The Reluctant Environmentalist

vii The Reluctant Environmentalist From the Editor Suddenly environmentalism is hot. Not long ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger was on the cover of Newsweek, posing as a green warrior, while, a couple of spots down the magazine rack, Vanity Fair featured Leo DiCaprio standing on what I assume was meant to be a melting ice cap next to a young polar bear. It makes me want to jump in my Prius and call Dillard on my cell to pitch my Thoreau movie to HBO—“If it’s green they’ll buy it, babe.” Meanwhile, celebrities everywhere are tripping over themselves, trying to show off their small carbon footprints. It’s admittedly hard not to roll your eyes, but, if I can be permitted an un-cynical moment, I also believe that this is potentially a time of great opportunity. If Arnold’s picture on the cover helps one law pass or inspires one teenager to work for the environment instead of heading to Wall Street, then the show is worth it. But still, something about this makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s just an ingrained suspicion of being part of anything popular. For years I’ve resisted the “environmentalist” label (the only “ist” I’ve ever consented to is “essayist”). My tendency is to filter public issues through my private world and then back out into the public. And so, as I’ve witnessed this great green surge, I’ve begun to think about, and to judge, my own environmental credentials. In other words: I know Arnold is full of crap, but am I? Furthermore, Arnold’s pose will do the world (and Arnold) some good (remember that teenager). Is mine a pose as well, and, if so, exactly what sort of pose? And will it do the world, or anyone, any good? In a roundabout answer to my own questions I need to bring up a book I just finished reading, Deep Economy by Bill McKibben. McKibben and I worked on our college newspaper together, he as the editor-inchief and I as the political cartoonist, positions that probably say worlds about our differences in temperament. He seemed to me a powerful and slightly remote figure, tall and thin and archetypal, someone who, viii Ecotone: reimagining place as another classmate recently put it, always looked a little like Abe Lincoln. (The one time Bill and I really interacted was when he supported me during the controversy that followed the publication of my cartoon, The Trickle Down Theory, which was a picture of Ronald Reagan urinating on an unemployed black man in the gutter.) In the years since college McKibben has become the leading environmental writer of our generation, a status he has earned honestly by writing books like The End of Nature, which detailed the dangers of global warming twenty years before it was chic to do so. He has also been extremely generous to many other so-called nature writers, like myself, and actually was instrumental in helping me get my first book published. All this to say that I came to McKibben’s new book strongly predisposed to liking it, and in fact I did like it, quite a lot. It seemed to me a tight summation of where we need to go: away from our obsession with growth at all costs, toward a dependence on local economies, and obviously away from slurping down oil and gobbling resources like a bunch of drunken gluttons at a feast. Hovering over the book, or rooted below it, was the obvious spirit of Wendell Berry, whom McKibben acknowledges by dedicating the book to him. I think it’s fair to say that Berry is the most influential environmental thinker of our time, and to anyone familiar with the work of the Sage of Kentucky, the themes here will ring familiar: the need to return to caring for our local places; the need, in fact, to marry those places instead of having strip-mining flings with them; the need to live—and eat—from where we are. It’s kind of the opposite of globalization: localization or at least regionalization. Surprisingly, Berry’s own literary godfather, Thoreau, is not quoted once in McKibben...