THE ACCIDENTAL ACTIVIST

Looking for an escape, I became obsessed with restoring the natural ecosystem in my yard. Then a neighbor's tree came crashing down and kicked off a new battle.

- JEFF VANDERMEER

WHAT IS LATE-STAGE, MIDDLE-AGED, WHITE-MALE ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM BUT ending up in a ridiculous shouting match about native plants? That's how it worked out for me, at least. But long before I found myself screaming, "What if this were your front yard?!" at a guy operating heavy machinery, I was just a writer forging a path into the environmental movement by way of the popularity of a novel I wrote with the cheery title of Annihilation.

Annihilation of what? Of a certain sense of self? So a different self can emerge? Wandering college campuses in the aftermath of that novel in 2014, flooded with invitations to speak on climate change, I realized I knew fuck all about the subject from a drilled-down, personal angle. For years, I'd contributed to causes. And yes, I'd hiked through the wilderness to report back on the particular tilt of a bobcat's head taking in a backdrop of blue teal ducks rising from a lake. Who cares?

But then I wrote a book that made people come up to me and say it's why they entered environmental science or became a biologist. Annihilation also spawned a thousand takes on topics ranging from "global weirding" to the permeability of organisms to plastic. Every possible ecological metaphor, washing up like sea wrack.

The novel couldn't cure climate change, but it had unexpected agency, and the cynic in me panicked. If this fiction actually infiltrated the real...then what was I doing in my real life? Two years later, Trump was elected president. I put up five bird feeders in my yard and took comfort in watching blue jays be happy. I bought native seed packets and tossed the seeds all over with no plan or pattern. I was distraught, bereft, and the thought of growing something comforted me. I was someone else again, living in a different world.