April 2009 issue of Orion. Purchase this issue, take advantage of our free trial offer ($19 for six gorgeous issues) for the print magazine, or subscribe to the equally beautiful digital edition ($10 for six issues) for the full text.