We're Winning

Five years ago I got a phone call from a college student named Catherine Schmitt, asking how one made a living freelance writing about the environment. I told her that freelance writing is like farming: You can eventually make a living at it if you get up early and work late, but unless you write about sex, you need a part-time job at first.

Then early last spring Schmitt called again. To my astonishment, she'd done everything I'd told her to. She'd gotten a master's in ecology and environmental science. She was a salaried science writer for the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research and the Maine Sea Grant at the University of Maine in Orono. And she was freelancing. She wanted to write about me for Northern Sky News. Clearly, she needed to be taken fishing.

So she met me at my camp in New Hampshire, and within minutes her subject changed to something more interesting. As we filled the cooler with perch and bluegills, we talked about changes I'd seen on the lake and our forested island, not all or even most of them bad. The fishing is better now than when I first wet a line here in the early 1950s. No longer am I sung to sleep by whippoorwills, but now we have loons and eagles. Tanagers and wood warblers are down, but ospreys and blue herons abound. There are more camps on the mainland but not on the island, now protected as a wildlife sanctuary. The lake is busier, but there's a citizens' association that kicks butt when someone abuses the watershed. Suddenly we have wildlife we never had when I was a child—pileated woodpeckers, wild turkeys, turkey vultures, moose, fishers, otters, eastern coyotes. Can it be that something is going right?

As the conversation moved from lake and island to nation and world, I began comparing battles we're fighting now with those I'd faced when I became a full-time environmental activist and writer in 1970, six years before Schmitt was born. Gradually I was reminded about something environmentalists of all ages need to understand: We're winning. If George Bush has won a second term when you read this, that might not seem possible. But in the time scale I'm talking about, administrations start and end in minutes; they tell us nothing about our future or the earth's.

Schmitt says I'm "optimistic," and I guess I am, but I consider myself more realist than optimist. I write mostly about nasty, greedy, cowardly people and the insults to the earth they perpetrate and permit, so I'm hardly blind to our challenges. But ignoring victories is just as dangerous as being a Pollyanna; it's hard to motivate people if they don't know they can win.

Consider overpopulation. In 1970 it was clear we were going to crowd ourselves and wildlife off the planet. In 2004 it seems likely we won't. Because of long life expectancies (which negate the need for large families), the population of virtually all developed countries has peaked or is declining. A study by scientists at the respected International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, shows a high probability that developing nations will stop growing before the end of the 21st century, at which time world population will stabilize at about 9 billion. That's 3 billion more people than we have now and lots more stress on resources if we can't limit our consumption, but it's also the best news I've heard in my lifetime. After developing nations stabilize, it is reasonable to expect that the world's population will gradually decline.

"I can't help but feel that his optimism is partly for my sake," Schmitt wrote in her article. "I know how ripped open he feels when he flies over blasted mountains in West Virginia, watching the churned insides of the earth running brown and black onto the trout streams of the Appalachians." What I hadn't told her is that activists like her helped create that optimism and that because I spend so much time with them and have been involved in so many similar campaigns, I know mountain-range removal will be a thing of the past before she is my age.

There are more Catherine Schmitts all the time, and as they mature, they train recruits. They are smart, tough, tireless, and too young to have a sense of perspective. For example, they get discouraged because politicians and government bureaucrats resist removal of the Lower Snake River dams in Washington and Idaho. Well, in May 1980, when I wrote my first article for Audubon—"Two Days Under Lake Dickey"—politicians and governments were putting up dams; removing them was unthinkable. With photographer Jack Swedberg I canoed Maine's St. John River, where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would shortly erect two monstrous monuments to pork barrel politics, one the size of the massive facility at Aswan, Egypt. Saving the wildest river in the East seemed a hopeless task. No one beat the U.S. Army. Too many jobs were at stake. It was a billion-dollar project. Yet somehow environmentalists prevailed, and the black age of dams died with the Dickey-Lincoln project. Now, instead of building dams, we're tearing them out. Not fast enough, I'll grant.