A Voice Crying In The Wilderness - The End Of An Environmentalist

Arnold Wolf was born and grew up on the Upper West Side of New York, the son of a prosperous Jewish family whose forbears had settled on the Lower East Side after escaping the worst of the Soviet pogroms.  Isaac, Arnold's grandfather could have been in a fairy tale - ragpicker turned used clothier turned master tailor then partner in Goldstein & Wolf, purveyor to Givenchy - and his son, Herman sold the business, invested in the renovated real estate of Alphabet City, made a fortune, and moved to Riverside Drive (he never wanted to be far from his cousins) with houses across town and on Long Island. 

 

Arnold was a privileged boy, good at chess and rabbinical studies, headed for Harvard and then who knew what - the Wolfs had never worked for anyone, whether pushcart vendor or scion of 7th Avenue - and he was a youngster with a future as certain as if it had been etched in the tablets on Mt. Sinai. 

When the car came every morning to take him to Yeshiva, he chatted with the driver, an Irishman from Queens who had been with the family for years, about the life ahead.  'Watch out for the ladies', the driver warned, “they’d as soon eat you as look at you’, to which the recondite, proper Arnold laughed politely. He was learning banter as if it were Swahili, and soon would do a good back-and-forth with Paddy O'Brien as naturally as drawing water. 

He never could quite reconcile his rabbinical studies with his future career as public prosecutor.  Perhaps it had to do with Mosaic Law, the Book, and Jewish apocrypha.  It didn't have to make sense since his brother, Saul, and his cousins Peter and Sinai had all become famous as 'The Jewish Genghis Khans of the Fifth Circuit'.  His future was ordained, as it were, and there was nothing that could alter its course. 

 

And so it was that Arnold Wolf went to Harvard, graduated with honors, was admitted to Harvard Law, and became an Assistant District Attorney for the City of New York, Brooklyn's 7th District.  There he saw it all - con men, hustlers, pimps, Ponzi-scheme fraudsters, and hookers.  He had to admit as he prosecuted a minor Jewish crook who had finagled a few thousand dollars out of a Coney Island hot dog franchise, that he was supremely impressed with Bernie Madoff. 

Yes, Madoff had bilked his fellow Jews out of millions but what chutzpah! His Ponzi scheme was, by the time he was uncovered and prosecuted, a masterpiece, a complex intersecting network of nothing, not only a house of cards, but an imaginary one.  Such daring.  Such balls. 

Then, as Arnold's reputation preceded him, he got more and more high-profile cases, and drifted into environmental law.  A company with thousands of employees was accused of breaking EPA regulations and razing forestlands that had been slated for environmental protection. 'Seen one tree, seen them all' seemed to be the only defense that the logging company had to offer as it challenged the jurisdiction of a jerry-rigged, political body bound and determined to inhibit private enterprise. 

Although Arnold had a good case - the legal statutes enabling the EPA in this particular instance were well-ordered - he understood the company's point of view.  What, really, was the value of X hectares of forest, virgin or otherwise, when compared with the economic value of the lumber harvested, the condos and theme parks built and the millions in tourism revenues to be realized?

The defense piled on and talked of 'sanctity...natural heritage...spiritual endowment...and the nation's lungs... but Arnold was not convinced.  A lot of New Age fol-de-rol and liberal cant; but unwilling to recuse himself on the grounds of ideology or preference (the law wanted factual proof of bias), he prosecuted the case. 

It was an open and shut affair based on legal precedent, but Arnold left the courtroom unsatisfied.  What was this environmental thing, this nature thing all about in the first place; and why were people so adamant about preserving it.  So he accepted an unofficial invitation to camp and trek in the Tuscarora mountains of Montana, the very locus of legal action. 

He, on the advice of mountain guides and naturalists outfitted himself with bells, whistles, mosquito repellent, and bear spray and made his way up the mountain trails into the forest.  The old growth forest was dark, brooding and spooky.  With the thought of a bear around every corner and having to whistle, shout and sing at every switchback, he retreated down the mountain to Paradise Valley.  

His hosts suggested other, less demanding trails amidst sagebrush, vermillion, and heather; but there too he was wondering what on earth the shouting was all about.  He had seen more and better in his Sony home entertainment center when his children asked for a Bambi epic. 

The worst of it all was a trip down the Yellowstone River, a tedious, monotonous, bumpy ride with nothing to see - a few hawks and vultures, a deer, and a rabbit in the sights of a Bozeman teenager on 'safari' but nothing more; and the bugs were getting fierce. 

The sun, heat, bugs, and monotony were oppressive. 'What on earth are they thinking?', Arnold asked himself as the rafts pulled into shore. 

The world's civilizations including his own - the Kingdoms of Saul and David - were the beating hearts of humanity.  Law, art, science, literature, and philosophy were generated in cities.  What could possibly come from some remote outpost in the Amazon, the African veldt or the Ross ice shelf? 

So he went back to 115th Street and back to prosecuting crooks and fraudsters conning money out of rubes and dupes.  There were enough of them to keep the wheels of justice turning, and better to put those crooks in the slammer than movers and shakers. 

If he needed a respite, Riverside Park, Central Park, or even the newly repurposed Bryant Park were more than enough.  In fact if he moved too far outside his familiar perimeter - The Hudson and New Jersey - he became uneasy.

He never 'got' the spotted owl or the snail darter.  Let them be consumed or subsumed by Darwin's great evolutionary triage.  They were of no intrinsic value in the give and take of survival of the fittest, so if you wanted to get a glimpse of them before they went extinct, fine; but for him it would always be Michelangelo, DaVinci, and the temples, palaces and gardens of kings. 

Peace, solitude, inspiration from desolate places? He had more insight from Shmuel Katz of Katz's Delicatessen. 'You want Nature? Try my pastrami.  It was once on the hoof', he advised.