The vision thing

IT'S TIME FOR the environmental movement to leave behind its tie-dyed ways and join the 21st century. So proclaimed activists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus last year in ''The Death of Environmentalism,'' their attention-grabbing report arguing that the once-vital movement, which won many battles during its 1970s heyday, had become ''just another special interest,'' too concerned with mere policy while lacking ''a big vision and core set of values.''

The report, which sparked lively debate on websites and editorial pages, advocated breaking the cause out of its granola ghetto and tackling global warming head-on-which, according to the authors and contrary to most conservatives, could actually create jobs and ultimately help the economy.

Whether or not you agreed with Shellenberger and Nordhaus, their take was refreshing, translating environmental policy into English and eschewing the gloomy rhetorical style that environmentalists have been known for since the days of Jimmy Carter and his cardigan sweater. But while the report constantly stressed the need for a larger ''vision,'' using the word again and again, the authors' own vision remained murky. They seemed to suffer from conservative think-tank envy, waxing poetic about the Republicans' ability to appeal to our self-interest through ''core values,'' as if values were merely strategic and vision merely a selling point.

When asked by the online environmental magazine Grist why they'd exhaustively interviewed leading activists but not a single visionary thinker or writer-someone like the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry-Nordhaus replied, ''We interviewed the people in the environmental movement who are deciding how to spend tens of millions of dollars annually.... I'm sorry, Wendell Berry isn't the person deciding how the enviro movement is going to construct its campaign to address global warming.''

But if you are going to build your argument around the need for a more inspiring ''vision,'' why ignore the visionaries? After all, inspired words and inspired politics often go hand in hand. If it weren't for Rachel Carson's lyrical, far-sighted ''Silent Spring''-her 1961 book in which she inveighed against poisonous chemicals that ''changed the very nature of the world-the very nature of its life''- the Environmental Protection Agency would not have banned DDT. Without his visit to John Muir in Yosemite, Teddy Roosevelt might not have saved more land than any individual in the history of our country. Without Thoreau's ''Walden,'' we might not even have an environmental movement.

If we want to inspire a new generation with a new environmentalism, we will need some inspiring words. Thoreau is no longer around, so we can't visit him at Walden. But if we would like to see more deeply ourselves, we might look toward a half-blind 90-year-old man named John Hay who lives atop a hill on Cape Cod.

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It was in hopes of clearing up my own sometimes foggy vision that I began visiting John Hay in the spring of 2001. At the time I was living just down the street. But Hay was no ordinary neighbor: He is regarded by many environmental critics as our greatest living nature writer; in 1964, he won nature writing's Pulitzer, the John Burroughs Medal, for his book ''The Great Beach.'' He was 86 when we met, but still had the energy to hike through the trees and walk the beaches around his home on Dry Hill in Brewster, where he has lived for 60 years. Though I'd been writing about the environment for 10 years, during my very first visit to Dry Hill, Hay helped change my perspective on nature itself.

At the bottom of his long driveway was an uneven chunk of wood with ''J.Hay'' painted on sloppily, and at the top was the man himself, wearing a rumpled flannel shirt, a baseball cap, and an expression that looked momentarily startled due to brows that shoot up above his blue eyes like the horned tufts of a screech owl. As we walked around his property, he pointed to a flower and gave its Latin name. I nodded politely, but that wasn't good enough for Hay. ''Stick your nose in it and smell it!'' he snapped. ''Introduce yourself!'' Hay, I would soon learn, believes that nature isn't something we go to like a museum. It's something we live inside of and are part of.

In his 16 books, from ''The Run'' in 1961 to last year's ''Mind the Gap,'' Hay has pointed to the way that human arrogance has led to our divorce from nature. He reminds us that we are animals, too, and that we actually have very little to be arrogant about. In his seventh book, ''In Defense of Nature,'' published in 1969, Hay describes attempting to save a tiny shorebird from an oil spill. He finds that its small ''whirring heart'' is pumping blood into his hand, and writes: ''That bird, which had bloodied me and been so close and warm in my hand, left me on the beach to shake with the weight of human ignorance.''

At such moments Hay yokes big ideas to small events. Reading him, the idea of saving nature ceases to be abstract. It becomes personal, as if a logger were sawing, not a stand of trees, but your arm. ''Many people write about saving the environment,'' Hay said in a 1978 speech to the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. ''But you can't save a thing unless you feel you are a part of it.''

Hay acquired this perspective not by adventuring in the untamed wilderness but by living quietly on Cape Cod. Having grown up in Manhattan, he bought his land atop a wooded hill of then-stumpy oaks for $25 an acre in the early '40s before heading off to serve in World War II. After the war, he built his modest house on the hill, and he's been there ever since. And strangely, at least by modern standards, it is the drama of staying in one place that has fired Hay's imagination. ''Living on the 'edge of nowhere' did not cut me off but teased my spirit into the open,'' he writes in ''Mind the Gap.'' ''Fish, birds, trees, and the weather called for some recognition in me that I had been unwilling or too self-centered to meet.''

For half a century and more Hay has stood sentinel atop Dry Hill, watching the turning year and learning lessons from the land. He's noted the small changes: the flocks of cedar waxwings feeding on berries in winter; the spring peepers, tiny frogs, singing in spring; the herring running upstream to spawn; the feeding terns in late summer. Over the years these natural events have become so imprinted on him as to be part of his internal landscape. To an almost uncanny degree, he is able to turn his mind outside of himself and into the lives of the birds, the fish, even the trees.

Hay's observations have led to a philosophy that no longer puts humans first. Which leads, in turn, to a vision of the world as hopelessly-or hopefully-intertwined, a world where human beings can never escape the fact that they are a part of a larger whole. If this is true, humility isn't just a nice philosophical notion, it's the only sensible way to be in the world. ''Without a deep connection to place,'' Hay told me during one of my visits to Dry Hill, ''we exile ourselves.''

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''The earth insists on its intentions, however men may interpret them,'' we read in ''In Defense of Nature.'' Today, as many Americans begin to suspect connections between global warming and the increasing intensity of the storms that lash across the Gulf, for example, or between our dependence on oil and the despoiling of our last great wilderness, Hay's warnings and insights are getting harder to dismiss. I am not suggesting that my fellow environmentalists abandon policy fights and retreat to commune with nature. Shellenberger and Nordhaus are right to say that we need to come down off our hilltops and get our hands dirty inside the Beltway. They are also right to argue that we need language that inspires, that goes beyond mere finger-wagging.

In ''The Death of Environmentalism,'' the authors quote John Muir: ''When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.'' Hay's vision, like the science of ecology itself, is rooted to the same idea: that we are all forever interconnected. What we mustn't forget is that poetry and policy are also forever hitched. You can't have ''vision'' without visionaries, and if ''core beliefs'' are to be inspiring, they need to be inspired in the first place. That's what will lead to the rebirth of a vibrant environmental movement. After all, a vision of the world is required before we get down to the business of saving it.

David Gessner's new book is ''The Prophet of Dry Hill'' (Beacon), a memoir of his friendship with Cape Cod nature writer John Hay.