The Long Winter
by Philip Shabecoff

E-mail this Page to a Friend

I was at my desk working on my current book project, a kind of ecological memoir, when I heard the first news over our local public radio station. We do not have a television set but after a while we went over to a neighbor's house and watched in grief and horror the images of the two huge towers, filled with living human beings, melting to the ground

When we returned home, I went back to my desk. Nothing. All I could do for the rest of that clear, warm day was sit outside looking down the long slope to a pond. The late summer woods were still green except for one red maple halfway down to the pond which always starts turning color early and which, for at least the last ten years, I have been sure would not survive the winter. Now it seemed to be an apt metaphor for the uncertain, precarious future suddenly before us.

I could not get back to work the next day or the next. Writing about the health of the environment, which I had been doing for nearly a quarter of a century, felt pointless, irrelevant. I puttered fitfully in the garden, harvesting the last of the tomatoes and cucumbers, and split some wood for the coming winter. My wife Alice and I went for walks on our quiet dirt road. Friends from Boston came to visit and we tried not to talk too much about the evil that had suddenly descended upon us. After they left, I still could not resume writing. And when I checked in on the Internet discussion line of the Society of Environmental Journalists, I found out that other reporters were feeling the same sense of futility about their work.

Gradually, however, the despair ebbed. Perhaps it was the quiet and beauty of our mountain but I finally understood that care for our physical habitat was still important, more important than ever, in fact. The sick fanaticism that inspires mass murder and suicide in the name of God will probably continue to disrupt our lives and kill more of us, perhaps for years to come. But I understood that the land, the water, the trees, our grandchildren will endure - if we care for them and protect them. I knew, as I have long known, that the harm we are inflicting on the earth - our only home - through our willful carelessness, our greed and the flawed arrangements we have made for living on this planet, is our greatest danger. If we let the climate go out of control, if we continue to eliminate life with which we share the earth and on which we will depend for survival, if we continue to poison and acidify and irradiate the land and water and our own bodies, the damage over the long run will be far greater than any that could be inflicted by suicide hijackers and anthrax spores.

Now we must be even more vigilant in protecting the human habitat. Terror could well strike at our drinking water, our food supplies, our nuclear power plants, our chemical factories, our pipelines and power grids. Unscrupulous politicians are already using the crisis to reach for goals denied them in the past, such as opening the Artic National Wildlife Refuge to exploitation and the ability to conceal abuse of the environment.

So I have gone back to my desk. I will continue to write my ecological memoir. And I urge all my writing colleagues and others who labor to protect the environment to do the same. It is the best way for us to continue to tend our gardens over this long winter.

Wendell Berry | Alison Deming | William Kittredge
Richard Nelson | David W. Orr | Chet Raymo | Pattiann Rogers
Scott Russell Sanders

and More...