A class on class and nature

In which our hero started telling a story and got confused

Just before a November 2016 sunset, my parents stood admiring yet another tidal marsh (John Clayton photo)

At a small New England college in 1982, the hippie-versus-preppie vibe was weirdly unsettled. I felt a certain pressure of aristocracy, partly from the wealthy kids who had literally attended prep schools, and partly from us middle-class kids who envied them. Meanwhile, protests were passé, Vietnam and the civil rights movement long over, most of the radicals buried deep in books. But when I walked into Kellogg House, their spirit seemed to circulate. It made me uncomfortable.

Kellogg was a former large old family home that had been swallowed by our campus and now housed the Center for Environmental Studies. One of its old rooms was a classroom, even though it still felt like somebody’s living room, full of houseplants. Our introductory class didn’t meet here—we met in a lecture hall in the Science Quad—but here we attended mandatory small-group discussions led by a teaching assistant just a year or two older than we were.

So everything felt a bit off to me: weird classroom, weird expert, weird topic. “Environmental Studies” was a new field, and I never quite understood its boundaries. I gathered they were somewhere between the science of ecology and the op-ed page of the newspaper. That would mean each student’s contribution to the discussion had to be somewhere between knowledge and opinion.

One day, our homework was to bring a story to tell that might spark environmental discussion. Mine was about how, when my parents bought their house, they decided to clear out some brush in the backyard to feel less closed off from a tidal marsh—a story involving poison ivy and lots of trips to the dump. But the point of the story was what happened next: They got a visit from the regional Conservation Commission. Somebody had apparently tattled on them. Clearing brush on the marshside—they learned after the fact—was illegal.

Many of us tell stories because we’re trying to figure them out. And that was certainly me as I stepped into my new collegiate life. In this story, who was right and who was wrong?

That day, I told the story the way my father usually did: The rich folks on the other side of the marsh didn’t want to look at the backyards of riffraff like us. They’d cleared out their own marsh views and then captured the Conservation Commission, twisting its goals to their benefit. My family’s work had not disturbed the marsh, only the weeds beside it. So “environmentalism” had led to unnecessarily strict regulations that were part of a class war, the wealthy securing their benefits at the expense of less-wealthy folks like us.

But in the middle of telling the story, I felt confused and incredibly vulnerable. I had thought of myself as someone who liked nature. Why was I arguing against environmental regulations? And in this setting! The few remaining hippies in the room would hate me for disrespecting the environmental movement, and the preppies would hate me for dissing the rich… unless the preppies embraced me for dissing the government, and the hippies… embraced me for dissing the government? But I had thought of myself as someone who liked the government! How did this all work? And why couldn’t someone explain it to me?

In the years since I left that classroom, that moment has stuck in my mind. In part, that’s because my understanding of the story has become only more confused. My parents’ neighbors later cleared out their own marshside brush and didn’t seem to get in trouble. Indeed, people up and down the street seemed to become bigger fans of the marsh, now that they could observe it. They were like tourists who visit Yosemite and become advocates for protecting Yosemite—except that this was literally right in their own backyards.

However, I also learned that this sort of brush-clearing probably was bad, ecologically. The stuff going to the dump wasn’t just weeds. And a marsh isn’t just the water. It’s a complex ecosystem that might be damaged by aesthetic alterations. Then again, that marshside achieved a worthy stasis for the next 40 years. There seemed to be more wildlife, or at least it was more visible.

I don’t think my father ever had any proof for his version of events. He was easily tempted by class-based conspiracy theories. As he aged and grew, it seemed to me that he was able to let go a bit. He stopped telling this story—maybe he’d figured it out. But I’ve written about that temptation to tell class-based stories, and I keep thinking about the relation between such temptations and the foundations of environmental politics.

I walked out of that classroom in 1982 dissatisfied with the teaching assistant. He’d left me hanging. He hadn’t been able to help me overcome my discomforts. Nor had he used those discomforts to make a broader point for the class. The discussion went nowhere. Apparently the story didn’t work for anyone else in the room either. I’m sure I’m the only one from that class who still remembers it.

Although as I’ve aged, I’ve let go of it a bit. I now wonder if the ideal discussion leader could have said, “Welcome to the rest of your life. I sense your discomfort, and let me reassure you: You will never find answers to dispel these questions. That future of doubt holds for all of us in this room! Our only solace: maybe, if we’re lucky, we will have passions or jobs where we get to think about these questions. We get to live them, rather than bury them.”

Today, society increasingly sees how the past has been unfair to marginalized and lower-class populations. We see how institutions have been warped to help the fortunate. We learn the potential for coming mass extinctions. We face continuing population explosions. And a changing climate turns up the heat on all of those debates.

I propose that we’re all like that 18-year-old me: We’re trying to figure out stories of conflict. We’re tempted by easy interpretations. We’re waiting for someone to explain it all. But maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to spend the rest of our lives actively seeking that explanation.