Beyond Flipper

Confessions of a Nature Writer

Let me say this straight out: it's not easy.  You see the fame,  the interviews on ET, the magazine covers, the late night chats with the President, all the trappings, and you say, "Man, I could do that, I could write lyrically about plovers and shit."  But then there's what you don't see.  You don't see the stress, the constant media scrutiny, the prying into your personal life, the paparazzi chasing after you as you try to take a solitary walk along the beach to contemplate sanderlings and profoundities.  What you don't see is how hard it is to focus on the sublime with all those flashbulbs flashing; what you don't see is the mudslinging, the interviews, the fierce rivalries with the Matthiessens and Dillards.  And of course the sex.  A godawful lot of sex.

Perhaps I am revealing a little too much of what goes on behind the scenes in the life of a nature writer.  But I do so in the name of honesty so that young people out there who are considering getting into this game will know it's not all leaves and acorns and quoting Thoreau.  Being quietly meditative is the least of it.  There are the three martini lunches with Wendell Berry, the long calls on my cell with Gary Snyder.  Sometimes I feel like a big phony, like I'm just playing a part.  Everywhere I go people want me to wear my signature bearskin vest and that necklace with the great horned owl talons, and of course they ask me to make my signature growling, snorting noises.  It's ridiculous really.  I think I know a little bit of how Madonna felt when she did that tour wearing a conical metallic bra.   Barry Lopez still teases me about appearing with that stuffed brown bear on the cover of Newsweek, and I'll admit it did look strange.  These days if I so much as wash my hair, let alone use conditioner, my young fans think I'm a sell-out.  I heard Dillard say the same thing on Letterman the other night.  And she's right.  It's hard, man, really hard.   I never asked for this.....this wasn't what I was looking for when I went to the woods.

People say I'm temperamental, that I've become a Prima Donna, that I ball out my roadies.   But you wouldn't believe the shit I have to put up with.   I'll never forget that time in the late 90s when my assistant invited John Haines to lunch instead of John Hay and I found myself across the table at Sardis from the famous Alaskan nature writer instead of the famous Cape Cod nature writer.  And then there's the envy.  People ask: why should you make the big bucks just because you know the Latin name of a rose-throated becard?   They act like taking walks in the woods is easy.   But you know what I say to my critics?  I say screw you.  I say you try making people feel exalted by praising the quiet fluttering of an aspen leaf in late fall.  I say, "Baby, that's the reason I'm paid what I'm paid."

People are quick to judge but not so quick to try and understand my feelings.  Look....I didn't ask for this gift, didn't ask to be acutely sensitive to the natural world.  Lord knows there are times I didn't want the burden.  Sure, I like the money, the starlets, the big cars, the perks, but there are times when I long for a simpler life.  I'd like to be back on the pond at Concord or swaying with John Muir in the treetops as lightning strikes around us.  But that's not how it is anymore.  Nature today has to be sharper, sexier, geared toward the younger demographic.  No one wants to hear a story about some guy living alone.

Speaking of which, my job, as you can imagine, requires me to constantly quote Thoreau.  But I doubt even Big Henry could comprehend the kind of stress the modern nature writer must endure.  It's not easy being profound all the time.  There are moments when I want to chuck it all and leave the woods and get a nice apartment on the upper East side.  But then I remember why I got into this racket in the first place and a little tear comes to my eye.  Nature writing, I remember, is about more than money and glory.  It's about quiet moments, too.  The slight trickling of the tidal creek as the water withdraws, the soughing of the wind in the marsh phragmites, the staging of swallows in early fall.  And I remind myself that it is those moments of quiet exaltation I live for, and that almost no amount of money or attention can match that.

But let's get real.  Sure, I can give my fanbase quiet moments, but those moments don't pay the bills.  To make the big bucks you've got to throw in a jeremiad, along with a sermon or two.  And it's best to steer away from that old Thoreau chestnut of "voluntary poverty."  Who wants to hear about doing with less?  We're Americans damn it.  Thoreau said: simplify, simplify, simplify.  Who the hell knows what that means?  I'd like to end with a piece of advice that, while not as profound as Henry's, is more practical, and, yes, simpler.    If you are feeling desperate heed my words.  Take it from me.  If there's a hole inside you that feels like it can't be filled, there's really only one way to fill it:

Go buy something. 

Revenge of the Tarballs

L(This blog was originally published on OnEarth.com)     Last Thursday, I took a walk along the Gulf of Mexico in the Bon Secour National Widlife Refuge in Alabama. I had walked that same beach during the height of the BP oil spill last summer, and though seventeen months had passed since the Macondo Well exploded, and a year had passed since the same well had been declared capped and the tragedy over, you wouldn't have known it if you had been with me.

Up the beach, to my west, dozens of BP workers combed the sand for a fresh crop of tarballs that had come in with Tropical Storm Lee and a thunderstorm that had hit earlier that day. And it wasn't just the tarballs that were fresh: BP was back in the news. Over the span of the last couple of weeks, BP has been declared legally culpable in last summer's Gulf disaster; the BP spill was declared the origin of the new tarballs; and a new scientific study from Auburn University has concluded that the oil on the Gulf floor isn't degrading quite as fast as the earlier, cheerier scientific reports suggested.  Finally, this week marks the first time that BP has submitted a new deepwater exploration plan in the Gulf since the spill.

Still, the national news didn't do justice to what I was seeing with my own eyes. From the newspaper articles I had read, you would have thought that six or seven tarballs had washed ashore, and a few of the old BP regulars had been called up, had a kind of reunion, said, "Hey, what you been doing since last year?" and then set to cleaning. It wasn't like that. The workers were out in force, about forty of them, and after spending a couple of weeks cleaning the more public beaches, they were now turning their attention to this stretch of less-trafficked seashore, where a fresh mess had been tossed up, revealing what BP wanted to keep swept under the Gulf's rug.

I approached a couple of the workers, a man and a woman, who weren't supposed to talk to me, but who, I had learned from experience, usually were so bored after a day of tarball farming that they couldn't help themselves.

"You finding much?" I asked.

The woman held out a net that looked more suited for mullet than oil.

"We've been walking all day," she said. "There are balls all up and down the shore."

The tarballs in the net were the size of quarters, and I mentioned that they didn't look all that big.

"We've got some this big," she said, making a fist.

I thanked her and walked down the beach, away from the workers. A great blue heron barely flew off as I approached, and sanderlings pecked the sand before skittering away. I counted nine natural gas platforms off shore, and soon enough I came upon some tarballs of my own, as well as an orange squiggling line that worked its way down the beach, a kind of foamy stew. This once famously white beach was stained and smeared, as if Dr. Suess's Things One and Two had raced about with cans of red paint.

I hadn't planned on coming to this beach. I was down in the Gulf to hawk my new book about the BP disaster, not to hunt for tarballs. But although I've written the last sentence of that book, the story just keeps on going. I had been eating barbecue chicken and fried okra at a local restaurant called Live Bait when I asked my waitress how the clean-up was going on, and she told me I should drive down to Bon Secour. The locals know that this thing isn't over and that they can expect to see tarballs kicked up by storms for years to come.

The only ones slow on the uptake are the majority of scientists, who have tried to claim the mantle of reason. They have cautioned that it is too soon to make any rash conclusions, that science takes time, and that the studies of the environmental dangers of oil might take years. That's fine, but on the other hand, many of these same scientists are quick to assure the public there is no threat.

George Crozier, director of the Alabama state sea lab at Dauphin Island, told the Associated Press that he doubts that the new tarballs pose much of an environmental danger. But isn't that a fairly rash statement without evidence or long-term studies? Where is the skepticism and caution now? The point is, you can't have it both ways. You can't say that scientists are not allowed to make broad sweeping statements about the dangers of the spill and then turn around and make broad sweepings statements about the fact that there is no danger.

The new report from Auburn is welcome because very few scientists, outside of the University of Georgia's Samantha Joye, have had much negative to say about the way that millions of gallons of oil have affected the Gulf. Many of the Gulf studies are funded by BP, but there are other reasons for this caution. No one wanted to say anything too early and later be proved wrong. Then there is the fact that many scientists, like many people in most professions, are careerists who don't want to scoop themselves by revealing results before they publish them in a paper in a journal. Finally, there is the larger point: scientists are, increasingly, specialists, and can't be expected to see the greater whole.

But it doesn't take a specialist or scientists to see what I am seeing now, and it doesn't take any special observational skills to see this smeared beach. I understand why the cameras are gone. Complacency, boredom, and love of novelty might make us want to turn to something new. But seventeen months later, the oil is still here. It's on my feet, and it's on the skeletal plate of the blue crab swimming in the pool of orange spew, and it's down on the sand that the sanderlings are picking at. I don't need a scientific report to tell me that something is not right here. You can tell me this is normal, but my eyes tell me it is not.

From Blog to Book

           I'm down in New Orleans (not Orleans) to celebrate the release of The Tarball Chronicles.  The book represents my personal landspeed record from inception to publication. I went down to the Gulf to report, but also with an eye toward a book, in July of 2010, and now it is being published in September of 2011, about fourteen months later. As well as being written fast, there was something else unique for me about it. This was a book born of a blog. Or three blogs more accurately, including this one.  That's why I thank each and every one of you (true, I do this as a group) in the book's acknowledgements. Unlike my earlier books, which were created in solitude, this one was the product of a community.  And I hope the readers of this blog feel some ownership for the resulting book.  Not so you run out and buy it, but because it's true. This is the soil the thing grew out of.

At first, a few years back, I had the usual tssk-tssk fuddy-duddy reaction to "blogging."  What changed this for me?  I think seeing my former students, many of them my most talented students, find in blogging an outlet for their abilities.  Speed of publication was appealing and also there was this: it looked kind of neat.  Anyway, I started bloggin in April 2010, around the time millions of gallons of oil started gushing into the Gulf. One reason I went to the Gulf was because I was pissed off about what was happening there, but there were other factors involved too. I had just had a book proposal rejected by the douchebags in New York, one I had been working on for four years-about walking around the country's entire coast, from Maine to Alaska and bringing all sorts of coastal issues to light.  And so I headed to the Gulf, in part, as my rebound project, and, lo and behold, found that many of the coastal issues I had already been studying came into play during the spill. It was as if I had been training for something and didn't know what I was training for until I got there.

What struck me when I arrived in the Gulf was the sheer strangeness of the place, the feeling that I was in an occupied country, and the sense that this time we had really done it, that we had really shat our national bed. My posts were my way of trying to communicate that strangeness to folks back home-to you guys really-and to tell the story in my own words instead of sitting on the lap of the national media and nodding as storytellers like Anderson Cooper (my close personal friend) jabbered on. I wrote the posts on the run, usually in the very early morning, before heading off for the day's adventure of flying in a copter out to the rig, racing over the water in the Cousteau pontoon boat, or spending a night in a fish camp. This meant that they were written fast, in a kind of journalistic shorthand, and I think that for a lot of us this will be one of the ways that blogging impacts the writing we both do and read. When you have no choice, or when you are up against it, you cut to the chase.

My first desire, when I got home from the Gulf and set to turning these posts, and my many journal notes and microcassettes into a book, was to try and preserve all the bluntness and immediacy.  Had I had my own way the book would have come out even faster and would have been a kind of collection of immediate moments, with the main goal of trying to put readers down in the strange Heart-of-Darkness world of the Gulf.  But that's what editors are for, and I had a good one in Patrick Thomas of Milkweed, who pushed me to think more deeply about my greater ambitions for the book, and suggested that I could retain the immediacy while also thinking about larger connections.  I am very grateful for these nudgings, and think they made the book better, and less blog-like. In other words, even though we were under time pressure, I tried to do what you always do when you truly settle down to write a book: you chew it over, you gestate, you re-conceive.  "Every great effort is second born," said Walter Jackson Bate (or was it Johnson?)  "First thought best thought" might have worked for Jack K.  But not for most of us.

"You spit blood for this book," my editor wrote me not long ago. I don't think that was an exaggeration.  To get it together in a year, to have it be more than just an ambulance-chaser type of book, was the hardest thing I ever did as a writer.  At first I hoped to get it out by the anniversary of the spill, but that proved impossible. And I'm glad for it. This gave me a few more months to try and go deeper, to make the thing third born.

And so, after months of hawking my My Green Manifesto wares, I turn my mind back to the Gulf.  This Monday I flew to Mobile and yesterday I read in New Orleans.  Though it has been stressful to spend the summer waving my arms around-"Hey, look at me!"- the reaction to My Green Manifesto has been heartening.  That reaction-and I use this phrase for the first time in my writing life-exceeded my expectations.  I am very fond of My Green Manifesto; it is goofy and loveable like a little brother. But now it's big brother's turn.  Because whatever the world's reaction, I'm pretty sure of this: the Gulf book is the best thing I have ever done.

* * *

I'll paste the book's first page below.  At first I had the whole Prelude in the second person but now I just use it for these few short paragraphs.

From The Prelude: Into the Gulf

It is June and you are at a cookout at a friend's house, a barbeque with all the kids playing in the backyard. You have just gotten back from traveling and you are happy to be home. For the last fifty-nine days millions of gallons of oil have been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, but that is not your concern, not your problem. You want nothing to do with yet another dismal, depressing environmental story. You live in North Carolina and the Gulf is almost a thousand miles away. Yes, you care about the environment, so you should be thinking about the oil spill, but you've put on blinders, as you often do when the harsh light of big news events blares down on you. There is too much to think about, after all, and right now you are looking out at your daughter jumping on a trampoline, and the spill is the furthest thing from your mind. You drink your second beer and think that life is pretty good, pretty good indeed.

But then suddenly a friend is standing in front of you, and he insists on talking about the spill. He tells you of a live video stream he has seen from a mile below the surface and of the sight of a single curious eel peering at black-red goo pouring from the spill's source, the busted Macondo well. He wonders what it is like for the people living down in the Gulf, and despite yourself and the beer and the sun on your face and your happy daughter playing, you start to wonder too. "You should be down there," he says. "You write about nature." You start to explain that that is not the kind of nature you write about-you write about birds and the coast, and you are not a journalist who chases stories. But then you stop explaining, and defending, and think simply: "Maybe he's right."

Over the next week the idea builds in your head. Maybe the Gulf is where you should be. Summer plans, family plans, rearrange themselves in your brain. You have a somewhat strained talk with your wife about your new plans, and, since there is no other way to get there on short notice, you decide to drive. "When will you go?" your wife asks, and it turns out your answer is "Right away."

A magazine gives you an assignment to cover the looming fall bird migration, but this is about more than birds, you know that already. When you finally decide to leave you do so in a mad rush, throwing everything in the back of your car and heading out without any real plan. Of course you are aware of the hypocrisy of traveling eight hundred miles in a vehicle powered by a refined version of the same substance that is still pouring out into the Gulf waters-but now you are driven. Now you need to see the oil. You're not sure why. You have heard the Gulf called a "national sacrifice zone," and maybe you want to explore this idea of sacrifice, of giving up some of our land, and our people, so the rest of us can keep living the way we do. So you go down, heading toward the Gulf.

Obama's Summer Reading

Obama's Summer Reading: A Look Inside

I hope it's a nice day up on Martha's Vineyard.  Nice, but not too nice.  Actually a little rain would be good-good reading weather.  Enough time for the president to find a little corner of the house, away from the girls and Michelle, and, with some rain pattering on the roof, finally get a chance to through the books he bought the other day at Bunch of Grapes.

I imagine him picking them up, looking them over, skimming here and there, and then doing what we all do despite the famous admonition-judging them by their covers. He likes the novel he bought, and is looking forward to starting it, but it seems more of a nighttime book.  He dips into the one that's gotten all the praise but the first sentences seem lifeless and dull.  He puts it down and stares out the window. One thing he has been noticing since landing on the Vineyard is how green everything is, the world full and bursting, but at the same time the salt winds nudging it toward fall. He likes those moments of noticing-moments when he remembers that a world exists outside of Debt Ceilings and Tea Parties and John Boehner-and they have become more precious since his Washington captivity began. Even better to remember that a world exists outside of human beings, a fact that, for all the crowds, this island sometimes helps you remember.

Maybe that's what he leads him to pick up the next book, or maybe it's not quite so romantic-maybe it's as simple as the fact that it is the shortest book in the bunch and therefore can be whipped through. Of course he can't bee seen in public reading a book with the word "manifesto" in it-imagine the field day on Fox News.  But there are no cameras around for the moment, so what the hell?  He reads about two men, men almost exactly his age, who paddle down a river not far from the island he is on.  They seem to be having a lot of fun as they paddle and maybe he starts having a little vicarious fun, too. He reads about Teddy Roosevelt, a man he has always admired despite their temperamental differences and the fact that some people like to use Teddy as a big stick to beat him with for not fighting hard enough for his beliefs.  Then he reads about a guy named Dan Driscoll, a fellow politician, who focuses in on his goals like a badger and doesn't let go, bare the consequences.  Yes, he thinks, if only it were that simple in my job.

And because the guy is human-and deserves a break despite what Hannity says- let's hope he laughs a little too.  For instance let's hope he is amused by this passage on the book's third page:

As Dan Driscoll paddles he describes what he calls his "radical idea" that being environmental isn't about education or politics. It's about what Thoreau called "contact." About falling in love with something-a place, an animal- and then fighting for it.

"When I grew up in Newton we always had our butts dragged out to Lincoln to learn about ‘nature.' Now a kid in Newton can just walk out his backdoor and down to the river. The way I look at it if I build these paths and one kid walks down here and has contact with nature, then maybe that will do something. Maybe he'll be inspired to fight for the place. Maybe he'll be the next John Muir."

He pauses to correct himself, seeming to realize he has slightly overstated.

"Or at least maybe he'll just be less of a dick."

Let's imagine the President laughs at the last word.  Let's imagine he says to himself: "Dick.  Now that's a funny word.  Why don't I ever get to say a word like that?"

As he keeps reading two ideas bubble up in his head, one personal and one political.  The personal one is hard to describe but goes something like this: after the immediate vicarious pleasure of paddling along with these guys on the river he starts to feel dissatisfied.  Now that's a vacation, he thinks.  Not sitting in some big house with guards all around on some rich folks' island.  Could he rent a kayak tomorrow?  Or could he look silly and unpresidential, like John Kerry on that windsurfer thing?

The second idea is this.  This guy is right! I mean anyone with half a brain knows that the earth, our first and only home, is worth fighting for. It may be that in this imbecilic political climate we have to pretend that there is some debate about global warming, and that we have to humor the loony crew trying to eliminate the EPA. But anyone with even the slightest historical imagination can see that we are in the midst of a massive environmental crisis, the president thinks, and when I get back to Washington I will address this, despite the political fall-out. And then he thinks:

But first I've got to call this Gessner cat.

He skims ahead, trying to glean any personal information about the author.   Perhaps he is looking for the author's cell phone number (910-512-7046) or his e-mail (Gessner52@hotmail.com), but why would these be in a book?  What he finds instead is that this Gessner guy has a daughter, about Sasha's age, and he wonders if the author and his girl might be up for a presidential playdate.  (What he doesn't find is the fact that the author's daughter is a dog fanatic who knows everything there is to know about about Portuguese Water Dogs).

But, given what he is reading about Gessner, he wonders if a playdate is really the right theme. Maybe a beer instead, like the one he had with Joe The Plumber?  Either way, people are always criticizing him for being stiff, and he gets the feeling that maybe this Gessner can help him relax....could maybe play the Kirk to his Spock. Sure, why not?  I like the lilt of his jig, the president thinks. And from what he's read he gathers that the man currently has money problems, and could use a high-paying job.  Why not bring him to the White House and make him Special Adviser in Charge of Loosening Me Up?

To which I can only add: Why not indeed, Mr. President?   Why not indeed?

My video address to the Prez

From Yesterday's Boston Globe:

Obama keeps low profile on the Vineyard

EDGARTOWN - If his comings and goings yesterday are any indication, President Barack Obama will be keeping a very low profile during his Martha's Vineyard vacati

On Day 1 of the first family's nine-day stay on the island, Obama remained mostly out of sight, not emerging from Blue Heron Farm until 12:15 p.m., when his motorcade headed into Vineyard Haven and a visit to Bunch of Grapes Book Store. (Daughters Sasha and Malia walked out with a bag containing, among other books, David Gessner's "My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism," which we recommended Obama read in our column this week.)

My Presidential Address

A couple of days ago the Boston Globe suggested that Obama read 5 books while on vacation. Today I make my own presidential address and try to convince him that he should read only one. See O and I go one on one.......Here's my new MOVIE!

My new book, My Green Manifesto, is due out today. Here's a taste......

A New Music

Adapted From My Green Manifesto:

My new book is about many things, including the need to fight for a limited wildness, but it is also, to a lesser extent, about language.  I've always wondered why our words grow soft and mushy when he began to talk about nature. Perhaps I am too persnickety, too preoccupied with the language that we use to describe the natural world, but I am in the minority that believes we should watch our words, that false language both reflects and encourages false thinking, that our lives depend on our sentences.

I feel particularly strongly that "being in nature" should not be described as some precious or highfalutin experience. After all, didn't we as a species evolve, along with our words, while spending a million years or so living in the midst of the natural world? And wasn't our relationship with that world, among other things, quite practical and direct? "Nature" is where the living roots of our language evolved, which suggests that that language should still be able to circle back and describe the place from whence we came without fencing it behind some quasi-mysterious mumbo-jumbo.

So many people who speak for the wild world seem to feel the need to speak in the voice of the mystic, with a hushed, voice-over reverence. We affect this high priest tone, and everyone else is expected to get down on their knees and listen to the whispered wisdom of the shaman. At times like those there's very little indication that any of us have the quality that many humans find most important for living on earth: a sense of humor. You'd never guess that any of us 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.)

I cringe when my language grows too flaccid on the one hand-oh, Great Blue Heron, help my soul and keep all sweetness and light-or, on the other, too rigid and devoid of feeling-Great Blue Heron, or Ardea herodias, is a member of the Heron (snore). . . .

Lately, I've been invited to give a lot of talks and when I speak people sit listening, rapt, or at least putting on rapt faces. I suppose if I really wanted to make it big I would start spreading the word of doom and intoning the phrase "global warming" over and over, hitting my audiences with it like a big stick. But I've got other ideas, however, impure little ideas that get in the way. For instance, sometimes I think that, from an artistic point of view, the end of the world might be kind of interesting, at least more interesting than all the dull predictions about it. Another troubling notion is that I'm not really sure I want to be this thing called an environmentalist.

I'm not trying to be glib here-I don't think it's unimportant to fight for environmental causes. It's just that I would like to put forth a sloppier form of environmentalism, a simultaneously more human and wild form, a more commonsense form and, hopefully, in the end, a more effective form. Because the old, guilt-ridden, mystical enviro-speak just isn't cutting it. Maybe the musty way of talking about nature needs to be thrown over a clothesline and beaten with a broom. That's what I've been trying to say at these talks I've been giving. My role, to put it more clearly, is to try to pull the pole out of the collective environmental ass. It isn't easy work. For a costume I wear a Hawaiian shirt and to get into character I drink a few beers. Throughout my talks I make jokes about how earnest everyone is and the audience usually laughs along semi-masochistically. Sometimes I get carried away. I start feeling megalomaniacal and believe I am the bringer of a new language. I imagine myself to be Bob Dylan at Newport, playing electric guitar among the folkies, trying (futilely) to get them to yell out "Judas."

This last metaphor was confirmed by one of the door prizes I was given recently, a CD tribute to Rachel Carson's work, after a talk at a conference in Boothbay Harbor, Maine to celebrate Carson's life and work. On the way home I listened to a song on the CD about the demise of the osprey from DDT, and then another on the birds' remarkable comeback, a subject I wrote a book about. It is fair to say that Carson is one of my greatest heroes but the music that came warbling out of my speakers seemed to be sung by a caricature of a late fifties Pete Seeger wannabe, who wailed about the poisons coursing through the ospreys' bodies with such excruciating earnest detail that it almost made me root for the birds' death. Anything as long as the song ended. This, I found myself thinking, this is part of the problem. Why does nature turn us into this kind of warbler? It makes me long for a new sort of music, a music anyone would listen to; a music that the Dan Driscoll's of the world could actually work to: a punk osprey tribute sung by, say, the Sex Pistols.

And maybe, I think now, that's a good place to start.

A new music.

Mr. Hopeless

(Note: You might want to listen to the Standell's "Dirty Water" while reading.)

A few years ago I was on a nature writing panel with a writer named  Derrick Jensen.   A couple of weeks before the panel I sent out a friendly e-mail to the other panelists, suggesting we bounce some ideas off each other. Here is the gist of the e-mail I got in response from him:

"You ask me what I think about so-called nature writing? I think the same about it that I think about any beautiful writing. There is no time for it. There is time for only one thing: saving the earth. The world is being slaughtered and we need to stop it. At this point writing is beside the point: the only-and I mean only-thing that matters is to stop this culture from killing the planet. The reason I feel comfortable saying that it's the only end that matters is that without a landbase you don't have anything. Everything-including beautiful writing-emerges from and is secondary to the land."

The other writers and I felt a little cowed by the note, embarrassed that we had been up to then corresponding about such minor concerns as semicolons, tree frogs, and imagery. We worried that we were poseurs next to Derrick, that we should immediately do something, maybe burn our bras or draft cards. I read his e-mail to a friend, a writer who is much more careful about keeping his politics out of his essays than I am. He told me a story about a Marxist poet who accosted Robert Frost and said: "No poetry is worth its name unless it moves people to action." Frost replied: "I agree. The question is, how soon?" (It is worth noting that this writer, while not overtly political in his work, has, in his spare time, saved more of Cape Cod's landbase than anyone I knew.)

I admired Jensens' passion, and realized that, face-to-face, we might have more in common than not. The sheer earnestness of environmentalism can make me uneasy, but force me to choose between a tad too much earnestness and melting ice caps and I'll take earnestness every time. Still, something about his tone unsettled me.

While I was writing my new book I became preoccupied with environmental psychology, and some of the pressing questions for me were: What allows a person to go beyond paying lip service to nature and to actually live with it in this modern, muddled world? How can we fall in love with something so limited and wounded? And how can we go from loving to fighting? Finally, we must consider what role, if any, that hope plays in these questions.

Jensen's most well-known essay, "Beyond Hope," argues for a politics of hopelessness.  I couldn't disagree more. Without hope and the energy it provides we curl into the mental equivalent of the fetal position, hiding from the world. "Without hope there is no endeavor," wrote Samuel Johnson. He was not talking about the Disney variant of hope, but the real animal. It's the light that filters down into our dark brains, sparking our neurons. The brightening after darkness, which energizes like the quickening of the world after winter. A thawing and movement into activity, an activity that then gains momentum. This is hope as a physical thing: The hope that spring inspires, after the long winter.

It is just this sort of hope- hope spiced, of course, with a dash or two of vitriol-that energized me as I wrote my book, a book, I realized only gradually, that was aimed at younger readers who were going about the business of deciding what they might want to do with their lives.  My agenda was simple: To describe the ways that my own life, and the lives of some people I admire, are connected to the natural world, and the benefits that come from that connection, benefits that are not always obvious. To provide a way for those of us who would blanch at calling ourselves environmentalists to begin to at least think of ourselves as fighters, in the way that citizens suddenly think of themselves as soldiers during times of war. Finally, by both argument and example, to provide a new language for those of us who care about nature.

For me the embodiment of this sort of fighter was Dan Driscoll, a Massachusetts Eco Planner who has spent the last twenty years  fighting to clean up the Charles, adding greenways and native plantings and overall re-greening a place that was so famously dirty that it was the subject of the Standell's song, "Dirty Water." Dan serves as a fine counterpoint to the gloom and doom school of eco thought in his heartiness, passion for the local, and sense of humor.

"We nature lovers are hypocrites, of course," he said to me when we canoed the length of the river together.   "We are all hypocrites. None of us are consistent. The problem is that we let that fact stop us. We worry that if we fight for nature, people will say, ‘But you drive a car,' or, ‘You fly a lot,' or, ‘You're a consumer, too.' And that stops us in our tracks. It's almost as if admitting that we are hypocrites lets people off the hook."

I pulled my paddle out of the water to listen.

"What we need are more hypocrites," he said. "We need hypocrites who aren't afraid of admitting it but will still fight for the environment. We don't need some sort of pure movement run by pure people. We need hypocrites!"

I thought of Edward Abbey fighting for the West while throwing empty beer cans out the window of his truck. I thought of my own environmental Achilles heel, a dainty preference for hot baths over showers-not nearly as cool as Abbey's boozing, but possibly as wasteful. And then I thought of everyone I knew and knew of and couldn't come up with anyone who had an entirely clean eco-slate. Which seemed to mean that, logically, Dan was right: if only non-hypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none.

It occurs to me now that, in its frankness and open humor, Dan's attitude could do the environmental movement a world of good. We need to start again, I'm convinced, and we might do that by admitting that we are limited, human animals, not idealistic, über creatures.  And we need hope, too, not fanciful hope but the energetic, tough-minded sort.

Adapted from my new book, My Green Manifesto

How to Get on a Creative Roll, or, The Value of Momentum

Momentum.  I say the word so much in my classes that I wouldn't blame students if they walked out or threw bricks.  But I'll say it again.  Mo-men-tum. Sometimes it seems to me that the whole writing game-the whole of life?- is contained in that one word.  How do you get in movement and stay in movement?  The question.   How to get rolling and, more importantly, keep rolling?

As for the "keep rolling" part (which, momentum being momentum, is the easier part) many people have tricks, usually some variant on Hemingway's habit of stopping when you know what sentence you're going to write next.  That's not for me.  For one thing, if I know the sentence, I'll write it down while I've got it.   For another, it's just too rational.  "If I know what I'm doing I can't do it," said Joan Didion.  That's closer to it.  Momentum, whether starting it or keeping it, is about the continued thrust into the unknown.  The decision-if it even is a decision- to move forward without or beyond the aid of reason.  Momentum is the march into darkness when your sensible (and fearful) side is telling you stay put in your clean, well-lighted brain.

But this is pretty vague.  Let's get specific.

1. You are sitting at your desk writing, or kind of writing.  It isn't going well.  You started a long project, let's call it a novel, a week ago and you are at an impasse.  This morning your specific problem is that you need to get your main character, Elton, down to the farmers' market where he can meet Lorrie, the cute single mom.  But suddenly that idea seems kind of stupid.  As does the whole book.  Dark thoughts gather.  How did you ever think that you, busy you, would have the time or energy to write a novel?  Wouldn't it be better to start next January when you'll have more time?  That sickly feeling comes over you, that everything-I-write-seems-lame feeling.  Quitting looks more and more attractive.  If not quitting the whole project, then at least for the day.

But you don't.  Not this time.  Instead you somehow plow through those doubts and shove Elton into the car and get him driving down to the farmers' market.  You are typing now, though you are not initially freed from the curse of insecurity.  You're still pretty sure what you're doing sucks but at least you're doing it.  So you keep moving, keep typing.  Maybe in the back of your head you now remember that you don't have to be in a chipper mood to write well, and that, while we all improve as writers, we also pretty much write the way we write, our sentences like our fingerprints, and this is semi-reassuring becase it means your sentences come out the way they come out independent of your feelings about them.  And then Elton and Lorrie meet, and you like the description of her laugh (it isn't half bad), and you have him say something witty and then she, with little effort from you, says something witty back and.....

....and what you are experiencing, whether you know it or not, is the writerly law of momentum.  You are in motion and you might just stay in motion for a while.  It doesn't mean everything is perfect and that you will now write the whole novel is one great surge, like Dostoyevsky or something.  But it might mean you will write for another hour or so.  Tomorrow you might throw what you wrote away but tomorrow you might also feel a little different.  A little more solid, a tad more confident.  And, if you are lucky, you might develop a taste for this thing, this movement, this momentum, which might let you power through those doubts.

You understand, of course, that "power through" isn't a very artistic or sophisticated term.  But you are beginning to think it is an effective one.  The thing is that this is how "rolls" often start.  You have a crappy day but then you have a not-so-crappy day that leads to a very nice average day and then suddenly some part of you (maybe not your brain) realizes that you've had two not-so-bad days and then you have a good day and then, before you know it, you are feeling strangely confident.... You would jinx yourself by saying you are rolling.  But you are.

2. What I described above is momentum on a small daily scale.  But for writers there is also something else, something larger, that I will call career momentum.  It involves, for most of us, the creation of a book, or, hopefully, of books.

For writers who are starting, or writers who are stuck, I always bringing up Keats and the composition of his long poem Endymion (I even drew a cartoon essay about it.)

The gist is that Keats, at the beginning of his very short career, young and clueless, decided that rather than "Sit on the shore and pipe on his flute and take tea and comfortable advice" would "dive into the sea and see where the shoals were."  How did he do this?  He decided to put aside the short, cozy, and fashionable lyric poems he had been writing and set to writing a long epic poem. It did not go particularly well at first, but he-to use our new phrase-powered through, forcing himself to write a certain number of lines a day. Endymion is generally regarded as a somewhat weak poem, but from a psychological point of view it is fascinating. As Keats' biographer, Walter Jackson Bate, has written, the real benefits came later, in the next poems, and in the lack of fear in front of a blank page, and in the readiness of phrase that, having trained himself in Endymion, came more easily.  Bate quotes William James: "You learn to skate in the summer."

I am not saying that all our books need to be slammed together. You may be an entirely different sort of writer, one who composes in your head, and comes to the page with a vision, and with precision.  But for most of us, at some point, we need to put our perfect vision of a book on a shelf deep in the closet and get down to the work of writing.  Most books need to be framed out, like house, and framing isn't precision work.  Better to get in movement now and stay in movement since, as Samuel Johnson said, activity is "self corrective."

The strange thing is that once you are in movement, once you have momentum, you learn things you can never learn in theory.  Your reasonable brain, for instance, might have ideas about plot, but it can't know plot in a way someone who has wrestled with a book (or two) will.  Likewise, you may have some general ideas about your own work habits but these are just ideas until they are tested in the fire of a book.  Once you emerge from those fires, you suddenly know a lot more about yourself and are able to predict how you will respond, and, more specifically, practical things like how long it might take to finish a project or, at least, this chapter.  (I am listening to Elvis Costello's Greatest Hits as I type and "Every Day I Write the Book" just came on.  Really, I swear. So I might as well go with the music and say that that's another thing about momentum: once you get going you're going to want to get that feeling every day.  Day after day...rolling....The song's over now-a song called "Shipbuilding" is on.)

One final thought on momentum.  In skiing terms this might be more of black diamond tip, for experts only.  When you are starting out there is much to be said for focusing your energies on completing one project, one book.  But once you are rolling, once you have momentum on your side, there is nothing wrong with jumping around a bit, hopping from project to project.  I read a recent interview with Cormac McCarthy where he said he was working on five books at once. Why not, if you can do it?  It's a different kind of momentum than "powering through," the opposite of forcing, just going with the one that's coming. There are real advantages to this sort of method.  For one thing you are rarely stuck.  Often when you are working on one project the solution to another pops up. It's another one of those things that feel different when you're inside it than it looks from the outside, in theory. From the outside it might seem overwhelming to have so many balls in the air, to be doing so much.  But from the inside it can actually be a rejuvenating way of working.  "A change is as good as a rest," said Churchill, who knew a thing or two about variety.  It allows you to "rest" certain projects while keeping an overall movement.

And movement, after all, is what it's all about.

Cover Me

The other day I got the cover for my new book, The Tarball Chronicles.  There it is-up there.  I hope you like it.  I do.  I'm actually very pleased.  I think those of you who followed last summer's posts from the Gulf will agree that it gets across some of the sheer strangeness of the experience, of the tragic aspect of the BP spill but the black humor, too.  At least I think it does.  If you don't agree, please don't write me about it.  I'm too fragile at the moment.  Somewhat close to cracking up in fact.....

There is this anxious time in the life of a writer (um, when isn't an anxious time?), when you are done with a book but before it comes out.  You await the Day of Judgment, fearing, not so much being consigned to hell-hell at least is active and participatory-as nothingness.   Here is Ed Abbey, for instance, describing his book, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and the quiet reaction he imagined:  "Another drop down the well of oblivion."   (Of course, Abbey's worries proved wrong and any writer would like to have their book attain the level of non-oblivion that Monkey Wrench did.)

There is very little that is solid to grasp to during this phantasmagoric time, the time in-between being done with a book and it being done with you. And then they send you your cover.  They used to send it to you in the actual mail but now, as if to add to the airiness of the time, they send it through the ether as a link.  Though you, if you are like me, try to make it immediately corporeal by printing it out.   Then you hold it, pick it up, look at it from all directions, tack it to your bulletin board, tape it to your computer.  You look at it more closely than anyone else ever will, and you look at it more often than all the rest of the people who ever will see it combined.  You love it.  You hate it.  Despite the old saying, you judge your book completely by it.  One day it's a talisman, the next it's tea leaves.  This is what a bestseller looks like, you say in one mood.  This thing will surely flop you say in another.  I love it!  I hate it!  I love it (said more firmly).

But enough with that, Gessner.  Pull your mind together.  Regulate yourself (as Samuel Johnson would say).

One thing I do know.  No matter how my relationship with the above pelican in the HAZMAT suit develops, it will never achieve the intensity of romance that I had with my first cover.  In those days, pre-internet, I think the first time I saw the fully realized cover of my first book was when the book itself arrived in the mail.  There are a lot of cynical things I'll say about writing if properly nudged and lubricated.  But that moment was beyond cynicism.  It was incredible.  I always tell young writers that, whatever other demons might beset our writing tribe, and however incorporeal so many aspects of that life might feel, there is nothing like that purely physical moment of holding your first book in your hand.  Fuck Kindles.  Give me the heft of a finished book.  I can't remember what I did when I opened the package that finally had a book with my name on it (I was 36 at the time) but it surely  involved a jig.  And a yawp or two.

As it turned out that first cover would also be the one I've had the most input in so far.  They used a photo a friend of mine had taken while we were roaming the Cape Cod beaches one fall.  I think my friend did a great job, which is particularly impressive considering the psilocybin pulsing through his bloodstream at the moment he snapped the picture.

I love my Hazmatted pelican, and I wish it well in the world.   But there can only be one first love.  I hope every writer reading this has had, or will have, the experience of looking down at a book with your own name on it.  It makes all the madness worth it.

P.S. Sorry Kindle users, especially Kindle users who are viewing Bill and Dave's.  I got carried away.  We still love you.