The Woods, A Socialist Utopia - From Community Organization To Environmental Justice, A Bronx Tale

Esta Cohen was born and brought up in a Jewish neighborhood of the Bronx, a place, said her grandfather, unofficial mayor of Mott Haven, of 'kosher, kaddish, and kibbutz'. Everyone in Mott Haven observed the sabbath and seder, sat shiva, went to temple, and were supporters of Israel. 

Esta never saw anything other than some scratchy planters the Goldfarb family donated to the neighborhood playground thanks the considerable profit realized from the sale of both their jewelry store and hattery.  The Goldfarbs were an item in the Bronx - successful business people, devout Jews, and dedicated progressives, advocates of the labor reforms of Samuel Gompers and his Jewish union organizers.  Although unionism would certainly affect Jewish trade, the Goldfarbs had the larger community in mind and were all in for socialist reforms.  They were 'Irish Jews' - faithful to Guinness, bar fights, and the Emerald Isle, but good Americans when it came to political favors. 

The Goldfarbs are beside the point, for this is a tale of elision - how a good Jewish girl, daughter of the Brandeis, Lafollette generation of labor activists, and fierce socialist, evolved into a modern progressive who embraced the canon of environmental activism, social justice, race, gender, ethnicity, and universal diversity.

The evolution is not hard to envisage, for the philosophy of utopian social reform is one of general human welfare and the particular causes of which are conditioned by culture, society, and current zeitgeist.  She grew up the daughter of Ladies Garment Workers radicals, fought for workers' rights from an early age, and was weaned from that goodness only when modern threats emerged. 

She took to environmentalism because as mentioned she had never seen a tree growing on its own until she left the Bronx, and when she saw one of many growing in profusion at Anthony Wayne park across the river in Hudson County on a trip organized by the 161st Street YWCA, she knew that this was God's gift to Man; and she had to do everything in her power to protect, promote, and defend the environment which nurtured them. 

 

After Columbia which she attended on a Rosenzweig scholarship, and where she became thoroughly educated in the ways and means of the progressive canon, she joined a Washington, DC non-profit, Citizens For Social Responsibility, a group which, perhaps unfairly but accurately was characterized as a liberal catch-all. Under Bob Muzelle's leadership, the group went from civil rights to peace to women to gays and to the environment never losing a step in what had become a familiar cadence and rhythm. 

Bob had earned his stripes in battle - on Freedom Rides to Montgomery, in sit-ins in Selma, and in marches with Martin and Ralph across the Pettus Bridge where he had been beaten by Bull Connor's thugs, bitten by his attack dogs, and tossed aside by the legions of Dixie crackers along the way. 

Bob saw that the progressive mantel covered a variety of different issues - it was the reform and salvation of humanity which mattered most, whether through resetting the racial compass, admitting homosexuality as an unequivocal gender choice, or most importantly claiming the climate as the existential issue of the day. 

Esta was delighted to be part of the Muzelle 'Juggernaut for Social Justice', but hewed not surprisingly to environmentalism.  For a girl raised on the mean streets of New York City who had to wait until she was sixteen before seeing anything growing wild, having to spend her days in the woods was ideal.  

She loved every minute of protest before dams, proposed data centers, endangered species habitats, and wild kingdoms.  The environment, Nature, was her new home and she would defend it to the death. The spotted owl, snail darter were her orphans. 

 

To be honest, Nature was too buggy, too dense, and too monotonously boring to be a serious existential issue.  She had had it with tents, mosquitos, lumpy air mattresses and gross improprieties, and wondered whether she had made the right progressive choice. Her civil rights colleagues were getting fucked by the likes of Pharoah Jones, super pimp and headman of Anacostia, Washington's inner city, or camping it up with Dupont Circle gay boys in the hottest clubs in the DMV while she was damp and bitten in the Shenandoah. 

 What was this Nature fetish all about, she wondered after having spent her time in the woods and emerged no more enlightened or illuminated than before?  It was a faux idyll, she concluded, a liberal wet dream, a fantasy, a confected utopia of universal harmony. 

'You haven't seen the real Nature, she was advised by a colleague. 'For that you have to go West'; but after a trip to Livingston, Montana where she joined others in a protest against BLM - the rapacious federal bureau of land management - and their intention to turn old growth forests into logging heavens, she was not moved.  She missed the ruggedness of urban life, its symphony, its discordancy, its life!  There was nothing to save here that couldn't be seen virtually.  Who needs the real thing, a childish playground, a kindergarten coloring book?

She grew to like Livingston, not its wide open spaces but its bars that open at 9 am, its open carry permissiveness, its five-mile freight trains carrying coal from the Dakotas to the coast, and its hardly civil tolerance of Eastern ranchers. 

  

She put in her time at the barricades, but then retreated to Dry Gulch, the go-to bat for railroad workers who shunted trains and loaded coal on the east-west freights which stopped at Livingston Junction, her piece of urbanity in the progressive Never Never Land of her colleagues. 

Virtuality trumped reality every time, at least when it came to 'The Environment' or 'Nature'.  Why would anyone hike the Absarokas, or the Blue Ridge or the Catskills for that matter when the virtual experience was far more personalized, engaging, and real?

The virtual world was replacing zoos, penitentiaries for wild animals, and the virgin forests necessary for logging to meet the demand for modern living.  Why would anyone want to bang along with a hundred other tourists on rutted Serengeti, tsetse fly infested tracks when the virtual experience was far more graphic, intimate, and personal?

 

The lure of the wild, the natural, the undeveloped had a particular allure for Etta Cohen when she as a forming adolescent - anything but the projects, concrete, and corner shops - but once she set foot into the woods, an unpleasantly buggy, boring, predictable, and totally uninteresting place, she understood the febrile fantasy of her youth.  

'The Environment' was a non-starter and so was its Apparition, Global Warming. It made no difference to her that the premises of global warming were being debunked - no sea rises, no coastal flooding, no incineration of Iowan corn crops, no decrease in polar ice, no death of tropical coral.  She on her first outing from the Bronx got the picture. Nature was no more than a feature of human settlement, to be done with as conditions demanded. 

Nothing brilliant, nothing existential, nothing more than resources on the one hand and Hollywood idolatry on the other. 

Esta did not return to the Bronx but to Park Avenue from which penthouse she was able to observe the comings and goings of the greatest city on earth and forget entirely her dalliance with all west of the Hudson.