An Environmentalist Goes Rogue - Nature Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be

Harley Finch was an environmentalist. He began his journey back in spotted owl and snail darter days, and spent most of his time either in the Oregon woods or the steps of the Capitol.  He was one of the first environmental activists at a time when most Americans thought of nature as a given, a place of recreation - picnics, campgrounds, a stroll in the woods.  

Harley knew however that nature was the lungs of the world and its spiritual home.  Thoreau was right when he wrote of his epiphanic Sunday afternoons by Walden Pond but Harley was still called a 'tree hugger' 

 

The country caught up with him in a few decades, and conflated the snail darter with global climate change.  Environmentalism wasn't just protecting endangered species, but a movement to save the planet. 

Now, after many years in the trenches, he seemed to be fighting what seemed to be a losing battle as environmental issues were far off the front pages.  If anything the media only reported contrived naysayer data about increasing Arctic ice, stable sea levels, and normal weather activity.  However, as Harley knew, the crisis had not gone away and in fact the doomsday clock was closer to midnight than ever.  Americans however, were paying no attention and have gone back to their backyard barbecues, PTA meetings, and summers at the beach. 

Because of this growing apathy, Harley became even more activist.  He needed to take the fight to the people, not simply let them mull over the facts, flip through the pages of the morning newspaper, dismiss articles citing new climate data, and turn to the sports page. 

In a speech at Duke University, a friendly venue, one always hospitable to progressive speakers, an academic setting where every aspect of the canon was embraced, Harley knew that he had a receptive, welcoming audience, and although this was not exactly bringing the fight to the naysayers, it was a warmup, a run through for his new more aggressive, demanding presentations. 

He hammered on about the melting polar ice caps, the warming oceans, the never before seen potency of El Nino, the further encroachment of the Sahara, the withering crops as far north as the Dakotas, and the invasion of parasitic flora and fauna which would soon take over farmland.   'It is not time to sit back, recline in the Barcalounger, watch some football, but to act'. 

The audience, more sparse than he had expected, gave him polite applause but only after Dean McPherson had prompted them with a 'Let's give Dr. Finch a big round of applause'.  Not even five years ago, the hall would have resounded with cheers, shouts of defiance and solidarity.  What had happened?

Environmentalism had petered out, faded and disappeared just like every other faddish cause that sweeps from California to the East and disappears into the Atlantic.  The weather in Washington this year had been no different than any other - temperate, some bad thunderstorms in August, a foot of snow in January, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Rehoboth, Dewey Beach, Ocean City, popular seaside resorts only a few hours from the city were just as they always had been, even tides, pleasant sea breezes, the usual crowds, cotton candy, ice cream, and Coppertone.  India suffered through summer heat just as it does every year, tropical storms battered Mindanao and Java but no worse than before.  Life goes on. 

'The silent killer', shouted public health officials hoping to address the issue of high blood pressure, a growing problem in fat, diabetic America; and Harley took it as his own meme, a pertinent message to those who were looking for signs of climate change they could recognize.  This killer is insidious, he said, coming in 'on little cat feet', quoting Sandburg and hoping to raise the level of inquiry

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on

Nothing. Those few students who came to listen to him sat on their hands, checking their phones, attending to other business leaving Harley standing alone, emptied, and disconsolate. 

This sparsity, this diffidence, this shirking ignorance, this absolute unconcern was particularly troubling for Harley because he had spent his whole adult life advocating for a sensible environmental policy and the existential danger of climate change.

'If the rule you followed led you to this', the Cormac McCarthy character Anton Shugur says to Carson Wells whom he is about to kill, 'of what use was the rule?' and so it was with Harley.  If environmentalism had turned out to be a silly cipher in the scope of things, of what value had his life had?

'I need to get away', he said to his wife one Friday. 'To the Shenandoah'.  Corinne knew exactly what was up.  Her husband was going through 'one of those sticky patches' that only the deep woods could cure.  Getting back to the motherlode, the spiritual center, his own Walden Pond. 

Yet this time as he walked the Blue Ridge Trail, ordinarily the one which loosened his collar, and let him forget Washington, he couldn't shake the empty halls, cancelled colloquies, and diminishing requests for articles in the Environmental Defense Fund journal and the Op Ed page of the NY Times. 

Recently he prayed for cyclones, hurricanes, and flooding tides.  The life led had to have some meaning; and now as he scanned the horizon for rain clouds but saw nothing but bright blue, his funk deepened. 

The fluttering leaves on the trees which once gave him a poetic sense of justice and profound happiness were now just leaves.  Fluttering was physics.  The magic of the woods, the spiritual sanctuary he had always sought had become simply a buggy, hot place he wanted to leave. 

Were Thoreau and his Transcendentalists crackpots? Outliers? Crazy hermits fleeing what was humanity's best and most enduring expression - cities? What was nature after all but a place to be transformed into Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny? Was Genesis wrong?

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and on every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth 

What was he doing in the woods, far from anyone or anything.  Who was he kidding? And so he returned home.  He had not had the epiphany he sought, but an epiphany nonetheless. Copses were not the spiritual idylls of the deep woods.  Glades were only incidentally infertile bits of ground not miraculous visions.  Susurrus was not a verse from heaven but equation - wind + pine trees = sound. 

Harley had been sold a bill of goods - or rather had bought the goods from a snake oil salesman.  Nature was nothing but rocks, trees, and vines. Louis XIV, the Sun King, revised nature, cleared the land and built the Gardens of Versailles. That was something to reflect upon. 

One of the latest in snake oil chicanery is the Ecotherapy movement, a program which promotes the improvement or restoration of the ‘human-nature’ relationship, and by so doing aims to rebalance our lives.  Americans spend between 85-99 percent of their time indoors, advocates say, thus distorting the psychological, spiritual, and physical balance we once had in an earlier, more pastoral age.

'Ecotherapy' refers to healing and growth nurtured by healthy interaction with the earth…Ecopsychology, the study of our psychological relations with the rest of nature, provides a solid theoretical, cultural, and critical foundation for ecotherapeutic practice. This perspective reveals the critical fact that people are intimately connected with, embedded in, and inseparable from the rest of nature. Grasping this fact deeply shifts our understanding of how to heal the human psyche and the currently dysfunctional and even lethal human-nature relationship.

The originators of Ecotherapy, on the other hand, believed no such thing; and knew that there was money in ventures strengthening the bond between man and nature.  They understood New Age philosophy, the spiritual nature of Environmentalism, and the anger and frustration of Americans living in a politically divisive, increasingly fragmented society. Their angst was real. ‘The talking cure’ was expensive and increasingly irrelevant.  Xanax, Zoloft, and Prozac were quicker, cheaper, and easily available; but pacified rather than cured.

A return to nature was the perfect solution – it was organic, pure, and inspirational.  An old-growth forest of 2000 year-old redwoods was as close as one could get to the Garden of Eden. Southern swamps were primeval and spiritually fundamental. Midwestern prairies simulated the inspirational wilderness of the Holy Land.

The commercial opportunities are endless. In addition to the hundreds of ‘clinics’ which are springing up around the country, books, skincare products, and ecological gifts are big revenue-producers.

P.T. Barnum famously noted that 'a sucker is born every minute', and no land has ever taken to the exploitation of that nostrum more than America. Ecotherapy is but the latest in a long history of con men, shell gamers, Ponzi schemes, and get-rich-quick follies. 

It wasn't that Harley gave up on the woods.  Let it be for the inspirational and idealists among us; but for him it was Versailles West that provided the inspiration, energy, and satisfaction he needed.  The Big City, the heart and soul of human enterprise, its best and most enduring expression, its...

Here he stopped himself from sounding like his old lecturing self.  Bullshit. He had simply given up on the notion of Nature holiness, Gaia, Thoreau, and all the Walden Ponds.  And who wouldn't? Was a buggy outing really that epiphanic? 

He admired the Ecotherapists for making a buck out Nature.  Logging, oil and gas, rare earth minerals were one thing.  Getting thousands of credulous Americans into the woods and making it into something extraordinary and uplifting takes genius. 

Fear And Loathing In Washington - Why The Left Is So Deeply Afraid Of Donald Trump

Bob Muzelle thought he was afraid of nothing; but of course that was nonsense.  He was so afraid of getting killed in the Vietnam War that he became a conscientious objector thanks to his desultory but recorded Quaker background.  It didn't take much to convince his draft board to give him an exemption, for his father, the local optometrist had given the examiners new glasses for decades.  As far as being a Quaker, it ran in the family and not much more. 

Bob did his CO duty, the equivalent of rolling bandages on the home front in WWI, but his sinecure was even easier.  He was a second year law student, assigned to the JAG, Judge Advocate General, and served his term of service as Brigadier General Hyman R. Lofton's aide de camp.  This position was usually referred to junior officers of the Army, but once again, the Garden City draft board's commander, a close friend of his father's, made a recommendation to the General, and Bob's position was secured. 

Other Yale graduates served in combat in Vietnam - volunteers all, either in the military tradition of their families, out of derring-do, or simply a patriotic sentiment to counter the rising student demonstrations against the war.  Most of them were killed - Second Lieutenants, always first over the wire, rarely came back home alive - and few remembered.  There was one, John Walton, who distinguished himself in the battle of Khe Sanh, won a silver star and a commendation for the Medal of Honor. 

Bob was jealous of Walton, and wished that he could have swooped down from home, kill a hundred North Vietnamese regulars, and be feted; but that airy vision was just fantasy.  If he took a hard look at himself, he was no war hero.  He had run from bullies, took the taunts of his classmates (Bob was fat, unathletic, and clueless about girls, the trifecta of adolescent animus), and did everything with caution, preparation, and without risk. 

After serving his two years in the Army, Bob joined the Civil Rights and Peace Movements, reupping his service with the Reverend Baxter Ames, Chaplain of Yale, socialist, activist, hero of the Left and always on the front lines demanding an end to the war, and the final restitution of the black man. 

Joining the Ames brigade was a natural for Bob whose Army service, such as it was, gave him a certain authority to speak out against the war and to speak for the heroism of the black man on the front lines. The black draftees were actually little more than cannon fodder, sent into battle by racist officers only two generations removed from segregation and slavery; so Bob was making it all up, but it went down well with the idealism of his audiences. 

Bob spent his life in The Movement just as he did during his Army service.  He was never on the front. lines but always serving those who took Bull Connor's ax handles and attack dogs first hand.  He never had to prove either his commitment or courage, and hoped that he never would have to.  The idea of being thrown into an Alabama jail, buggered by black murderers and abused by the trusties hired to guard them was terrifying.  

Fast forward to the present day, the era of Donald Trump.  Bob had burnished his record as a progressive's progressive and had been called on, even in these, his elder years, to speak to the young about their duty to oppose the hateful, despicable, traitorous government of the President. He was loud and insistent, drawing on decades of prepared speeches, spiced with local lore, anecdote, and homily. 

Yet there was something truly threatening about a man who had shown will, determination, and defiance during the Biden years during which he had to fight many unfounded, frivolous, politically motivated lawsuits at once, all of which he met with bullying rancor.  Not once was did he appear contrite, apologetic, or politically concerned.  He was being pilloried, racked, and tried by a cabal of Salem witch hunters, and he would never give in to them.  And vengeance would be his. 

Now that the President was in his second term and no matter what the outcome would retire in sybaritic pleasure, the just rewards of a long, successful career in business, Hollywood, and Washington. Since re-election was not in the cards, he could do whatever he pleased with impunity. He had never paid any attention to the howls of the Left about bigotry, racism, homophobia, or misogyny. in the first place.  The Left was nothing but a failed, discredited, craven, and hysterical mob - irrelevant, ignorant, and stupid. 

When a politician like Trump - and there haven't been many like him, if any - wields his sword, it is time to duck, not engage.  What he was doing was not simply refuting the Biden era policies of faux peace, unrealistic social equality, diversity, inclusion, and identity, but taking them apart one by one.  The Musk-led DOGE Anschluss down Independence Avenue to rid the nation of a paper-pushing, mindless bureaucracy was only the most visible assault.  The deployment of ICE troops was an even more militant statement of his intention to return the country to its foundational roots. 

Yet these physical, visible actions were only to show his resolve.  Beneath the Sturm und Drang, he was busy dismantling every other progressive reform that had been effected during the Biden years.  He was ridiculing gender reform, calling out the inner city as a sinkhole of ignorance, violence, dysfunction, and perennial irresponsibility, bombing offending nations, and unleashing the private sector in a Robber Baron-like laissez-faire capitalist panzer attack. 

'What will he do next?', wondered Bob's minions in his 10th Street walkup office, a comedown from the old days of bright corner offices, but an expression of the tenor of the times.  The old school, hands-across-the-water, black and white arm in arm across the Pettus bridge, sit-ins and freedom rides epoch was over and done with. 'Black folk don't need no whitey', said LaShonda Evans, formerly of Black Lives Matter, but now the spokesperson for Democratic Socialists For Racial Justice. 

Bob had been marginalized, isolated, and forgotten in the Trump onslaught and the retrenchment of his formerly collegial progressive redoubts. The conservative Trump juggernaut with the President at the helm was destroying all sensible, humane, and charitable programs; and the cabal of businessmen - Musk, Huang, Ellison, Page, and Brin - was turning the nation into a terrifying, robotic, nightmarish landscape.  

If this unholy alliance were allowed to continue, climate Armageddon would soon be upon us - the rich would float on rising tides in their mansions, while the poor were inundated and washed away in the dark night. The nation would once again be owned, managed, and run by privileged white men. 

In Bob's worst funks, he had his doubts.  He had spent decades doing nothing, producing nothing, creating nothing; and only criticizing, carping, and hectoring like and old maid.  Meanwhile this genius cluster had revolutionized humanity! Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and recombinant DNA would usher in the post-human generation and create a new world of unlimited possibilities - world where the mind is freed from brick and mortar, the body freed from pedestrian tasks, and an almost unfathomable universe opened up. 

He feared Donald Trump not because of his assault on the gender spectrum.  If he was being honest with himself he would admit that the whole idea of trans-this and trans-that was ignorant folly.  He knew that the bureaucracy was a fat, happy, bloated sinecure for has-beens and do-nothings; that the black man was not worth his weight in salt; and that socialism had died with the crumbling of the Berlin wall. 

Bob feared Trump because he was like Yale classmate John Walton, KIA Medal of Honor candidate - a doer, a courageous front-line hero, a man of action.  Trump would stop at nothing to reform the world in his image, and people like Bob would be swept away like trash, unwanted, irrelevant bits and pieces.  Bob was nothing compared Brin, Musk, and Huang.  He was a little man, an empty man, an insignificant man who had wasted his life badgering others, living in a suburban split level, cutting coupons, and working late.  No arm candy, no yachts, resorts, skiing vacations in Gstaad or summers on the Vineyard. 

What was Bob afraid of this time?  Of being remembered as a catcalling cipher. 

Which he was, but as the Yale Alumni Magazine reported in a short obituary, 'He tried to do good'. 

Optimism, Pessimism, Realism - Good, Bad, Indifferent, OK, But What's A Nice Jewish Girl To Do?

A pessimist and an optimist meet on a streetcorner.  The pessimist says, 'Things couldn't possibly get any worse.'

'Oh, yes they could', said the optimist. 

Sadie Bernstein didn't consider herself either an optimist or a pessimist, and certainly not like her father, Abe whose 'Oy, vey' commiserations over brisket and potato latkes were like kaddish prayers - without them the meal would not be a meal, so the family listened patiently as he told of misery, loss, ignorance, and, last but not least, the piece de resistance of the meal, 'What's in it for the Jews?'

'We can barely keep our heads above water', said Abe, 'with all the Jew-haters on every corner. The black people have the N-word; but for us the K-word never stuck. "Jew" is bad enough. We don't need anything else'

'Come on, Abe'. said his wife. 'We've got Zuckerberg, Ellison, Page, Dell, and Brin.  What do you call that?'

'With all their money, what did they do for the Jews', said Abe. 'They're just goyim with yarmulkes'.

And so it went every evening at six when the meal was put on the table, the children put away their books, Abe washed up and sat at the head of the table, and the discussion started. 

Perhaps because of her father's pessimism Sadie tried to look on the brighter side of life.  This Jewish thing was getting her down. Her classmates were having fun.  Life was to be lived without second thoughts, regards for consequences, or troubling morality. In the mirror of he shtetl, the Warsaw ghetto, and the Holocaust, how could anyone be happy? That's why these goyim, the ones who put us in the ovens, don't think about anything except the next sailing for the Mediterranean.  

So, hard as she tried, it was impossible for Sadie to see the silver lining in anything, let alone the miracle of a beautiful sunset.  The weatherman predicted two inches of rain for tomorrow, so no sunset, leaks in the roof, delays on the roads, and wet socks. 

She envied Muffy Parker, blonde, blue-eyed prom queen who had every boy at Jefferson Carver High salivating, buzzing around her like bees around a lily, and she wasn't really all that great looking.  Her popularity came from what she did after hours, throwing that blonde bush around like Christmas candy, something a good Jewish girl would never do unless the boy were from a a good family and even then she would think twice. 

Sadie whipped through Algebra I and II, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus, was headed for MIT on a Lewison scholarship, and instead of being optimistic about her life promises, she was only the Jewish grind, of course she's going to MIT and will grind her way into some laboratory somewhere. 'That's what they do'.  How could anyone shake that off especially because it was true. 

'You are what you are', said Aaron Altschul  a boy who had grown up in Crown Heights but who had none of this optimist-pessimist nonsense she heard at her dinner table. 'You're a Jew, so am I.  Deal with it' and so entered the third corner of the triangle - realism.  Everyone is dealt a hand from the same deck of cards.  Some get face cards, others low numbers.  The luck of the draw which is what life is, take it or leave it.  You want face cards but you got deuces and threes? Forget about it.' 

'Now we Jews got a lot of face cards. Why, you might ask? Did God stack the deck? What else could he do? He gave us more brains than anyone else, but finished the job too quickly.  We might be smart but not so great in the looks department.  Would you wish this (here he pointed to his face, typically Jewish, doughy, broad and narrow in the wrong places, lips too oversized to be sensual, and a nose...) on anyone? Deal with it'

Even today, girls Sadie knew were disappearing with a Jewish nose after finals and returning before Fall semester looking like Hollywood queens.  Nips and tucks were supposedly non-ethnic, but who was kidding whom?  The whole plastic surgery racket was to make everyone look like Nantucket WASPs.  Where was the play-the-hand-you're-dealt realism in that?

So if she believed her father, Talmudic scholar, successful businessman, good Jew but irremediable pessimist, she would have to look at life as worse than Hobbes's 'solitary, poor, brutish, nasty, and short'. If she hung out with her Nantucket friends, the future would always be a romance novel, full of endless opportunities, love, prosperity, and happiness; and if she listened to Aaron Altschul she would be obliged to trod forward without reflection, taking life as it comes, neither happy nor unhappy. 

She was angry at herself for continuing to debate the issue - again, she was becoming a stereotypical Jew, parsing everything like the Apocrypha, like some bearded rabbi trying to find meaning in the most arcane Jewish texts. Why couldn't she let go and have a fling? 

Besides, her biological clock was ticking, and if she always had her head in the Pentateuch, she would not even notice it if Mr. Right came along. Her father would say, 'You'll be lucky to find a husband who's not a philandering drunkard'.  Her former Christian classmates, all married with children and summering on old homesteads on the Vineyard would say, 'He's out there, Sweetie. Definitely'; and Aaron Altschul would only manage a 'Take what comes along with codicils' kind of realist legalese. 

Her maiden grand-aunts had escaped the Nazis in Poland by passing as Christian, and once the pogroms were over, the camps destroyed, the prisoners liberated, and the war ended, they never bothered to discard their personae and return to Jewishness.  No, being part of the majority was 'salubrious', as one had written in her journal. 

'I would never go that far', thought Sadie, never revoke my Jewishness, my heritage, and my religion; but maybe their might be an easy elision, a smooth flight path to Nantucket and the Vineyard. Ah, optimism, she thought before the old warnings of her father niggled their way in to her brain.  'They will never accept you, never you should forget it'; and Block Island, Aaron would say, is just as good as Gay Head or Harthaven. 

Mr. Right never came along, but then again in Aaron's universe - the one she finally adopted - there is no such thing in the first place.  She met a nice man, a prosperous man, one who didn't drink and who was from a good family. He had a Jew in the woodshed a few generations back, so he wasn't concerned about that.  He was a temperate, good natured soul which combined both optimism and realism, and except for visits to the Brooklyn nursing home to visit her father, the old bugaboo, pessimism for Sadie was on permanent leave.