CELL PHONE NATURALISTS
BROOKS, DAVID
CELL PHONE NATURALISTS By David Brooks I must have been crazy to think I could climb to the top of the REI outdoors-gear store in Seattle without a professional guide and months of training. I'm...
...It is the cell phone in the forest...
...I imagine myself sporting this number, saying to myself, "Here I am in the middle of the forest and I'm wearing the Starship Enterprise...
...But the San Francisco and Washington offices of the old-fashioned environmental groups like the Wilderness Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club declared war on the agreement, seeing any effort to bridge the divide with big timber as a deal with the devil...
...Here in the Pacific Northwest, bastion of casualness, the same sort of attention is paid, only this time to rugged outerwear...
...I'm getting tunnel vision...
...This prejudice leads environmental activists to adopt all sorts of absolutist approaches to environmental problems...
...The economic arguments are often compelling, especially considering the environmentalists' tendency to exaggerate problems and deny economic costs...
...The old-fashioned naturalist-moralist may have sought the simple life...
...They're using money to buy turbo-charged natural experiences...
...There are high-denier parka shells, power-stretch tights with microfilaments, expedition-weight leggings, fleece, microfleece, and BiPolar Fleece (for people on Prozac...
...For crampons, do I want the semi-rigid 12-point Charlet Moser S-12 Rapidfix Lanieres with the heel-clip in the rear or the Grivel Rambo with the rigid drop-forged points and the step-in bindings...
...Sustainable...
...Before me stretch more than 80,000 square feet of snow shoes, kayaks, tents, crampons, and parkas, a daunting profusion of equipment options...
...They tend to disdain economic thinking as a mere camouflage for the exploitation of nature...
...They take the economic side of any debate, and call for cost-benefit analysis, and denounce the job-destroying effects of environmental laws...
...They often hiss the word "development...
...Marx quotes an 1840s journalist intoxicated by the power of steam: Steam is annihilating space...
...He doesn't just sit in the forest, he treks up a mountain, climbs a glacier, bikes to the continental divide...
...For example, in Africa they favor giving villages a stake in the wealth derived from elephant hunting so that herdsmen have an interest in keeping the numbers of animals up...
...You'd be a woodsy sort of person who likes to get away from the pollution and artificiality of civilization and find spiritual cleansing in the wilderness...
...If I am ever to penetrate the essence of contemporary culture, I must conquer the north face of REI...
...The party of nature saw the path to happiness in throwing off unnecessary wealth and artifice in order to reconnect with the kindred patterns of nature...
...For $15,000 a person, you can take an expedition, advertised in Natural History magazine, to Antarctica or the Galapagos or the Serengeti...
...They tended to think that God had created nature for man's use and had granted man dominion over it...
...Throughout American history, after all, nature and technology have been cultural rivals...
...It's not the salespeople who make my brain spin...
...No headquarters controls it...
...One small step for man...
...Traveling is changed from an isolated pilgrimage to a kind of triumphal procession...
...That train rumbling through the rural landscape became a popular motif in the painting and literature of 19th-century America...
...Because he is challenging nature on his own terms...
...Just a few miles east of here at Microsoft's headquarters, for example, you'd get strange looks if you showed up for work in a suit, carrying a briefcase...
...I'm not qualified to judge the practicality of these plans...
...But if you can drop $40,000 on a vacation, wildness is yours...
...In the United States, they'd like to reverse the budgetary arrangements that give the Forest Service an incentive to cut down trees for off-budget revenue...
...In the postindustrial age, technology and nature no longer seem such rivals...
...In 19th-century Bath, Beau Brummell and his confreres paid obsessive attention to the quality and material of their clothing...
...Inside the front door (ice-axes serve as door handles), there's a museum of outdoors gear off to the David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Especially in Washington, D.C., the battle lines are stark...
...Here they glide over cultivated acres on rods of iron, and there they rise and fall on the bosom of the deep, leaving behind them foaming wheel-tracks like the chariot path of a sea god...
...Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind," complained Emerson...
...National groups are feuding along the old lines, but the states are moving ahead, and by the time Washington gets around to reform, much of the work will have been completed...
...National parks can't be managed for biodiversity, they have to be run according to the principle "Nature knows best...
...It tells the story of busy men, citizens from the hot street . . . men of business...
...Conservatives can be seen picking apart the dirigiste dreams of the environmentalists, and they can be found poking holes in the apocalyptic predictions of the environmental movement...
...There it was...
...My main problem, though, was that I brought to REI a set of false presuppositions...
...As Aldo Leopold wrote in his hugely influential 1949 A Sand County Almanac, America "has become so obsessed with economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy...
...The Sierra Club's magazine, for example, is riven with anti-corporate and anti-capitalist sentiment (though most of its overwhelmingly affluent subscribers presumably work for corporations...
...After all, why does he need all those polyester coverings and the rest of his high-tech gear...
...And from each product dangles a thick booklet so packed with high-tech jargon that it makes selecting a mainframe computer seem as simple as picking an apple off a tree...
...REI is the home of the Cell Phone Naturalists...
...And a lot of Quincy Library-style mediation is going on in the states...
...As you traverse the spot, you're expected to distinguish between purifiers made from iodine resin and tri-iodine resin, glass fiber and pleated-glass fiber, a ceramic microstrainer and a structured-matrix microstrainer...
...And when it comes time to talk about the things they love, conservatives wax romantic about technology, not wilderness...
...I made it past the rain chamber, where you can test your all-weather gear...
...But I don't go far before I am assaulted by a blaze of magenta and cobalt blue glaring off a vast profusion of polyester...
...My goal of reaching the coffee shop upstairs at the store's summit suddenly seems an absurdity...
...He opened it by describing a scene that took place on July 27, 1844...
...The Cell Phone Naturalists aren't looking to recreate the simple life of the Shakers or the Transcenden-talists or the hippies...
...One hundred and fifty years ago, Thoreau could walk to the edge of his town and find wilderness...
...Cell Phone Naturalists are comfortable with dynamic order, with systems that are always changing yet fundamentally stable...
...But if you came dressed for Everest in a Gore-Tex parka and boots that keep you warm to -70 Fahrenheit, you'd blend right in...
...He may have been convinced that wealth poses a mortal danger to virtue and that self-denial is the only course to happiness...
...Between me and the coffee shop at the far end of the mezzanine there remains a treacherous field of artificial-fiber parkas, paddle jackets, zip pants, stretch vests, anoraks, and ponchos, each with its ominous booklet hanging down, stuffed with technical detail, highlighting the state-of-the-artness of the item...
...Instead, they think organically, like romantics...
...And, by the way, once I found a jacket in my size on the mezzanine at REI, I started to feel reconciled to high-tech polyester...
...Flummoxed by this bewildering environment, I only know that somehow I must summon the strength to trudge on...
...A plaque on each reassured me that the bench is made of wood from trees blown down in 1995...
...They devise ways of using economic incentives to encourage environmental preservation...
...I walked past the postage-stamp forest landscaped around the store as a place for customers to test-ride mountain bikes...
...I thought that if you were the type who wanted to go out into nature, you would want to be natural...
...Lynn Scarlett of the Reason Foundation compares the situation to welfare reform...
...Its devotees were romantics...
...Back at REI, however, the culture war between the party of the machine and the party of nature is obsolete...
...Of course sophisticated interest groups of every stripe pay lip service to reconciliation...
...There are $400 parkas with core-vent kinetic systems and sleeves with universal radial hinges (so you can move your arms...
...The most alive is the wildest...
...Nature isn't the alternative to society, it's a more wholesome setting for society...
...They tend not to think mechanistically at all...
...But the THEY ARE NOT RENOUNCING MONEY FOR SIMPLICITY...
...Today, after all, the machine in the garden isn't the locomotive roaring through the valley...
...And if you listen to Cell Phone Naturalists enough, you realize they see all life as an ecosystem...
...The old-fashioned naturalists saw nature as a remedy for and escape from society...
...The party of nature rebelled against this world-view...
...The difference between the thoreauvians and the Cell Phone Naturalists is as stark as the contrast between building a railroad and building a Web site...
...At the far end of the museum is the climbing wall—at 65 feet, the largest free-standing climbing structure in the world...
...State groups are deferring less to scientific authority as the source for uniform standards...
...Even something as basic as sandals comes in various high-tech versions, loaded with expedition-class straps and interstellar treads...
...On the one hand is the party of technology, which was as enthusiastic about the locomotive in the mid-19th century as today's technophiles are about the computer...
...They tended to be utilitarians and materialists...
...When Republicans see liberals going to environmentalist extremes, they say scathingly, "It's a religion to them," as if religiosity were synonymous with zealotry (an odd sentiment coming from conservatives...
...According to people who follow these trends, there are numerous signs that the orthodoxy of the environmental movement is slowly being affected by this cultural shift...
...They were transcendentalists more than materialists...
...They prized sensation and intuitive understanding more than reason and logic...
...I knew they'd be products of Seattle's culture of hiking-shorts macho...
...The rivalry coincides with what Marx calls two conditions of consciousness...
...Technology won't distance you from nature if you use it to hammer your way up a rock face in Nepal...
...Forests can't be harvested in moderation, the policy must be zero cutting...
...For past generations, the simple life meant renouncing ambition and social mobility...
...My favorite is a Titanium Omnitech parka with double-rip stop nylon supplemented with ceramic particles and Polyurethane coat-welded seams...
...in short of all unquietness...
...And it gets worse...
...The culture war between the party of technology and the party of nature soon turned into a political contest, whose outlines are familiar to this day...
...To get this far, I drove my rented minivan to downtown Seattle and parked among the muddied-up sport-utes in the REI lot...
...And even the people who don't actually go on expeditions to the North Pole are turned on by products associated with that sort of conquest...
...In nature, animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort...
...So when the Cell Phone Naturalist drives out into the Cascade Mountains in his Land Rover to sit in the woods and fiddle with the Global Positioning System he bought with his Sierra Club credit card, of course he doesn't see any contradiction between his lavish consumer spending and his natural experience...
...There are more fissures within groups than before...
...He may have wanted to retreat from civilization and all its corruptions to return to basic modes of existence...
...The Cell Phone Naturalist flees comfort and seeks cold and deprivation...
...They are society's winners...
...But the REI store's real raison d'être is upstairs on the mezzanine, in the clothing department...
...They use pastoral terms and nature metaphors to describe man-made institutions, whether they are talking about their company, the marketplace, intellectual life, or their own neighborhood...
...Nature for them was no howling wilderness, but a remnant of the pristine paradise that was man's first home and the great cure for all the greed and shallow-ness of urban civilization...
...no tree was murdered in the making of this rest spot...
...You can buy a palatial mountaintop estate with environmentally friendly outbuildings and a view unmarred by any sign of human habitation...
...Images of nature have always been used to sell things, but if you page through the glossy magazines these days, the nature you see is a frozen mountain ridge or a rocky summit that can be conquered with the right SUV or watch or jacket or sweater or credit card...
...Should my canoe be made from DuPont's patented material Kevlar or regular nylon...
...These days if you go looking for wildness without a sizable cash reserve, you're liable to find yourself camping in a state park amongst the RVs...
...A railroad involves a far-flung network of iron tracks and runs like a great metal machine...
...I rode up in the slate-floored exterior elevator and stepped onto the front balcony with its huge benches...
...It is infinitely complex and always changing, yet it works...
...Seattle is one of the most technologically advanced cities in America and also one of the most environmentally aware...
...They bounce around the store flashing their enormous calves, looking like escapees from the Norwegian Olympic team...
...These days if you've got the right investment plan you can turn Wealth back into Eden...
...I'm only a few steps inside the front door, in the ice-ax section, and already I'm feeling oxygen-deprived...
...One venti cappuccino for mankind...
...Today an outsider could read through a mountain of conservative journalism and come away with the impression that conservatives have no interest in preserving nature...
...It sprang up spontaneously...
...For true nature techies, some things, like boots and sport-utility vehicles, should be as big as possible...
...Two Montana-based foundations, the Political Economy Research Center (PERC) and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), have been busy bringing economists and environmentalists together for years...
...Instead, they are seeking to devolve environmental controversies to the local level, where flexibility is greatest and practical tradeoffs can be arranged...
...It's funny the way changes in technology can alter our perceptions of nature...
...They sought simpler and more spontaneous ways of living...
...The long shriek," Hawthorne wrote, was harsh above all harshness...
...I stop...
...The compromise they forged won the approval of the Clinton administration and the House of Representatives...
...They are still fighting it in the Senate...
...Yesterday's rivals may be today's allies...
...He's using his newfound wealth and the geographical freedom of the telecommunications age to renovate his work-life, to move to Montana or Idaho or New Hampshire, where he can tap on his keyboard in a study with wilderness views...
...THEY'RE USING MONEY TO BUY TURBO-CHARGED NATURAL EXPERIENCES...
...And other things, like tents and sleeping bags, should pack up small and open up big...
...Indeed," Marx writes, "it is difficult to think of a major American writer" who has not been fascinated by the dissonance between technology and nature...
...They are the ones who propose legislation that would increase logging and mining on public land...
...It is their dominant metaphor...
...Sooner or later the rise of the Cell Phone Naturalist is bound to have consequences for our environmental politics...
...it was the fountain of "improvements," to use a popular word of the period...
...Technology could make the rough smooth...
...Somebody once said the history of America is the history of a people turning Eden into Wealth...
...You'd aim for anti-commercial simplicity, not flashy consumer connoisseurship...
...Because while only a few people actually go climb glaciers, there are millions and millions who want to dress as if they did...
...In short, you'd value nature, not high-tech wizardry...
...The Quincy Library agreement probably has flaws, but it is a harbinger of the sort of reconciliation of environmental concerns and private-sector development that is a natural outgrowth of Cell Phone Naturalism...
...Nor is it my fellow customers who have put me in this state...
...It soon becomes obvious that while in the seventies the polyester people were low-class disco denizens, now they are high-status environmentalists...
...There should be no barrier between man and the woods...
...It's more like a rain forest than a giant clock...
...Liberal Democrats occupy the opposite pole...
...The Republicans have become the party of the machine...
...Not all were so grandiloquent, but the technologists shared other traits...
...They tended to value contemplation more than action...
...Part of what makes the REI phenomenon so disorienting is the perverse way in which it revives the Dandy Ethic...
...Caravans of voyagers are now winding as it were on the wings of the wind round the habitable globe...
...Concluded Emerson, "The Land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture...
...For a backpack, do I want a Sun Tooth Tech pack with 500x1000 denier cordura or a Bitterroot Tech Pack with the 430 denier HexStop trim...
...But it is striking that even to express love of nature has become almost taboo in conservative circles...
...And it's striking that the groups that have worked most effectively to harmonize nature and economic well-being are not conservative or liberal, but libertarian...
...And the equipment at REI seems to have reconciled nature and economic development...
...Other things, like stoves and food packs, should be as small as possible...
...Rationalists, they believed in logic, statistics, calculations, and science...
...These people are simultaneously pro-technology and pro-nature...
...The technologists favor economic growth and development, the naturalists favor conservation and limits on growth...
...and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace...
...Information-age technology doesn't pose the same threat to nature...
...And finally there opened up in front of me the glorious vista of the coffee shop: a vast range of mission furniture and a paradise of multicultural aromas...
...Life consists with wildness," he wrote...
...They're not trying to escape from society...
...The forest must triumph over the machine...
...These Cell Phone Naturalists are optimistic about material progress, as were the materialists of yore...
...You can spend a week at Thayer Lake Lodge in Alaska admiring the grizzlies or at the Ariau Jungle Tower Hotel in the Amazon watching the monkeys swing by...
...Up to this point, I was feeling good, but now that I've reached the commercial area, the sheer vastness of the place knocks me back...
...Decades ago, Russell Kirk and the southern agrarians celebrated the pastoral ideal...
...The Cell Phone Naturalists seem to have discovered a new gospel of wealth: Money can be purifying if you spend it on things that permit you to experience nature...
...But they tend not to see society as a giant mechanism run according to rational, comprehensible laws, as their techie predecessors did...
...Civilization, which erects barriers, leads only to alienation...
...That $600 walking-around money in your pocket won't corrupt you if you keep it in a waterproof canvas wallet...
...Thoreau deepened his friend's argument...
...In short, they are not renouncing money for simplicity...
...He does it because he takes on life as a series of achievement tests...
...Carcinogens can't just be reduced to innocuous levels, they have to be totally purged, no matter how much it costs to remove the last 0.1 percent...
...I climb there looking for a respite from all the high-tech mumbo jumbo of the gear section and do indeed find a few soothing racks of all-cotton shirts in muted colors...
...The theme figures in Thoreau, Whitman, Hemingway, Henry James, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill, Melville, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, T. S. Eliot, Dos Passos, and many others...
...But a voice—it sounds like James Earl Jones— urges me on, and soon I am slogging through racks and racks of Cordura, Polartec, and all the "ex" fabrics—Royalex, Spandex, Supplex, and Gore-Tex...
...I am seized with the desire to sit down and just let somebody find my lifeless body here amidst the GoreTex mountain bibs...
...And if you observe them long enough, you begin to see that they have merged the mindsets that divided the industrial-era engineers from the Transcendentalists...
...I crossed the boot section and followed the little forest trail that allows you to try out your footwear...
...I walked through the nature art gallery and past the Park Service Information booth in the middle of the book section...
...In some places it already has...
...Cell Phone Naturalist walks around the forest looking for a place to set up a wilderness office...
...One of the most important events in recent environmental history was the formation of the Quincy Library Group...
...An institution is deemed to be working well when it functions like a forest: when it is diverse, filled with autonomous creatures fulfilling their individual missions, when it lacks a single autocrat or clear hierarchy, when it allows each member to adapt continually to changing conditions and opportunities...
...They're not waging war on the automobile or weaving their own clothes on hand looms...
...I didn't realize I'd need a joint degree in chemistry and physics from MIT...
...So most of the foot traffic at REI seems to be on the mezzanine...
...Every item in the store comes with a mind-boggling number of chemically engineered options that only experienced wilderness geeks could possibly appreciate...
...The Internet is organic...
...It's bound to weaken the polarity between the economically minded developers on the one hand and the romantically minded environmentalists on the other...
...But the Cell Phone Naturalist takes his ambition with him...
...In 1964, the literary critic Leo Marx wrote a classic book called The Machine in the Garden...
...Environmentalists can be passionately, almost fanatically, anti-machine (hang around some when a snowmobile goes by...
...It's the technology I am unprepared for...
...I confess, I feel myself losing the will to live...
...In short, nature must be cleansed of human interference...
...I was ready for squads of super-fit software designers with glacier glasses hanging from Croakies around their necks (because you can never tell when a 600-foot mountain of ice might roll into town, sending off hazardous glare...
...But ultimately you might find that your concept of nature changes...
...The howling wilderness was there to be mastered and made productive...
...As the religious-studies professor Max Oelschlager points out, Thoreau didn't believe that people were redeemed through nature...
...I was expecting to enter a world of reverence for nature...
...Above me, clocks told the time atop Mount Everest and Eiger in the Swiss Alps...
...No matter how conservative or libertarian the people in suburban Seattle may be on economic matters, they are environmentalists through and through...
...In the mid-1990s a group of local environmentalists, citizen leaders, and timber executives started meeting at the public library in Quincy, California, to work out an agreement preserving, yet allowing harvesting in, the Plumas National Forest, which covers a huge expanse of northern California...
...I've lost feeling in the fingers I use to sign credit-card chits...
...And the Cell Phone Naturalist tackles nature...
...The Cell Phone Naturalists (a phrase I owe to NPR's Julia Redpath) are technologists, capitalists, and environmentalists all at once...
...I even discovered I could quite easily traverse the obstacles before me...
...Up beyond the ice-ax section, for example, there's a play table where customers try out a dozen different water filters and purifiers...
...For the party of the machine, technology meant progress, opportunity, wealth, and well-being...
...But in their behavior and outlook, the people at PERC and FREE, as well as those at more mainstream groups such as the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund, seem to exemplify the coming environmentalism, which is neither enthralled by the beneficence of corporations nor hostile to the development of wealth...
...But that way of thinking is out of place in the pages of the lavishly funded environmental magazines (some of which carry Rolex ads on their back covers), on the lips of the techno-mil-lionaires in their enviro-mansions, and amid the cornucopia of REI...
...He turns nature into an obstacle course, a series of ordeals he can conquer...
...But that strain of conservatism is now confined to the paleoconservative faction and Chronicles magazine...
...I'm dimly aware of some code of gear connoisseur-ship to which I should be paying attention...
...right so you can enjoy a little edifying foreplay before you get down to serious shopping...
...But not all the talk is phony...
...He believed, before Darwin, that they belonged to nature...
...Nathaniel Hawthorne was sitting alone in the woods reflecting on the birds, bugs, and trees around him when the idyllic stillness was disturbed by the whistle of an onrushing train, gentle at a distance but increasingly malevolent the closer it came...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 7
