The Greens’ War: Questioning Progress to Save the Spring

By Janelle Clausen

Nature has both captivated and catapulted humanity since its dawn. It inspired wonder and sheltered us, giving us the resources  to survive both literally and spiritually. But it has also been a battleground, subject to catastrophe by the very creatures exploiting it. Luckily though, strong voices in media exist and inspire ecological thinking. They are fighting a war to save not just the Earth, but ourselves. 

The opening scene of “A Fierce Green Fire” a documentary detailing the growth of the modern environmental movement, shows a wide span of nature for several seconds. The colors are vibrant. Birds fly and trees touch the heavens. But soon we see a small, grayish factory over the horizon, spewing pollution into the sky and invading the natural world. Before anything is even said, it’s clear that three things define nature: tranquility, transcendence, and tragedy.

This film is framed like a war- a battle for peace and balance, if you will. Many interviews likely lasted hours in their full form, but Director Mark Mitchell inserts sound bites like “rallying cry,” “pivotal battle,” “fight to the death,” “equality of extinction,” and “mass destruction of humanity,” just to name a few. There was never a question of who the heroes or enemies were either. Activists raced against loggers to try and save the forests. Lois Gibbs relentlessly fought against industry flooding her town with chemicals, and authorities that underplayed problems like poisoning and birth defects. Later, when grassroots progress came to a “screeching halt,” they immediately switched to Ronald Reagan, a symbol of pro-business views, saying activists wouldn’t be satisfied until “the White House was a bird nest.”

But this battle between human progress and peaceful nature began with Henry Thoreau- or so his diaries tell. The telegraph wire, at the time a monumental achievement of human engineering, intruded upon his silence. He later spent nearly 2 pages detailing the fall of a “noble” tree which otherwise could have “stood for a century,” a victim of humanity’s intrusion. The very idea that a tree could be warrior-like is the best kind of personification, which can draw sympathy and understanding from a reader.  “I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree,” he writes. In his time he realizing the earth he walks upon is “not a dead inert mass… It is a body- has a spirit- is organic… It is more cheering than the fertility & luxuriance of vineyards.” This reflects Thoreau’s perspective that we a small part of a living nature- and we are killing it. Thus, Thoreau asserts in Walden through his cabin building, it is possible (even ideal) to live with nature. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” he wrote. “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like.”

Thoreau’s sentiment would echo through time. “If Wal-Mart has an antonym,” Bill McKibben wrote, “it’s Wendell Berry.” He is referencing the author of “The Making of a Marginal Farm,” which details how Berry created a farm and lived within his means- just like Thoreau tried to do. They used no chemical fertilizers or insecticides, cycled the soil and used horses instead of tractors. He conceded that it was hard work, but that this “reclamation project” was a matter of “self-preservation” that also made he and his family healthier. Like human progress and industrialization are the enemies in “A Fierce Green Fire” and Thoreau’s work, he condemns how society is structured: “The worst disease of the world now is probably the ideology of technological heroism… This is the ideology of the professional class of the industrial nations,,, a class whose allegiance to communities and places has been dissolved by their economic motives.”

Like Thoreau and Mitchell show, there is some sort of yearning for something simpler and more natural, but the amount of effort required for his lifestyle is underplayed- and perhaps impossible today, like Thoreau’s. There are various legal, institutional, economic, political, personal and attitudinal problems, Julia Corbett writes in Communicating Nature. We may have families to support, a society that may scorn us, taxes to pay and what not, for example. ​Nonetheless, Berry’s writing style initially reflects “the landscape of harmony” he so appreciates, ​not quite trying to overpower the reader like Mitchell or Thoreau might be tempted to. It lures in the reader. But beyond here he writes daring declarations, even, echoing the idea that there should be no compromise when it comes to helping heal nature.

The idea of intrusion strongly permeates through Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature.” As Thoreau extensively mentioned the saw in his journals, McKibben’s ​powerful imagery plays the sound of a snarling buzzsaw in our minds. This frightening sound, introduced in one powerful sentence, lingers in our minds after. Humanity is never far away. As it was distant in “A Fierce Green Fire,” however, it was still there. People were still pursuing lumber. And as he’d later write, when the swimming in an otherwise isolated lake is interrupted, “it’s that the motorboat gets in your mind… You’re forced to think, not feel- to think of human society and of people.” McKibben paints a picture that there is no escape. Nature was once sacred. There is a certain emotional quality to it that is hard to explain, something that nearly goes beyond understanding. Unlike other works though, there seems no moment of hope.

But one more important film remains: “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.” It documented the life of Rachel Carson, an ecological crusader who rekindled an environmental movement through her love of nature. Throughout the piece, we see images of birds flying through a vast blue sky and beaches, uninterrupted by human interference. The music is soothing. This does not stray far in style from Thoreau, Berry and Mitchell, who craft a serene scene of nature. Even Carson’s childhood is painted as being serene and ideal, what with its close connection to nature. At the same time, like in “A Fierce Green Fire,” “Making of a Marginal Farm,” and “The End of Nature,” the hero and villains are framed perfectly well. Carson’s struggles are noted in detail, from her ulcers and chronic pain, to trying to decipher the “puzzle” that would become “Silent Spring.” Interestingly enough, her voice also sounds timid yet filled with conviction in this period- partially underwhelming, in some ways, like Berry’s. This makes the chemical industries vehemently trying to discredit- even attack- her seem all the more malevolent, even malicious. While Carson’s book ends up a success, her near death is framed as a tragedy, as would be the case of any hero. 

Some strong people have given nature’s silent tranquility a voice in the last two centuries. But ultimately, without Thoreau, it seems the environmental movement never could have blossomed without him.