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Earth Day is an Essay
In my MFA program, creative nonfiction writers like myself were taught all about the origin of the essay — how its pioneer, Michel de Montaigne, coined the term from the French word essai, or “to try,” to describe his attempts at self-reflection. We learned about the way the form memorializes the author’s wrestling of an issue — his or her diving in and taking on, turning over and examining from all angles, circling around and circling back until some kind of revelation is made.
I think it’s the circling that makes so many of us writers swoon. In workshop, when someone’s piece of writing came full circle to a theme or an image referenced in the beginning, we often smiled and nodded, and maybe even emitted a collective, satisfied Ahhhh — because coming full circle feels like the completion of a puzzle, a picture fully revealed. Yes, we think, now we understand what the author is trying to say. The metaphors are clear because the circuit has been closed, its symmetry complete, revealing a simple, wholesome “Oh.” We get it now, the dots have been connected.
It’s been a few weeks now since the recent oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara — and as ecologically tragic as the accident has been in and of itself, what makes this spill so interesting is the fact that it’s a repeated incident, an echo of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that inspired the first Earth Day protests, which (along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) spawned modern-day environmental regulation. And yet, after 46 years and the birth of the environmental movement, enough oil has been spilled in our waters to demote that original Santa Barbara oil spill to only the third-worst in U.S. history (behind the 2010 Deepwater Horizon and 1989 Exxon Valdez spills, respectively). And of late, as if lifted from some eco-Shakespearean tragedy: a large-scale spill of the very same substance, occurring in the very same place. Here we are again, looking at another generation of oil-coated sea animals, thick black ribbons reaching for the shore. Do you see it? Full circle.
It occurs to me now that Earth Day is an essay, one that aims to wrestle this issue of what we keep doing to our home and ourselves. An essay that attempts to examine greed, addiction, complacency, and regret. An essay that asks of us: how does our behavior reflect our relationship with the planet, and are we ever going to change?
I’ll be the first to admit: the Earth Day essay we’ve written so far has some lovely traits: rich imagery, an inspired message, a seasonal rhythm that motivates many of us to be thankful and care for the earth at least once a year. But let’s face it: the fact that this story has come full-circle doesn’t make it good.
If I were workshopping this story, I might even say that Earth Day is a shallow essay, its moves predictable, its tagline trite. It’s an essay that started strong, had all the elements of a good story: a central problem, conflict, emotion, tragedy — but has become too riddled with gimmicks and pageantry to provide much of any revelation at all. It’s a Hallmark greeting on a Facebook page, a marble circling the drain.
One of the things they tell you when you write essays is that your narrator must experience a change during the course of the story. That there must be some kind of transformation in the wrestling, some kind of a-ha moment that emerges before the writing ends. And to make sure we considered and incorporated that self-reflection into our work, one of our mentors would encourage us to respond to the following prompt within the context of our story: “I used to believe_______. Now I believe _________.”
I guess that’s why our Earth Day story falls flat. You can see that nothing much has changed, that our narrative is missing the self-reflection it should have. We used to believe that unrestrained production and consumption of fossil fuels was sustainable. And now, judging from the full circle illustrated by the latest Santa Barbara event, it seems that’s still what we believe.
Honest self-reflection is one of the most difficult tasks asked of creative nonfiction writers. It requires blinders to hide those who would judge and ridicule, the ability to write through the hard place of self incrimination. We have all kinds of excuses for avoiding this challenging aspect of our work: that the people we care about won’t love us anymore, that we don’t want to hurt or disappoint the ones we love. But there is a bone-ache in quietly shouldering a mother’s or a country’s addiction, a sickness in silently bearing one’s guilt and responsibility for enabling the destructive behavior. Too many of us wait to tell the truth until after the person involved with the malady has died. But in this case, the ailing one is our planet — by then, it’ll be too late to circle back.
Photo credit: Michael A. Mariant/Associated Press, www.mashable.com
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