Ecolog: "To reconcile the needs and works of humankind with those of the earth and its life" has been my life's motto for about 60 years now, and that only counts from the time it "came" to me at the age of 15. Before that, I had the great advantage of having a grandmother whose roots were in the Cherokee people. As a small child, she took me into the fields and showed me the miracles of life, and I have been some sort of child of the fields ever since.
As I tore the oaks from the Texas soil on my father's orders, it hurt me. Those woods were my playground, my university. I learned grammar, after a fashion, at grammar school. My "university" of the woods did not teach me culture. But we cultivated. We tore up the land and the crops failed and the sand blew and my father cried and we moved away. That's how I came to California and the Mojave Desert where I spent every possible moment alone while my parents were breaking up. I have a lot of people to thank for information and ideas and how to think and love and to be whatever I am. I have come to believe that culture is a curse, a psychopathology. Before the rise of "civilizations," we lived within the energy cycle. We are now reaping as we have sown, to cite yet another cultivation metaphor. People like my grandmother still exist, but they are being consumed by the concentrators of power unto themselves. They do TO people and the earth and its life; people like my grandmother do FOR those things. Connected to every trinket we suck from the shelves at the big discount stores is a chain of damage to the earth and its life, every car or truck I drive, and the list goes ON. But life--life goes AROUND. I do not begrudge my fellow humans or even myself these things, but we must stop lying about what is really going on; we have to dig ourselves out of the pits by stopping as much waste, as much destruction as we can. And we have to get better at it. We have to look back upon our mistakes and stop making them over and over again. Most ecologists understand this, but some don't. They had might as well have been investment bankers. The Mad Av types and other spin doctors can take a good word (ecology, sustainability, etc.) and pervert it into advertising with which to delude us into thinking we're doing something for the earth and make a killing at the same time. We could stop doing this, and stop accepting mere labels as conscience-salve. No matter the odds against success; it is where we put our little finger on the tiller that steers our ship of fate and that of the earth. We should be doing FOR each other and the earth, not TO the earth, and we need to understand that bragging rights have nothing to do with anything except the rotting of our image. WT
