Beacon Broadside

by David Gessner

David Gessner is the author of six books of literary nonfiction, including Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond and The Prophet of Dry Hill: Lessons From a Life in Nature. He is the editor of Ecotone, the literary journal of place. 

It is bad form to refer to one’s own work and worse to quote oneself.  But here goes.

In 1999, well before Drs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger pronounced environmentalism dead, I diagnosed the field of nature writing as a terminal case in an essay and, three years later, a book called Sick of Nature.

The essay came about when, after throwing a book against a wall in which the author had droned on serenely about "being the present moment" and "living in the natural woods," I went for a walk on my unnatural beach carrying my unnatural micro-cassette recorder, into which I spoke the beginnings of an essay. When the essay was later published it began exactly the way I spoke it that day as I tramped along the beach:

      I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. 

Of course I wasn’t really sick of the natural world, just of the way some writers chose to portray it. I was sick of the hushed voice, sick of the saintliness, sick of the easy notions of the perfectibility of man, sick of the apocalyptic robes, sick of the scolding.  But most of all I was sick of the certainty that seemed to ooze out of the words. Writers certain that they knew what would happen in the world and certain that they knew how to be in that world and certain that they should tell us these things. The odd thing was that, for all their certainty, the world they described didn’t sound much at all like the world I happened to live in.

Despite this, I believed and still believe that the environmental
essay has an important role both in our literature and in our current
political fights, though I also believe that it will probably have a
more important role if we call it something other than "the
environmental essay." Let me say that I’m not much help on this
one—the obvious alternative "the nature essay" is about as racy and
contemporary as quilting (no offense to the quilters out there) and
"eco-essay," while better, isn’t entirely accurate and sounds like a
trademark.  Whatever we choose to call this essay-thing it should not
ooze certainty or complacency. If it’s going to ooze anything—and
maybe it shouldn’t—let it ooze conflict. Conflict, as most of
our sophomore English teachers mentioned, is the essence of art. Why
should that be different when we turn our literary attention to the
so-called natural world, which, after all, is a famous Darwinian hotbed
of conflict? Why should we get all soft-voiced and Sunday school when
describing a world where death and struggle and raw life are so much
more baldly apparent than in most of our own, a world so innately
fascinating that it certainly won’t become more so by covering it in a
sugary goo?  Why should we start to sound like scary cult
proselytizers when as artists we strive to be the opposite of
proselytizers, Keatsian practitioners of negative capability, that
ability to be in "uncertainties, anxieties and doubts"? Or, on the
other hand, why should we sometimes come off like accountants tallying
up a ledger sheet of gloom?   

Nature essays, at their worst, are narrated by people who give little indication that any of them have the quality that many
of us find most important for living on earth: a sense of humor. From
their writing you’d never guess that they have ever laughed or farted. (Which, it needs to be made clear, is different than translating Native
American Myths about trickster coyotes who laugh and fart.)   Recently
I judged a nature-writing contest for a university and I thought that
if I read the words "calm" or "peace" one more time I was going to pull
out a gun and kill myself. Even worse was "living in the present
moment," whatever the hell that is. All I know is that these pat
phrases and ideas oversimplify what it means to be a human being, and
for leading the usual complex, troubled, compromised, joyful, sexual,
funny, loving, jealous, insecure, calm, manic lives that human beings
usually lead. There is the moment, sure, but there are also
never-ending goals and plans, there are maps, there are decisions and
calculations and imaginative leaps into the future and back into the
past… These present-moment peaceful sorts are utopian characters in
the sense that they are not in flux, not full of contradictions, not on
their way to becoming something else. They are already saints, have
already found "it," and already exude the air of the shaman or Zen
master.

But let me hold my tongue. My task in my long-ago essay was to tear
down. Today’s task is to build back up. What am I looking for, not
merely railing against, in our dialogue about nature? First, I’m
looking for a discourse with a whole lot less bunk.  And a whole lot
less mysticism, (which most of us, when not on drugs, don’t
understand). I’d also like a kind of writing that isn’t content to
chew its cud out in some far off back forty literary pasture, fenced
off from real life concerns like politics. While I may not be
personally ready to call myself an "environmentalist," I am more than
ready to fight for the environment. It is a sign of our
over-specialized times, after all, that we have tried to put up a wall
between writing that is "literary" and that which is political. As if
the two things could be fenced off and still remain vital. It has
gotten to such a silly point in this country that it is commonly said
of writers that their activism hurts their art. The implication seems
to be that people are meant to do only one thing, in the manner of the
assembly line worker. For my part, I’m happy to accept the sloppy fact
of what James Baldwin called "men as they are." But I also understand
that it’s time to shut up and fight. Samuel Johnson, after listening
to a philosopher friend argue against "the reality of matter," got up
and kicked a chair, saying, "I refute it thusly." I can have my qualms
with environmentalism—its earnestness, its joiner-mentality, its
current vogue—but these qualms need to co-exist with action. I may
be occasionally turned off by the arguments of the virtuous, but they
are right about one thing: fighting for nature is, in the end, a moral
issue. And as with a lot of moral issues, we can tamp it down, push it
away, or try to ignore it, but we know, at some level, that we are
avoiding something and that that avoiding holds great peril, both
psychologically and practically.

Now dressed in full nature writing regalia–spear in hand and animal
pelts on–I am finally ready to do battle. I am ready to leave behind
the effete fear that politics will somehow taint my work, to understand
that this exclusion is mere fashion, and that fashions change. I am
also ready to leave behind the nature writer’s sense of impotence. What I want to carry into the fight is humor, irony and the personal
essayist’s recourse to the testing ground of self. What I want to
leave behind is "Oh, how lovely!" while what I want to carry into the
fight are the moments—often lovely moments, yes—when I am briefly
outside of myself, moments that remind me of how multifarious and
delightful this world still is and that speak to my own animal
wildness.  What I want to leave behind is false romanticism. What I
want to carry into the fight is the original romantic urge for the
specific, the local, the real.  What I want to leave behind is quoting
Thoreau; what I want instead is to follow more deeply the complex
spirit of the man. What I want to leave behind are pages of facts.
What I want to carry forward are facts marshaled for purpose, facts
enlivened because they follow an idea. What I want to leave behind is
the sanctimony of quietude and order and "being in the present." What
I want to embrace is loud and wild disorder, growing this way and that,
lush and overdone. What I want to leave behind is the virtuous and the
good, and move toward the inspiring and great. And while we’re at it I
want to leave behind anything false, false to me that is, false to what
I feel is my ex perience on this earth. What I want instead is to wade
through the mess of life without ever reaching for a life ring called
The Answer.   

My dream is to fight and to rally others to my fight. And here is my cry:

Nature writers of the world unite: You have nothing to lose but your daisy chains.   

You may also want to read an interview with David Gessner at Bookslut, an essay on migrations he posted here last fall, and his longer "green manifesto" (from which this post was excerpted) available at the literary journal Ecotone.