Creek Running North

I’ve been thinking a bit more about the whole “women bloggers are from Venus, Kevin Drum is from Uranus” thing, and I’m wondering a bit about my own approach to my own blog. Could I perhaps be neglecting my duty to masculinize the internets? I mean not only do I write in support of feminist women, but I post photos of flowers and bunnies, and I also post poetry, some of which is about flowers and bunnies and women. Could I be blogging just a shade too fey?

It’s not just the blog, either. I wonder sometimes whether I’m not nearly aggressive enough in promoting my writing: I want to write and sit back and let other people discover what a great job I’ve done. That oh-so-masculine self-promotion kinda leaves me cold.

Take for example my work at Earth Island Journal. A few years ago I did some investigative work that solidly linked a new destructive form of sonar, which has been implicated in dozens if not hundreds of whale deaths, to an increasingly interventionist US foreign policy. (Sound far-fetched? Read the article.) No one had put together that information before, and I probably could have gotten some traction with the story if I’d shopped it around more.

Or take this story, which I broke in the US press (with important help from my friend Ann Hwang). The Journal printed my rather exhaustive analysis of Bush administration interference with science in April 2003. The New York Times picked up that story in February 2004. That year, the story won a Project Censored award — for a much shorter, much less extensive, essentially truncated take on the story I scooped the US press on more than a year before.

I don’t care about the award, really. Nice thing to add to your curriculum vitae, I suppose, but the Joshua trees are the only things I want to impress, and they care as little about my lack of Project Censored award as they do about my lack of degree. But I wonder: If I were a real man would I be pushing my work harder, whining loudly about all the praise I’d gotten? On the one hand there’s my natural, utterly captivating reticence. On the other hand, my starved little testosterego. Which one do I cultivate?

But I just got a little sidelong piece of praise that even reticent little old me can’t help but crow about.

A little context is necessary here. A few weeks ago, two Bay Area activists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, wrote an essay claiming that environmentalism is moribund, if not dead. Shellenberger — an acquaintance of mine — and Nordhaus claimed that the environmental movement is too ossified, too bureaucratic and wonky and out of touch wth the common person, and needs to abandon its current strategy of releasing position papers on kilojoules per ton of atmospheric carbon (or whatever) and start working to build a broad-based progressive movement to take back the country from the right.

I’d heard it before — not just the criticism of the environmental movement, largely anticipated (and better expressed) in Mark Dowie’s 1996 book Losing Ground, but also the call for everyone to stop what we’re doing and start working on the thing that the self-appointed experts tell us is more important. I suspect this argument will seem familiar to feminists. It’s certainly familiar to me, having been ordered by random know-it-alls to work on population control, or black reparations, or Mumia’s cult of personality, or the Ohio Election atrocities, or any number of other things over the last thirty years.

Also: that’s not the environmental movement I know. The movement I know has a few ossified, bureaucratic but still arguably useful groups with huge budgets in DC, and tens of thousands of vital groups working on local and regional issues. All those people cleaning creeks and de-oiling ducks and pulling invasive exotics and adopting feral cats and starting recycling programs and challenging suburban sprawl and warning people off eating fish from mercury-laden estuaries, and Nordhaus and Shellenberger would have them give all that up to work on election reform or some such?

Heads. Up. Their. Asses.

And so lots of radical environmentalists are taking S&N to task for this truly stupid piece of writing, and one such person, I noticed Thursday, is Paul Watson, Captain of the Sea Shepherd. The Sea Shepherd, if you haven’t heard of it, is a ship whose crew enforces international law on the high seas, often by extreme (though non-violent to people) measures. For instance, the crew of the Sea Shepherd defends whales by ramming the whaling ships.

And Captain Watson, in his slam of Shellenberger and Nordhaus, holds up Earth Island Journal as a refutation of S&N’s claims that enviros are out of touch with social and class issues.

In other words: in a prominent fight among high-level environmentalists, my work is being cited as evidence that there is still some working-class toughness in the environmental movement.

By a pirate.

And my bunny can kick your ass.