Back to Basics: A Cry for Help

By Isabelle Naimo

I came out of this week’s readings needing a box of tissues and a pair of gardening gloves. Bill McKibben and Henry David Thoreau both left me longing for a place in nature I once knew. Maybe it was because I had sappy acoustic music playing in the background, but reading his words jolted me back to the past… back to the David Weld Sanctuary with its fresh air, where it lacked in stop signs and pavement, public restrooms and water fountains, trashcans and Starbucks coffee cups – it lacked all those things that show evidence of human life. 

It was absolutely beautiful; a perfect retreat. The trees and land were lavishly green, serving as a playground for the rabbits, and the shrubs, a perfect hiding spot for the deer while I walked by. I visited infrequently, until it was closed off from the public due to humans doing what they do best – destroying nature. They left me with that sort of nostalgic sadness over their own familiar spots in nature; generating that same longing some adults get for their mother’s homemade soup when the common cold strikes. After months of patience while it was closed down, the sanctuary has finally reopened to the public as of this past December. I hope that the general public can now treat this preserve with respect =and cherish this piece of the natural world.

Once I started to read the excerpt from Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, I was reintroduced to a horrible reality I know too well. He talks about the snarls of chainsaws heard through the woods and how it becomes harder to “get caught up in the time-less meaning of the forest, for man is near-by.” His use of imagery in describing the sound of the chainsaw aids in emphasizing how destructive it actually is. While no trees were victim to chainsaws in my particular spot, it was very much disturbed by human life. Its beauty was stolen by the temporary trash of plastics and aluminum but forever tattooed with graffiti. Now that perfect tranquil place has been taken. It’s a reality that makes me ashamed to be apart of the species that is ending nature. And like McKibben living on four hundred times the amount that Thoreau did, I’ve done my own share of damage through the years. I didn’t always recycle and I’ve poured toxic household products down the drain before becoming interested in the environment and educating myself. And even now, I continuously forget to bring my reusable shopping bags to the grocery store. But the best I can do for our planet is to simply try my best. Perfection may not be attainable but it’s better than the person who doesn’t even try.

Henry David Thoreau depicted two years of his life in the book Walden, though he lived in the cabin near Walden Pond for six years total. Thoreau’s style of writing, poetic and slow-paced, personified the natural world allowing his readers to see our land as more than just something man conquers. Throughout the book, he also emerges himself in nature and learns to live both simply and self-sufficiently. Ultimately, the tale of Walden proves to future generations that we don’t need that much to live. Living a good life doesn’t necessarily have to mean making the environment suffer in return. Aside from the simplicity of living off the land, Thoreau states, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.” A common theme through Walden is the American standard of society and class. Thoreau wholeheartedly believed Americans were savages and everything of our existence was linked to money and political power (he’s not exactly wrong). While at Walden Pond, he was able to separate himself from the typical distractions of life and the norms of society altogether.

Thoreau puts a great emphasis on self-reliance, something I cannot help but to admire. Through his time at Walden Pond, he lives independent from the financial system. And too often, myself along with many of my peers, waste our most precious years of youth and health working ourselves down to graduate with a degree. And with that degree, we’ll get a job and continue to work ourselves down in an attempt to pay off the debt we’ve accumulated while working towards that very degree itself. It all seems a bit silly. How I wish I had the means and courage to live off grid, completely independent from the norms of society.

Wendell Berry also took the path of self-reliance and living simply. Similar to Thoreau, he too learned how to live off the land and directly associated himself with nature. Although unlike Thoreau, Berry’s writing is very personable and easy to read. His style allowed me to become invested into his story and interested in what he had to say. Berry’s article “The Making of a Marginal Farm” tells the story of how he started his own farm to grow food for his family and the health benefits that resulted. The war on GMOs and eating organic is a topic that has caught on recently so I personally found myself eager to keep reading. We’ve all heard the controversy of fruits and vegetables found in a typical grocery store. They’re not always organic and they’re not locally grown, meaning they had to be shipped from miles away. And the longer they were on that airplane and that truck, the less fresh they are once it ends up on our kitchen counters. In the making of Berry’s farm, he didn’t use any chemical fertilizers or insecticides. The quality of the food he grew increased with the health of his land and therefore he became healthier.

That box of tissues I needed after reading McKibben could’ve came in handy while I was watching A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet. It didn’t leave me longing for a place I associate with happiness or sentiment, but more or less, the documentary could be viewed as a history lesson in the harsh truth of environmentalism. It documents the span of fifty years, covering so much material that it actually fell short for me. Each Act focused on a different time period and environmental issue. Act II was the strongest in my opinion. It focuses on the fight against pollution that arose in the 70’s surrounding the neighborhood of Love Canal. The angry housewives, along with their leader Lois Gibbs, made it easier to stay intrigued. Their anger was definitely justified – Gibbs, for example, was one of the many mothers whose children became ill. The community of Love Canal was so ridden with toxic waste that health issues like cancer, birth defects, and even death became unsettlingly frequent. The scary thing is that what happened to the citizens of Love Canal could happen anywhere. So while the documentary may not exactly be nostalgic, it certainly leaves its viewers crying for a simpler time.

The tragedy of Love Canal ties to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson’s researched revealed the alarming dangers of pesticides and herbicides have on the environment, wildlife, and inevitably our health. Her work sparked the environmental movement. This documentary serves as a tribute to her legacy, highlighting her success along with her struggles as she fought for environmental justice. What is so bittersweet is that, Carson worked endlessly to raise awareness to the side effects of DDT and in conclusion, ended up passing away from cancer. Stories like Love Canal and heroines like Rachel Carson can help motivate people, women in particular, to take control of their health and the future livelihood of their families. After all, according to Communicating Nature’s third chapter, The Links Between Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors, young educated women are most likely to care about issues of the environment. 

The third chapter of Julia B. Corbett’s book Communicating Nature discusses how individual attitudes and behaviors leave the question on how to make people care about environmental issues far too complex to answer. She breaks down different examples of fictional characters and the various aspects to consider when figuring out a way to communicate issues of the environment to them. There are several factors to consider when anticipating how someone will take action, such as attitude, personal background, and routine habits.  Her writing is effectively “dumbs down” psychology for those of us that aren’t as inclined to dig deeper. To conclude, we all have our own stories and beliefs, therefore we may not all grow our own farms like Wendell Berry or distance ourselves from society like Henry David Thoreau, but surely, there are enough solutions that can help the environment for all of us to choose from.

 Bringing our lives back to simplicity, back to the basics, might be the universal change that needs to be made in order to help save our planet. That might seem intimidating though if you’re anything like me and don’t know the first thing to starting your own garden, or if you’re just not quite ready to cut ties and move into the wild (we all know how it ends for Chris McCandless). 

The good news is that there is other things you can do to both simplify your life and help save the planet. Green Living Online effectively talks about 9 easy ways the average person can do everyday to limit their impact on the environment. It lists choices as basic as eating less meat or buying locally grown food, to reducing energy consumption, to simply consuming less stuff. There’s an endless amount of simple things people can do everyday to help, because every little thing matters. An article like this one is so effective because it’s straight to the point, relatable, and easy to read. The destruction of our environment can be intimidating enough – educating people on ways they can help shouldn’t be.