Happy Earth Day!
Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century
by Ross Robertson
by Ross Robertson
I have always been a somewhat reluctant
environmentalist. I was practically weaned on John Muir’s Yosemite, and
as a kid growing up in the suburbs of California in the last decades of
the twentieth century, I fell fast in love with the depth and space and
beauty of the mountains. They were everything my world of clay lots and
cement and computer technology was not - cool, silent, elemental, rich
with unquestionable mystery. They were every bit as spiritual as church,
minus the dogmatism and the bake sales. The forest wilderness of the
Sierra high country made a green romantic out of me, and when I got to
college in Atlanta, I became concerned enough about the fate of nature
to do something about it. I organized river cleanups and letter-writing
campaigns, studied the classics of American nature writing, and sat on
the environmental committee of the university senate. I lobbied on
Capitol Hill in Washington and protested chip mills and nuclear reactors
in Tennessee. I even intercepted a Brazilian merchant ship on its way
into Savannah harbor and blocked it from unloading its illegal cargo of
Amazon mahogany, which was still wet with the blood of indigenous
tribes.
I’ll always remember the incredible sense of
purpose I felt that day as our small skiff shot over the waves at
sunrise, the righteous, lawbreaking freedom of putting my future on the
line for what I believed in. Even more than that, however, I’ll never
forget the confusion and the strange unease that came over me when the
action was done and we headed for home through the twilit forests of
coastal Georgia. It had been the ultimate statement of “us versus them,”
but somehow it left me feeling at odds with myself. Less than a week
from my twenty-first birthday, I was frightened to realize how far I’d
already come from love and idealism and the will to change things to
anger, frustration, and a cynicism that increasingly bordered on
desperation. I saw this in my friends, also. It cut us off from one
another, and when the urgency of our common mission brought us together,
it set us in opposition to the rest of the world.
I knew my days as an eco-extremist were done.
What I didn’t know then was that I was coming up against a shadow so
basic to the character of modern environmentalism, it would take me more
than a decade to find my way out from under it. That everywhere my path
would take me as a young activist in the coming years - from a lonely
bio-dynamic cooperative in the farmlands of rural Missouri to the
networked high-rises of the San Francisco nonprofit world - I was walking
down a well-worn track toward a dead end. It was only one day last
spring, in fact, that I finally figured out what was wrong and what to
do about it. That was the day a book called "Worldchanging" came across my desk and made me proud to call myself an environmentalist again.
If you bleed green like I do, you may also be
under the wings of a shadow so close to you, it’s difficult to see. This
blind spot has less to do with the environment and more to do with how
we perceive it - and how we perceive ourselves. To me, the most pivotal environmental issue we’re faced with is not climate change or hunger or
biodiversity or deforestation or genetic engineering or any of those
things. It is an issue that is going to determine what we do about it all: our deeply felt ambivalence toward the human race and our presence here on planet Earth.
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About the author:
Ross Robertson, Senior Editor, joined EnlightenNext's
editorial staff in 2003. With a BA in Creative Writing and Ecology from
Emory University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University,
he brings with him a studied dedication to the art of the written word.
But perhaps more significantly, he adds the perspective of an observant
and insightful Gen-Xer to the editorial team.
Before joining EnlightenNext Magazine, Robertson worked for the
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in San Francisco, applying his
study of conservation biology to various environmental projects. As
part of his tenure there, he helped produce the proposals for the Giant
Sequoia National Monument proclaimed by President Clinton in 2000,
preserving 328,000 acres for these three-thousand-year-old trees and
other wildlife.
Image source unknown but greatly appreciated