In the spring of 1969 a graduating senior at Mills College in California delivered a commencement address rather sensationally entitled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax.” The speaker announced that the world was despoiled, the future bleak. The main cause of all the trouble, she said, was human overpopulation. Her response to that crisis was to promise she would never have children–clearly the only thing she could do on a personal level to address the problem. It was a stunningly effective rhetorical device.
What Mills ponders in Whatever Happened to Ecology? are the failures of the mainstream environmental movement she was part of for close to 20 years. After her rise to fame, she traveled the lecture circuit, had a breakdown, edited progressive environmental magazines such as Not Man Apart and CoEvolution Quarterly, and worked as a free-lance writer. She lived in San Francisco, the headquarters of the booming environmental movement, and worked with many of the movement’s stars. She profiles some of them here: David Brower, onetime president of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute; Joan McIntyre, one of the early leaders in the crusade against whaling; and Dave Foreman, onetime Washington lobbyist, later one of the founders of Earth First!
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But emphasizing the money issue can obscure other good reasons to preserve the kite’s nesting area: the harmful agricultural pesticides that would be dumped on the field, or the aesthetic value of the bird to people, or the simple right of the bird to exist for its own sake. Most environmentalists recognize these points, but the rules of the reform game force them to emphasize economics. And who can blame them for playing along? Those who want to preserve natural lands are well-advised to use every weapon at their disposal against the heavy pressures for development.
Mills’s ideal is a system in which people grow their own food, compost their own wastes, generate their own energy, and practice some sort of local self-government. They use resources from their own area and return them in the form of wastes, sweat equity, and care. It’s utopian, but at least partly doable on an individual level. Mills’s personal effort in that direction began in 1984, when she fled the San Francisco urban scene in a belated version of the 60s back-to-the-land trend. She moved to Leelanau County to live with her husband-to-be, whom she’d met, prophetically enough, at something called the first North American Bioregional Congress. The two are hardly models of self-sufficiency at this stage, but at least Mills’s admission of their shortcomings is endearing: the couple built their own home, but get their electricity from a nuclear power plant. When she wrote her book, their garden was still more dream than reality. They still drove a car–a Buick, for chrissake. And they own a snowblower.
Whatever Happened to Ecology? by Stephanie Mills, Sierra Club Books, $18.95.
