Suddenly environmentalism is hot. Not long ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger was on the cover of Newsweek, posing as a green warrior, while, a couple of spots down the magazine rack, Vanity Fair featured Leo DiCaprio standing on what I assume was meant to be a melting ice cap next to a young polar bear. It makes me want to jump in my Prius and call Dillard on my cell to pitch my Thoreau movie to HBO—“If it’s green they’ll buy it, babe.” Meanwhile, celebrities everywhere are tripping over themselves, trying to show off their small carbon footprints. It’s admittedly hard not to roll your eyes, but, if I can be permitted an un-cynical moment, I also believe that this is potentially a time of great opportunity. If Arnold’s picture on the cover helps one law pass or inspires one teenager to work for the environment instead of heading to Wall Street, then the show is worth it.

But still, something about this makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s just an ingrained suspicion of being part of anything popular. For years I’ve resisted the “environmentalist” label (the only “ist” I’ve ever consented to is “essayist”). My tendency is to filter public issues through my private world and then back out into the public. And so, as I’ve witnessed this great green surge, I’ve begun to think about, and to judge, my own environmental credentials. In other words: I know Arnold is full of crap, but am I? Furthermore, Arnold’s pose will do the world (and Arnold) some good (remember that teenager). Is mine a pose as well, and, if so, exactly what sort of pose? And will it do the world, or anyone, any good?

In a roundabout answer to my own questions I need to bring up a book I just finished reading, Deep Economy by Bill McKibben. McKibben and I worked on our college newspaper together, he as the editor-in-chief and I as the political cartoonist, positions that probably say worlds about our differences in temperament. He seemed to me a powerful and slightly remote figure, tall and thin and archetypal, someone who, as another classmate recently put it, always looked a little like Abe Lincoln. (The one time Bill and I really interacted was when he supported me during the controversy that followed the publication of my cartoon, The Trickle Down Theory, which was a picture of Ronald Reagan urinating on an unemployed black man in the gutter.) In the years since college McKibben has become the leading environmental writer of our generation, a status he has earned honestly by writing books like The End of Nature, which detailed the dangers of global warming twenty years before it was chic to do so. He has also been extremely generous to many other so-called nature writers, like myself, and actually was instrumental in helping me get my first book published.

All this to say that I came to McKibben’s new book strongly predisposed to liking it, and in fact I did like it, quite a lot. It seemed to me a tight summation of where we need to go: away from our obsession with growth at all costs, toward a dependence on local economies, and obviously away from slurping down oil and gobbling resources like a bunch of drunken gluttons at a feast. Hovering over the book, or rooted below it, was the obvious spirit of Wendell Berry, whom McKibben acknowledges by dedicating the book to him. I think it’s fair to say that Berry is the most influential environmental thinker of our time, and to anyone familiar with the work of the Sage of Kentucky, the themes here will ring familiar: the need to return to caring for our local places; the need, in fact, to marry those places instead of having strip-mining flings with them; the need to live—and eat—from where we are. It’s kind of the opposite of globalization: localization or at least regionalization. Surprisingly, Berry’s own literary godfather, Thoreau, is not quoted once in McKibben’s book, though this may be a wise strategic move, an attempt to avoid one of the musty trappings of eco-writing. But of course everything McKibben argues for can be found right there in Walden: commitment to the local, fighting against the destruction of the natural world, and the big question: why not be happy with less instead of living dervish-like in a quest for more? By saying that McKibben owes debts to Berry and Thoreau, I am not trying to diminish his book or argument. The book, I believe, is aimed at opening up more people to what until now has been the belief of a few, trying to make us face the fact that the SUV and Trophy Home party is almost over, and that morning in America is actually going to be one doozy of a hangover. Or to put it another way, it’s time to face what we’ve put off. To put up or shut up. Pay the bill. All that.

So will it work? Can a book like this—can arguments like these—ever truly galvanize? Are we ready for the ideas that Jimmy Carter tried to quietly sell us thirty years ago before he and his cardigan sweater were run out of town?

I’m not sure. Clearly McKibben has his facts straight, and his presentation of the Wal-Mart-ing of America is compelling. In our quest to be bigger and richer, always bigger and richer, we have given the keys of the kingdom to the very few and—surprise, surprise—those few don’t seem overly concerned with the common good. McOil and McFood serve up the slop and we line up at the communal troughs just like the cattle and chicken in the meat and poultry death camps. It’s a gruesome picture, built on greed, and I’m pretty sure it’s an accurate picture. But I’m not sure if it’s a picture most of us are ready to see, or to think about a lot, let alone fight against. And I’m not so sure about the way McKibben presents it either. “Here is what is wrong and here is what we need to do to fix it,” he says very rationally. “Here is the virtuous course . . . here is what is good.” But doing what is virtuous has never been the world’s greatest motivator. Our internal computers don’t simply calculate what is right and then act accordingly. Think again of those moments when Carter was driven out of town and Reagan came rushing in. For the first (and maybe only) time, a president mouthed ideas similar to McKibben’s, admitting doubt about our mania for growth, suggesting something as radical as a little restraint, and where did it get him? Carter’s decline has become a cliché of our collective political memory: the dour little minister, shrinking every day in both political cartoons and the eyes of his countrymen, urging us to spend less on gas and turn down our thermostats. And our response? “How dare he?” If anything led to the orgy of consumption that followed, it was the fear of being Carter as much as the love of all things Reagan. You think we should get smaller? Okay, then we’ll build bigger cars and (much) bigger houses! You think we should lead a life, in Frost’s words, “of self-restraint for the common good”? Well, said most of my college friends, Watch out Wall Street here I come! So collectively frightened were we by the idea of restraint, of actually getting smaller, of running out of our great national abundance, that we, instead of meekly retiring, burst out into the world like a bunch of drunken frat boys, buying and eating and drinking. The one Democrat president we have had since Carter at least had the decency to be a big-eating, lusty, excessive omnivore like the rest of us. No talk of “restraint” from Bill. He wanted not just to grow the economy but to burst out and swallow the rest of the world. It’s the appetite, stupid.

So here comes McKibben, well armed with knowledge but somewhat Carter-like in approach, telling us to get small. Will we listen? Are we finally ready? Suddenly people seem to know what global warming is, and they also seem to know that the solution has something to do with paring back, not just inventing new Jetsons-like gizmos to save our future. It’s true that a single terrorist attack might knock eco concerns off the front pages, but for now. . . . For now we have embraced McKibben’s fellow rationalist, Albert Gore, and we seem honestly responsive when he points at his charts and graphs and, like your eccentric uncle, insists on showing his slideshow. But our response to him is due not just to rational agreement, but to our emotional reaction, to the fact he lost an election he won and then grew a beard, to the fact he got depressed and has now come back from the dead (not to mention his shiny new prize). Which is another way of saying that there always needs to be an emotional content, and a strong emotional content, if people are actually going to act, if people are going to do the next-to-impossible, which is to say change their behavior. Maybe that’s why, despite our tendency to roll our eyes, it’s not so awful to have Schwarzenegger on the cover of magazines or to rent a polar bear for photo ops or even to use the silly phrase “eco-warrior.” Gore himself seems to think that our tendency to have visceral reactions to people is a bad thing, the result of too much television, but it wasn’t television that made England rally around Churchill. Would “It is in our best interests not to become extinct” have stirred a people like “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”? Closer to home is the case of our country’s greatest (from an acreage standpoint) conservationist, Teddy Roosevelt, who was the first to cast an environmentalist (namely himself) as a kind of ultimate fighter, doing battle with the forces of greed and exploitation.

But there remains the small problem of doing battle with ourselves, with our own natures. Because, in the end, that is the core problem. We the people have extolled the virtue of the individual throughout our short history, our national lifespan coinciding with the historic time when individualism first blossomed, then burst, and now perhaps has begun to rot. We are not just fed this by our advertisers, but in every area of our lives. Take my own field, for instance, eco-literature. Here’s Thoreau alone at Walden Pond; here’s Muir alone atop a pine tree during a thunderstorm; here’s Ed Abbey alone in the desert. And not only alone, but also very much acting out their romantic individualities, even down to Abbey tossing beer cans out the window of his pickup. These writers may be telling us to do with less, but they are also sexy cowboys, romantic loners who, not incidentally, have lots of space to themselves. Though they rail against the old myths, they are also part of the old myths. Less obviously appealing are the conservationists, Aldo Leopold or Rachel Carson, who understand that the cult of the individual chafes against a larger conservation ethic. How can we be alone anymore anyway when Walden Pond is a Disney recreation of itself and you have to take a number to get into Arches (no need to mention Yosemite, which you’ll want to steer far clear of until after the plague). But still, no matter how crowded we get and how much it chafes against conservationism, we worship at the altar of the individual. It seems we just can’t help ourselves.

Or maybe we can. Maybe I am oversimplifying, overstating. We are Americans, after all, trained to fight, to compete, and the best fighters for the environment—Roosevelt, Muir, Thoreau—have taken that same passionate individualism and fought to save the land. Maybe it’s too much to ask for us to change our basic excessive characters, but maybe we can turn that aggressive nature toward something else, can get competitive about, say, our car’s miles per gallon or saving yarn. Yes, what McKibben says is right—what Carter said so long ago was right, or at least the beginning of something right—but maybe the reason we are starting to finally react now is that it is being presented as a true fight to save the planet. It’s easy to laugh at this, easy to picture the blockbuster with Bruce Willis being called out of retirement to battle global warming, but silly or not, it may be more effective for us to think this way. After all, who among us can change all that much, or all that fast? If we are individuals and fighters, well fine. But one thing we can do is turn that energy toward a good fight, and now it looks like we might have one. In this sense I hope the glossy magazines keep plastering those eco celebrities and polar bears on their covers. Anything that helps. Anything that ignites.

The sheer earnestness of environmentalism can make me uneasy, but force me to choose between a tad too much earnestness and melting ice caps and I’ll take earnestness every time. Still, I can’t help but worry that I may become like one of my oldest friends, who not long ago became obsessed with the theory of peak oil. Peak oil is the idea that we have already passed the high point of petroleum production and will run out much faster than most predict, in the near future, bringing the world as we know it grinding to a halt. It’s not a bad theory, as these theories go, but it’s just one in a series of dire predictions. The problem is that my old friend, who is otherwise a very nice guy, has let it take over his life. Everything—his friends, his family, his job—is now seen through the lens of peak oil. His marriage, for instance, has dissolved, in part because he was critical of his wife for being concerned with quotidian things like playing tennis and going out to dinner. How could she care about such petty concerns when the world was about to end? Lately he has begun to talk about taking his kids up to the mountains with other like-minded peak oil–ists where they will grow and can their own food, and despite my own environmental leanings, I can’t help but feel that this plan has a Unabomber whiff to it.

I first learned how serious things had gotten when he told me he “needed to talk” early last fall. He is not a big talker, so I knew something was up. After a bunch of “um”s and “an”s, he finally got to his point. A couple years before, he and his wife had asked my wife and me to be the legal guardians of their children should anything happen to them. But now he was having second thoughts. When I asked why, he um-ed and an-ed some more before mumbling something that I had to ask him to repeat.

“I’m not sure you’re going to make it,” he said.

“Make it?”

“In the coming times.”

Then, by way of explanation, he added: “You and your wife know nothing about canning food.”

I walked away from that encounter shaking my head. Not so much at the silliness of what he said as at the tone, the sheer certainty with which he said it. I also saw my friend reflecting back some of my own beliefs, though in funhouse mirror fashion. I, too, believe that the next centuries will bring some radical changes and that out of necessity our worlds, and food, will be based more on the local. But still, I couldn’t help but feel that he had become a Dickens character, consumed by his ONE IDEA while forgetting anything that fell outside that theory: friends, say, or common sense, or his wife.

I’ve been thinking about my friend as I wrestle with my own desire to fight for the environment, while still fighting against calling myself an “environmentalist.” This may just be a case of resisting labels, and might not have any larger repercussions, but then again it might. I think it may come from a fear of seeing the world too simply, of falling into the trap of believing there is one answer, one way, one thing, even one enemy. And perhaps it is the larger fear of creating a too-simple map of the world in a time when the world could not possibly be more complex, messy, and interconnected.

Then again, all my thinking might just be a case of playing Hamlet when what the world needs is action. “The earth is our home,” Ed Abbey said simply enough, “And we must protect our home.” So what do I say to that? Well, in response I lean on another writer, a writer who was Abbey’s contemporary, but who fought an entirely different fight. I think of James Baldwin’s lines on racism near the end of one of the finest of modern essays, “Notes of a Native Son”:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.

That gets at it best, better than Abbey’s blunt passion. The complexity of the challenge, the need to, in Keats’s words, “be in uncertainties.” While I want to fight for a green world, I don’t want to live my one life on Earth as a caricature, a person who sees everything through one simple lens. It’s when environmentalism becomes fundamentalism that I get nervous. Maybe we—or perhaps it’s better here to say “maybe I”—feel the need to embrace opposites, to understand that life is sloppy, complicated, even ridiculous, and that destroying ourselves may be a fit ending to this farce. Also to understand that romantic individualism is mixed up, perhaps forever, with conservationism. To understand it is all one big, absurd mess but at the same time to understand that we—or at least I—have to fight with a deep passion to change this world, to make people see the sense of conserving, of at least trying to save this land for our children and grandchildren.

So both ideas, which are, like Baldwin’s, “in opposition,” must be held in mind.

Which is not an easy thing to do.

Which may be why so few do it.