52*“ *
' luna fi. 2003
BOOKS
Balancing apathy and dogmatism
Environmental author finds perennial paradise between control and wild abandon
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P A R T Y WITH PRIDE!
T im o t h y K r a u s e
aking a middle-of-the-road approach to
environmental issues has made David
Oates a hit of a radical.
In his new brx)k, Paradise Wild: Reimag-
¡rung American Nature, Oates follows an occa
sionally biographical trail through a personal
wilderness. He successfully keeps the forest-for-
the-trees environmental activists on one side
and the effluent river of commerce on the other.
But the path of practical consumption is a lone
ly one in an all-or-nothing society that has crime
to believe its own myth of Paradise List.
“It definitely is my lifelong commitment to
ask questions about how does it feel to he in
nature? Do we belong there? How
do we belong there?" says Oates,
53, a gay English professor at
Clark College in Vancouver,
Wash., who lives with his partner
in Southeast Portland.
Drawing together his once-
compartmentalized spheres of reli
gion, sexuality, environmentalism
and scholarship, Oates examines
the intersection of nature and cul
ture by focusing on how “the mis
applied myth of Eden has mired
Americans in a hopeless ‘Paradise
Lost’ mentality that belies the true
ever-present wildness in our lives.”
I'm convinced that our public debate (and private
struggle) over die enwronment are locked into an un-
resolvable cycle of use versus preservation because they
are founded on the cultural myth of Paradise Lost,
reinforced by an unexamined nostalgia. A remembered
perfection: an inevitable decay — this thought pattern
has already broken the world into two opposites :
natureJwddemess/Eden and hunvm/avdized/fallen.
Oates’ book responds to other environmen
tal writers and thinkers who held a “not very
productive and not very realistic set of beliefs,
mythologies, projected desires that didn’t corre
spond to the reality that I knew, and that wasn’t
getting us anywhere as environmentalists.” The
goal, he says, is to do a better job of realistically
planting the human animal within nature.
The reasoning is simple. People will contin
ue to consume and dispose, drink and piss. But
no longer should they romantically grieve the
loss of nature, nor should they repeatedly cry
wolf when, in fact, nature continues, ever
onward, changes notwithstanding.
Utility is now linked with destruction, as if to
use something you had to despoil it. Preservation is
linked with purity, as if to preserve something you
had to hermetically seal it. To follow that model is
to create a world split equally between toxic waste
dumps and museums. And there is not a whole lot
of life in either place.
“We have to think productively about how
to do those things and not just put up some
sort of childish obstacle and say, ‘No, I shall be
pure of these uses of nature,’ ” comments
Oates. “At some point you need to turn a cor
ner and say: ‘OK, here we are in the world.
We’re living on it. It chews us, and we chew it.
Our real choice is how to do it. Which trees to
take and which ones to leave.’ ”
For extreme environmentalists, giving any
ground, even one tree, can be giving too much.
Oates sees a sustainable compromise as more of
a comprehensive plan rather than hacking off
Author and professor David Oates really throws himself into his work. H is new
book is Paradise Wild: Rehnagining Am erican N ature.
or giving in. He suggests, for exam
ple, that just as much energy be put into practi
cal and sustainable tree harvesting as is invested
in protecting trees that shouldn’t be touched.
Nature is not the opposite of culture. It is at
least as full of change as of stasis, as full of danger
as of solace. We need to embrace both.
“I’m more interested in the how than just
saying ‘no.’ How are we going to go about
this?" questions Oates. “I really do think it’s
going to take an army of environmentalists
with chain saws to drive [forestry giants like]
Weyerhaeuser from the hills. I want them on
the run; I think they’re the devil. I think it’s
corporate greed creating clear-cuts.”
But, he continues, “We’re not going to get
them out of the forest until we have a workable
alternative.... What happens when these kids
with chain saws go across the hills is they say: ‘We
have a better way to do this. We know how to
love the forest, and we recognize that loving the
forest and using the forest are not opposites.’ ”
There is middle ground between control-all
engmeerism and don’t-touch romanticism.
Throughout Paradise Wild, Oates introduces
stories from his private life to illustrate not
only his mountain-climbing journey to this
realization but also humanity’s intimate con
nection to an innate, pervasive wildness. This
is particularly evident in his renouncing funda
mentalist religion in order to reconcile queer
sexuality— a type of wilderness in itself.
There's a sly but unmistakable connection
between queemess and wilderness, buggers and
tree-buggers.... Nature itself is always capable of
bursting our bubble, breaking through, insisting
there's m ore.... Gay people do the same
thing.. insisting that real people and real sexuality
are strange, multi-form, exciting, unprogrammed
and capable of infinite surprise. Just like nature....
Those who go outside in any sense are likely to
discover the queemess of the world.
And so went Oates, who grew up in sub
urban Los Angeles and attended an evangelical
college in Santa Barbara. Passionate about his
faith, he thought at the time his sexuality was a
problem to solve.
“ I felt like my soul was at risk the whole
time, that no amount o f belief or practice was
enough to cleanse me of something that
couldn’t be eradicated. I prayed for about 10
years for Jesus to change me into a straight
man. It cost me a lot of tears and a lot of
sleepless nights and some severe distortions in
my personality trying to hold together a
facade of a correct straight person and at the
same time intensely aware that it wasn’t true.”
A turning point came when he opened up *
to a classmate who was surprisingly compas
sionate. “That little tiny chink of human kind
ness was such a big deal,” the author recalls,
having expected immediate rejection and hos
tility. Then as soon as he left that environ
ment, everything began to change.
Fundamentalism in the environmental
movement, like in religion, he claims, “is a
powerful force against the work of thinking
and feeling more clearly.”
But if religion gave Oates an understanding
of the environmentalist movement, it was sex
that drove him to the mountains to see with
immediacy what it meant to be a man within
nature, while observing how sexuality and the
environment validate each other.
Sex is wild. Literally. A little wilderness right
m your pajamas! Sex keeps on escaping the cage,
running wild in the streets, eating the suburban
poodles, messing up die smoothly running and
too-scripted system o f G irl, Boy, Marriage,
Death. And the numb consumerism that some
times goes with it.
To oppose these orthodoxies is buggery. Queemess.
I say: Lets claim the badge gladly. Let’s be
queer for the woods. JH
D a v id O ates will conduct a "Wild Writers
Seminar" later this summer. For details visit
www.davidoates.info.