Engaging Voices: Tales of Morality and Meaning in an Age of Global Warming

3. What Is to Be Done?

63 Lily knew she couldn’t go on anymore. Still, she was scared about how they would respond. Maybe she should leave without telling anyone, just not show up. But she couldn’t do that. She would have to go to the meeting and tell them she was leaving the group, leaving the university in fact, to go live on The Farm. Somehow Richard had managed to convince them to try to save the wetland. They had been joined by some Audubon Society people, some from Fred’s church, and even a few representatives of the black community, interested in having a tie-in for minorities in the environmental education center they had hoped to put at the refuge. It seemed like it would work—the birds and butterflies would survive, the swamp would help the local ecology, people would get to enjoy nature, and residents from the poor community would get jobs at the nature center. And things were going well. Some city counselors had supported their efforts. A few high school classes had visited. An article was written in the local paper. 3 What Is To Be Done? 64 * Engaging Voices But The Developer had other ideas, and (she hadn’t really expected this) so did people who wanted more local jobs—building the mall, working in the stores. Then there were the taxes that would help repair the terribly run-down high school and the city hospital. A lot of people didn’t think that “saving nature” was such a terrific idea, not if it meant lousy schools and a crummy hospital and your neighbors out of work. The Developer had much better connections with the zoning board, and had promised not to develop some other parcel of land, somewhere else, in exchange for rights to pave over this one. That was good enough for the city and state. Several of the key players were up for reappointment or reelection this year, and to many of them The Developer had always been a “real friend.” Others just saw things his way, not the way the group did. So it had turned into a struggle, and a big one. Lily hated struggle . Just as the disagreements at the first meeting of the group had almost led her to leave, the shouting matches at the last demonstration , and the way Richard had ripped a sign out of that man’s hand, had scared her much too much. What good was all this fighting? How could they save nature, and make the world safer for people, with anger? Where she grew up, people hardly ever raised their voices. It just wasn’t done. She would never understand how people could stand there and scream at each other the way they had at that last city council meeting. It was worse than anything. She would be sorry to leave. People had worked really hard and gotten close to each other. Erica and Fred would talk about religion , Fred asking Erica a lot of questions about the Baptist church and the “African American community,” as Fred always called it. And she and Wendy had done some talking too. About where they came from and what they wanted. She tried to understand Wendy’s style—which was almost as aggressive and abrasive as Richard’s. “You know,” she’d once told Wendy, “when you raise your voice and start to criticize people, even people I’m against too, I get a little scared. I keep thinking, ‘What if I say something she doesn’t like? Will she turn on me like that?’” What is to be done? * 65 Wendy had laughed, even put her arm around Lily’s shoulders. “Hey Lily, omelet . . . eggs . . . can’t get the first without breaking the second, right? The tone in my voice isn’t important. Getting yelled at, not important. Angry, schmangry, not important. What’s important is changing this god-awful society for the better. This is politics, my friend, not a tea party.” Lily had smiled back, but hadn’t been at all sure. She wondered about all the other people who would be scared by hostile put-downs, and an absolute certainty that we are right and they are wrong. Would people who got turned off by that sort of thing come to a meeting to begin with? Or come to a second one? And what about people who thought, “I agree...