Energy

We are told by physicists that energy and matter are interchangeable, different expressions of a single identity. Mother Earth tells me much the same. But she also says that, while she has a great deal more of both beyond that taken by human cultures, the dominant global culture has for some time been seizing a great deal more energy and matter than is healthy for Mother Earth and her creation. This message is mainly about energy; however, matter, her matter, is also at issue. When it comes from nuclear fission or fusion, the appropriation of energy actually entails the disappearance of matter. Yet even when energy is extracted from non-nuclear sources, it entails a change in matter, from one form to another, as when petroleum, coal, or natural gas is burned. None of the substance burned remains the same. Some renewable sources, such as hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal, may seem to be exceptions, since no fission, fusion, or burning occurs. But this is not so. With current technology, appropriating such energy for human use requires an enormous array of tools, not simply as the final products, but even more in the gathering and processing of materials, and in the manufacturing and transportation of these products. All of these tools are altered forms of matter, artificially transformed from wilderness, and they consume energy in their production and use. In addition, the final energy-seizing product – dam, windmill, solar panel, geothermal power plant, and so on - reduces directly the energy of Mother Earth’s wild water, wind, surface earth, and even internal magma, and by its very presence destroys or disrupts wilderness. For these reasons and others, the goal of sustainability in energy production, as usually defined, is unacceptable to Mother Earth. The question she expects us to consider in Los Angeles as elsewhere is not how can we sustain our present or an even higher level of energy consumption. It is rather how best can we reduce our level of energy seizure and consumption to that which her recovering, expanding wilderness can include, as an integrative, sustaining part of the whole. This, of course, means a fundamental change in the character and composition of our energy extraction methods. Whatever the method, it is fallacious to assume that the energy source is unlimited or even abundant, as we now measure these things. If we measure at all, we must learn to value not megawatts or billions of British Thermal Units (btus), but instead the equivalent of watts or a thousand btus. More importantly, she expects us to know, and to behave as though we know, that even the smallest amount of energy consumed by us comes at the expense of others in her creation, others who have as much legitimacy in their claim to this energy as do we. And she expects us to compensate their loss. Such knowledge is diluted at a distance. Our energy sources in Los Angeles can be sensible to us only if they are local or regional, and shaped by an awareness of our dependence upon a healthy local and regional wilderness for our energy supplies, as well as for every other need we possess. This is obviously neither the source nor the sense of our energy today. The Abandonment The two most important sources of energy for human beings and for all other life created by Mother Earth are sunlight and food; and the latter ultimately acquires its energy, if we believe our botanists, from the former. There are other sources of energy provided by Mother Earth, including gravity, geothermal energy – complementing from below the sun’s warmth from above - and the kinetic energy resulting from her rotation about her axis, which, along with sunlight, seems to power her atmosphere’s weather, ocean currents and tides (with the Moon’s help). She also provides regenerative biomass fuel. This is of special importance to us, because it fed the fires which our ancient ancestors captured from her wildness, becoming our first potent tool. In future, it will aid us again. In any given region, we have no influence over the quantity of sunlight, gravity, background geothermal radiation, or wind we receive (except from the unintended global warming we appear to be causing through the massive burning of rainforests and fossil fuels). We and all other life do have some influence over one another, including those creatures which after death make up our food and/or can fuel our fires. Indeed, as regards food at least, we remain alive and well only so long as we seek it, find it, and consume it. She tells me, and nutritionists tend to agree, that we are most healthy when that food comes directly from her, unprocessed and unpolluted by our tools. Part of her message to us today is to remind us that we have intentionally suppressed and greatly diminished this vital energy source by our assaults upon wilderness. We could hardly have been more foolish. Her wilderness is where Homo sapiens were created and thrived for most of our existence. Being large, fangless, clawless, slow of foot, and awkward above ground in the trees, we were doubtless tool-makers and users from the beginning. Otherwise, without at least stone, wood, or bone weapons we would have been easy prey for hungry carnivores such as dire wolves, lions and saber-toothed cats. With these same or other tools from similar materials, and the ability to capture wildfire, we were also better able to secure our own food, in greater variety, make clothes for colder regions distant from the equator or higher in altitude, and construct secure shelter. None of this, however, made it possible for us to treat wilderness as an exploitable resource, and so initiate its destruction. Wilderness was instead our deliverer of bounty, our protector, our home, just as for her other creatures. We were, as they, expressions of wilderness. The resulting lives, so long as the quantity and variety of food did not fail in the home region, were neither nasty, brutish, or short. Based upon the evidential experience of native people in Los Angeles and throughout Mother Earth, wherever they were free of aggressive imperial cultures life was abundant, healthful, stimulating, and frequently long-lived. It was also connected to the others around them and to the Mother of them all, in ways of which those possessed by tool-drenched dominant cultures have no understanding and can only assert disbelief. But then as now, not all our children were able to reach adulthood, and not all adults survived to old age. Some communities, struck by unusual deprivation or war, disappeared entirely. Most accepted these deaths, and death itself, as an appropriate if difficult part of welcome and frequently joyful life. However, for those distressed and threatened by the universality of death, tools, in their variety and power, especially their power of artificial mutation, of being reshaped by tool-employing humans into even more powerful forms, made it tempting to believe that these deaths were avoidable. And so a path away from wilderness and towards tools was chosen, in different places and among different peoples at different times. This choice almost certainly faced sometimes passionate resistance, from those who possessed or were led by wiser counsel. Over the last few thousand years, and especially the last few hundred, those cultures which did not make this choice became weaker, relative to the others, in their power to kill. Thus they have declined, their members killed or absorbed; whole peoples have vanished altogether except as ancestors. At the heart of this choice for power, this avaricious tool-fueled hunger for the end of that transformation which is so necessary to Mother Earth’s creation, was the hunger for energy. Humans began to seek what they did not need, but which their tools taught them they might desire and win. These lessons were seductive but ultimately false. It is this lie, this misplaced overriding desire, which confronts us today as we still yearn for more energy and yet face an imminent future of richer lives, but much less energy. Energy and Agriculture Unless there are fewer births, fewer deaths mean more of the living. The self-destructive implications of this simple formula have somehow escaped the more tool-energized human communities in Mother Earth. The dominant culture in Los Angeles, springing from Europe and spreading to this region and to almost all others across her surface since roughly 1500 AD, has given it only passing interest at best. Seizing energy has made it possible for us to postpone death, whether the death of the very young or the old, and so to increase our numbers among the living organisms of Mother Earth. This process began, as historians and others have long pointed out, with the appearance of agriculture and the greater abundance of food which it provided. It may have begun with some version of slash and burn techniques, techniques which involve comparatively powerless tools and the least disturbance of wilderness. It is still practiced by the remnants of better connected and more pacific agricultural cultures, but they are nearly extinct. Without attempting to trace the subsequent history of this increasingly energized manipulation of ‘domesticated’ plants and animals, it remains today the most critical energy (and not simply nutritional) supply to the still growing and now massive human populations in Los Angeles and other parts of our Mother. The great numbers of Homo sapiens it has fueled have made us a literal plague on the surface of Mother Earth. One symptom of this plague, once agriculture became settled rather than nomadic slash and burn, has been a spreading destruction of wilderness in favor of farmland and pastures, the rural pollution of earth, water and air – although contemporary organic techniques seek to reduce this – and an expanding threat to the fundamental genetic character of other species as engineered genes for tamed plants and animals escape into and infect wilderness. In Los Angeles, and the entire west coast of North America, agriculture came with the Europeans. It was not needed or sought by the indigenous peoples, who enjoyed, before the European invasion, an abundance of wild foods, both plant and animal, including acorns, fish, pine nuts, rabbits and deer. Of course, the Europeans brought not only agriculture but a plethora of new empowering devices, incorporating iron and other metals, synthetic chemicals, and later, electricity. Energy and Metallurgy In most technically evolving cultures, after agriculture came metallurgy, the production and shaping of more or less pure metals. Like agriculture, the practice of metallurgy by any culture entailed a substantial, even dramatic, increase in the consumption of energy. The energy demands of metallurgy centered upon the process called smelting. This involves collecting earth which has a high content in one or more of the desired metals, and reducing it under elevated temperatures and in the presence of carbon to synthetic quasi-pure form. In its early development, copper and tin were most important, being combined to create bronze. Later came iron, and then steel, steel alloys, and other metals. From all these, more plentiful, varied and effective tools were then fashioned (Some meteorites are composed of iron alloys, and from such meteorites a few pre-metallurgy tools were made in a number of cultures. This metal is not artificial, but on Mother Earth’s surface it is uncommon, and so have been the tools made from it). The temperatures required were only fitfully reached, if at all, by the open-air biomass fires (burning for instance wood or dried manure) which early cultures used for cooking and warmth; nor did these fires offer the necessary concentration of carbon. For this, charcoal was needed. Charcoal, like coal which eventually superseded it, is largely carbon, and when burned in conjunction with metal-rich earth, made the first production of substantial quantities of metal tools possible. Charcoal may be found in the remains of almost every open-air wood fire. However, producing it in sufficient quantities to yield useful amounts of metal requires more than simply gathering it from burned-out home hearths. Whether underground, in pits, or above ground in mounds, specially prepared structures were needed, which control the burning so as to generate a much higher yield of charcoal from a given quantity of wood. Not only was the potential energy from wood, together with human energy to monitor and manage the burn, required in generating the chemical change of wood into charcoal, so too was human energy and supporting tools (the making of which took energy) needed in the gathering of wood, delivery of the charcoal to the smelting furnaces, the construction and maintenance of the furnaces themselves - however simple their design and materials - the forging of these metals into tools such as hammerheads, shields and swords, and their delivery to the final user. In short, a new industry was formed for which an increased generation of energy was crucial. The shift from the so-called Bronze Age to the Iron Age raised the energy requirements even further, in part simply because the reduction of iron and especially steel (a purer form of iron) and steel alloys takes place at a higher temperature. If charcoal was necessary for metallurgy, so too was metal-rich earth. A mining industry emerged, to provide the essential earth either by stripping the wild surface of our Mother and/or digging below her surface. When later coal dug from the earth replaced charcoal – coal was chosen once the forests were destroyed or became inadequate sources of charcoal – the damage to wilderness from mining took another leap forward. Even in the Los Angeles region, which has been relatively free of metal production activities, much of the harm to her wilderness came from the mining of gold in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Metallurgy produced the materials for a great variety of new tools, especially after the Industrial Revolution in Europe at the end of the 18th Century. Some of these were themselves instruments vital to the development of more potent, energy-consuming metallurgy, notably in the production of carbon steel, steel alloys, and most recently, aluminum.

In the second half of the last century, steel and aluminum smelting were among the largest consumers of electrical energy in industrialized countries. Conversely, electrical production depends upon steel, copper and other metals. The same is true of the entire petrochemical and related plastic industries, large-scale mining and construction-related earth-moving, air and rapid surface transit, weapons manufacture, pharmaceuticals production, and many other industries. Despite the appearance of new and increasingly exotic materials, every region on Mother Earth is still in, at one level or another, the Iron Age. Metallurgy, with iron at its heart, together with the unfolding of agriculture, particularly metal-dependent agriculture, constitutes much of the technical justification and the means of human cultures’ unbridled appetite for her energy. They are the steel-wrapped fists with which we have persistently assaulted, slaughtered, and imprisoned her wild creation. Mother Earth seeks to tell us that in the Los Angeles of the 21st Century either we will abandon both, or she will take them from us, even if it means our passing away. As I have said before, we must begin now, or she will. What will happen elsewhere is less clear to me, living here. Human cultures in areas where indigenous peoples long practiced agriculture in the absence of metal tools, and retained a central, harmonious bond with wilderness, may indeed restore such practices and prosper under them; although this is not what I hear from her. Hearing Mother Earth makes it yet more difficult for me to see how metallurgy on any scale could continue, even in areas where metal-rich earth and forests (for charcoal) are still abundant. Mining and smelting damages the wild, with a greater local consumption of energy than wild-wed agriculture, while providing nothing we need to survive. Food we clearly require, as does all life, although wilderness can provide it. Refined metals yield tools which attack the wild and us. Swords came before plowshares – and both are the means of premature death. Energy and Population There are now some 15 million humans living in the Los Angeles region, and over six billion spread across the skin of Mother Earth. I heard the comedian George Carlin once comment in an interview to the effect that his deeply-rooted cynicism about the behavior and future prospects of humans might be much improved, were we reduced globally from that great number to a more manageable 100,000. This planet, of which we are by nature an inescapable part, does not, she tells me, ask this of us. What we will see, those who are living four or five generations from now, are far fewer humans in many regions and certainly in Los Angeles. Here, where there are now millions, there may be only thousands. If we do not respond well to her call, it could be fewer still, even none. One way to understand this seemingly awful and absurd prospect is to understand that we will not have the energy to sustain more. We think now in terms of hydrogen and farmed biomass fuel sources, or solar and wind-generated electricity, or cling to the abundant yet exhaustible hydrocarbons of coal and crude oil, or the radioactive promise of nuclear fission. But these are not part of our future. They keep us alienated from the role we are made to play as healthy parts of Mother Earth’s marvelous and far more potent body, and she is bringing us back to her, alive or not. If we choose to live as humans, to be, using a fashionable term, sustainable, then we will do so with the energies we can derive from food, stone, wood, clay, bone, hide and other natural substances, most taken from and returned to our regional wilderness. In Los Angeles, we will be new Paleolithic cultures, without domesticated – that is, enslaved - plants or animals, and without metals. Some human cultures elsewhere may become new Neolithic peoples, having a form of metal-less agriculture. This is if, in need, they can convince themselves and our Mother that the imprisoned creatures are well-satisfied, and the land itself periodically returns to wilderness. But that is for her, and these cultures, to judge. None of us will have electricity, engines, metal pipes, plastics or other synthetic substances, and little or no captive water. Put simply, almost all the tools we have today will vanish, or lose their functionality. We will need to learn many, for us, new skills in fashioning our natural tools, including the tools and skill to ignite our own fires, create our own stone knives, axes, and arrows, bake our own pottery, and weave and when needed, waterproof, our baskets. Our dwellings will be shaped by our skills at selecting and joining together those natural materials which together can offer us durable and healthful shelter. We will in general not be able to depend upon the work of those from other regions to sustain us, and much of our leisure will be determined by the arrival of inclement weather and our sensible preparation for it – even in Los Angeles! None of this will bring us great stores of energy which we can tap at will. We will learn true prudence, or fail to survive. Food will not wait for us at the supermarket, grown at a distance, harvested and transported with enormous energy costs. We will not be able to warm ourselves with the flip of a switch, nor cloth ourselves with a trip to Wal-Mart, or Macy’s. If we become ill, someone in our small community will need to gather the herbs which can aid our healing. This will not be a world in which we will drain energy from the earth, the rivers and the oceans in order to extend our lives and expand our numbers. The energy we consume will keep us fit and joyful, but neither arrogant nor great in number. We will learn humility, and the pride which is comfortable with it. How will our population decline so precipitously? Where will the millions go; how will they die? Mother Earth can accomplish it in a few years, even a few months or less, if we wait for her earthquakes, floods, winds, fire, human plagues and other terrible defenses against us. A nuclear war, if we are mad enough to wage it, could do much to take us there without her obvious intervention. But she does not wish any of these solutions for us, no more than she wishes our extinction, which could be their result. What she asks instead is that we willfully move as communities towards her, beginning right now. She asks that we abandon those tools which are destructive of our place in her, the first of which in Los Angeles are the many flood control dams. She asks that we learn those skills and form those tools which will make us sustainable parts of her wilderness. She asks that we turn towards our own bodies’ strength, endurance, and sensitivity to the natural world around us. All of our native senses have atrophied in our dominant culture, inundated as it is by bright, loud and relatively odorless contrived energies. We will regain the better part of not only the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, but even more those senses which make us aware of realities our tools cannot measure. And, most difficult of all, she asks us to find nonviolent and consensual means to radically reduce our numbers. Mother Earth tells me that these things can be done. As for giving back to her that great mass of human beings which our foolish pursuit of death-defying energies has generated, I am no demographer, and she has yet to tell me much about this. What seems obvious is that the answer lies in some combination of fewer births and an end to the strange arrogance which makes us oppose the death of our elders (of which I am one – I will be 65 this year). I love children, and in this I am affirmed by Mother Earth. She tells me that a community without children, or which does not care for its children as a community, is wounded and cannot heal. Indeed, motherhood, and to a lesser degree fatherhood, is a fundamental transforming experience for human adults which Mother Earth has shaped most of us to seek and to rejoice in; it is an essential part of our species' wildness. Nevertheless, in order to reduce our numbers and as an alternative to a greater death rate among children, fewer births are acceptable to her, even when this means that more women will not become mothers - provided that this is their choice and none other's. Our planet expects, moreover, that if done, it will be without serious risk to the health of the women concerned. As always, she also expects that women who become mothers will, together with their children, hold a central place in the lives, including the political lives, of their people. I also value the experience, memory, and wisdom of elders. So, I hear, does Mother Earth. They can help us gain clarity, purpose, direction, and courage. They can help us remember the hard won lessons of our individual and collective history. However, what we typically avoid in our current dominant culture is the fact that elders, by our very nature, are already in a process of degeneration which will lead through death to our transformation into other parts of our Mother. It may be that such wisdom and bravery as some of us display are among the virtues of this process. In any case, death is something we elders are all approaching, and we have every reason to know it. When we are ready, we should be allowed to accept death as our final living gift in this human form, both received and given by us. Specifically, when we understand that we are near death, or that due to the debilitating effects of aging we can no longer live satisfying lives, we should be approved and helped, if necessary, to take this death willfully, in an act of voluntary euthanasia. At the same time, the choice must be ours, our loss regretted and mourned. The same option could be made available, as it is now in some other regions, to anyone suffering from a terminal illness. Except under these conditions of self-perceived, evident and unavoidable dying, Mother Earth has created us to resist death, and expects it of us. She also will no longer tolerate our incessant assaults upon one another, and does not recognize humans killing other humans against their will as an acceptable means of reducing our numbers. If this must be done, she will do it. Immigration of course plays an important role in population growth, especially in Los Angeles. Those of us now resident in L. A., almost all of us non-indigenous, should leave to those coming and to Mother Earth herself the question of their moving to this region. We cannot and have no mandate from her to keep them out. Some of the newcomers may bring with them a strong connection with her. It will be enough here to adopt policies, and to recommend policies elsewhere, which move us towards her as best we can. Certainly the current abundance of tools, and tool-sustained conditions, in Los Angeles which now make this place relatively attractive will soon pass away, even if our changes spare us from the natural calamities which may occur in other places. In the meantime, our task is to help everyone, whether new arrivals or long-term residents, to listen to Mother Earth and embrace the new liberating era which we face. New Paleolithic Energies Much of this message has been about the energy that we now have, or seek, which we shall be losing, and the extraordinary costs in apparent comfort, mortality, and population which this entails. If we turn towards wisdom in the years just ahead, and so survive the return of wilderness to the heart of our lives, what improvement shall come to the humans which remain? A part of the answer has already been given. To be clear, it should be said that we will not lose community, social relations, the making and sharing of art, the skills of enquiry and the pursuit of truth about ourselves, other creatures, Mother Earth and the universe beyond. As now, despite the millions and billions about whom we are told, each of us in Los Angeles will live in a small circle of relatives, friends, neighbors, and fellow workers, a larger community of something like a few hundred, and, less frequently, visitors and strangers from more distant places. Among the many who will die without direct genetic descendants some may be troubled, but whether they are or not, they should be encouraged to share fully in the nurture and education of the children in their community. In this way not only will they bond with and rejoice in the future of these youth, but they will also contribute tangibly to the success of that future. Because we will no longer be at war with nature, Homo sapiens as a species will be more secure and enduring. We will certainly be vulnerable, but we will not be fragile. We will also not return to the conditions or cultures of the early Paleolithic people, even though we will share much in common with them. Given the intervening 10,000 years, we can hardly expect or desire to become as they were. Much of our histories, and the experiences of our more recent ancestors, we will remember and teach, even though we will not have printing presses and mass-produced books (writing we may keep, with quills and on natural materials, rather than paper as we now know it, or video screens). Not all of the lessons from these histories are warnings, and we will benefit from connections we may make between the flexibility of Mother Earth’s wild substances and useful tools now made of metals or plastics. The great variety of social relations to which we have been exposed, at least as stories and ideas, will give us choices about our own communities’ social structures which were not available to early humans (or so we may believe!). Our religions will also be affected by our recent past and the transition to Paleolithic sanity.

We will be healthier. The food we eat will be more nutritious, and it will bring to us the strength of a resurging wild, unlike the oppressed, weakened, polluted, poisoned and frequently neutered plants and animals whose substance we eat today. It will energize our bodies much more than do the manufactured supplements many of us now turn to for stimulus. The work we do will help to make us fitter than any exercise center or home fitness regimen can deliver. The air we breathe, and the water we drink, will be typically cleaner than anything we experience today. We will heal more readily, although we will not have the advantage of a hospital’s trauma center or synthetic antibiotics. The herbs and minerals we may use to defeat disease and to aid the healing of wounds will be more potent than those available today, without the weakening side effects of today’s synthetic drugs. We will certainly die, some of these deaths will be that of children or young adults, and we will suffer from their going. But we will not fear death as we do today, and we will understand it as a changing of roles within our Mother, rather than the finality which many of us now anticipate. We will be able to rejoice in both births and unavoidable deaths as two aspects of the same marvelous flowing which includes past, present and future, equally valuable and equally expressed in the eternal today where our lives exist. Because we will acknowledge and witness Mother Earth and other persons greater than ourselves as omnipresent in our lives, we will never know abandonment or loneliness. While we will not be free of longing for that which we have lost, we will also not be changeless, we will not be without adventure, we will not be glued to one place, and we will not be powerless. As today, our energy will come from Mother Earth and the Sun, but much if not all of it will come as directly as the air we breathe, from daylight and wilderness, rather than from the seizure and consumption of ‘energy resources’. We will rediscover magic and miracles, not because we will have lost knowledge thus mistake them for something else, but instead because we will learn to recognize and embrace in our own wildness the tremendous patterns of energy in Mother and Sun from which our tools have blocked us. Among the Gabrielino/Tongva people indigenous to Los Angeles, some are said to have been able to transform themselves into grizzlies. Other native people in North America speak of the ability to travel out of their bodies to distant places both known and unknown. These and many other energetic wonders we may achieve, once we have put behind us the association between energy, capture and destruction. We may even be better at it than earlier practitioners. As were they, we too will be inspired by our imaginations and our awareness of others, and both of these have clearly been stretched by the blunders, misplaced ambitions, legitimate discoveries, and wealth of stories over the last 100 centuries. Mother Earth is never eager to have her power used for deforming or destroying a part of her body, one reason why the unnatural guns and cannon are so much more effective in killing humans and other life than are magic and miracles. Destructive magic is accessible to humans, but generally, she tells me, mass death and other major alterations in her creation will become expressions of her wildness, not our own contrary will. The brief epoch in which we have been allowed to pursue the artificial dissection, dismemberment, and devastation of the wild, is ending. Is This All? I may be mistaken in what I believe Mother Earth is saying. Even if I haven’t completely blundered, I willingly admit that there is much more that I don’t know than that I do. Still, I am strongly moved to think that I am right about her basic call to us; but if I am, the benefits I have described above may seem woefully inadequate and uncertain. What does it do in Los Angeles and in other regions for those who aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from, or where they will sleep tonight? What does it offer the wealthy, who will surely lose their wealth? For the poor and those who must struggle hard to avoid poverty – which includes most Angelinos today – the near term future of this region is important. If they are caring parents, their felt interests extend well beyond the next meal, to at least the next twenty years, a time when they hope their children will be secure and prosperous young adults. If they are themselves teenagers or young adults desperate to escape their own oppression by the current dominant culture, they may see their place in the world a year from now, or ten years from now, as vital. Otherwise, there would be no hope for a good life, and perhaps no reason to fight for survival today. Some may have come to that view already, but Mother Earth wishes them to know that they are wrong to despair. Her message to them is this: your real hope lies not in the sham opportunities promoted by those with power today, since their power is ending. It is rather with joining, intentionally, her path, and learning to not merely survive but to thrive within her wilderness. Ignoring her, unless and until the first or second great earthquake, tsunami, terrible flood, or plague among humans strikes here can seem sensible only if these calamities do not come, to Los Angeles or regions nearby. When they do, and I am told that they will if we fail to turn to her and our own wildness soon, our children and youth will perish in the millions, and hope turned elsewhere will have been vain and foolish. She challenges these youth, their parents, and indeed all of us, whether we are now poor or not, to remove by consensus the barriers which have been raised against her and to learn new ways, new skills and new, truly joyful freedoms. It will liberate us not only from real material poverty – a freedom which the wealthy may think they already possess - but from our own urban and rural prisons, and allow us to rejoin our planet Mother and the wild universe in which she shares. The bars, and the walls, will have come down. Obviously, it will not be easy. Because I was born, educated, and have worked for decades as a European-American male within a culture driven by artifice and artificial power, tool worship, flight from personal death, and pursuit of limitless wealth conducted by theft, rape, slaughter, and other expressions of violent power, I am poorly suited to share in the transformation to come. I am not wealthy, but I have come to value many tools, among them books, violins, the www, central heating, indoor plumbing, cds and dvds, and the travel possibilities which cars and airplanes offer (although I dislike the machines themselves). All of these – except perhaps the violin - will soon be gone, and I will miss them, however much I take delight in the recovery of the wild in and outside me. I also know very little about making clay pots or bowls, or a hand-made bow and arrow, or kindling a fire without matches, or the identification and harvesting of wild herbs. I hope to learn more, and urge all of those who read this message to similar studies and practice. But, given my 66 years, I am unlikely to become a master in fashioning or using any of the new tools. In short, it is the young – the younger the better – who will lead in all this. Still, I have often been alone in wilderness, or among people who have been raised in its midst, and I know that it is infinitely better, even for me, than what we have achieved with all our stolen energies. I believe that it can be so for you as well. This is some of what she tells me. Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth