Ironic Ecology

Abstract

David Gessner's My Green Manifesto begins with recognizably grandiose descriptions of his canoeing down a river. “If I squint,” he writes, “I can imagine myself on a great and wild river, the Amazon or Congo or, at least, the Colorado, and can imagine the man steering the canoe behind me as an epic adventurer, Teddy Roosevelt, say, hurtling down the River of Doubt” (5). However, Gessner quickly undoes this fantasy: “this isn't the Amazon but the Charles.” This relatively simple switch—treating the Charles as a kind of Amazon—provides the conceptual basis for Gessner's extended musings on the state of environmentalism. His trip down the stale, overdeveloped river with Dan Driscoll, the man who is responsible for slowly restoring the Charles's riverbank, mirrors his attempts to articulate a new environmentalism. Early on in the work, he asks, “why does environmentalism, much of which is just common sense, so often sound like nagging?” (8). While his answer meanders as much as his trip down the Charles, his main current lies in a reinvigorating of “wildness” in our everyday lives (103).1 In other words, we need to find the wildness we usually associate with Roosevelt and exotic rivers in our own backyards.