David Gessner Review

I’m interested in environmental issues, so I looked forward to hearing what Gessner had to say on his subject. Many environmentalists take a very serious approach, almost like they’re pleading to their audience to act out and change the world. But Gessner was humorous and had a fresh perspective on what an environmentalist actually was. Instead of asking us to transform into tree-huggers, he said that what was needed was “more hypocrites”. He admitted that no one in the world is a pure environmentalist. In other words, no one can claim to have zero energy waste or carbon footprint. But that shouldn’t stop people from trying to make a difference.

I also like how he said that the first step for everyone was to start with a small project, and the momentum that we gathered might carry us forward into something that had a larger influence. Asking people to jump up and change the world right away is daunting, and no one would know where to start.

He didn’t threaten anyone with the doom of the world, which has become the traditional approach lately. From a writing perspective, threats of “we’re all gonna die” don’t incite most people to action, they just discourage them. I liked his analogy of a spouse constantly saying “this marriage is all over! It’s hopeless!”

His comparison of humans to gannets made sense to me. No one can blame humans for wanting the best quality of life they can get. It’s our nature. The only problems arise when the resources we use to obtain that quality of life run out. I really liked the way he explained that. He wasn’t putting the blame on the squandering ways of humans for the environmental issues than need to be dealt with, he was just saying that what happened happened, and we will have to adapt. Because we are adaptable humans, we can do it, and we have a responsibility to do it.

I thought the intro to his book trailer was great. It wasn’t what I was expecting, and it made me laugh. He claimed that “he wasn’t normal”, but I think that’s a good thing. I don’t want to listen to normal people talk about normal things in a normal way. You have to have a healthy dose of weirdness and originality to interest people and get them to pay attention to what you want to say, and I think he had that.