stacks



Recognizing the Rights of Nature and the Living Forest


Chinese charater for the respect of nature

"Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law.

Nor by anything else except the resolution
of free citizens to defend their liberties.
"



"If you refuse to pay unjust taxes,
your property will be confiscated.

If you defend your property,
you will be arrested.

If you resist arrest,
you will be clubbed.

If you defend yourself against clubbing,
you will be shot dead."



stir up society

Abbey's Road

Creeping Corporatization of National Parks


November 6, 1980

Awaking as usual sometime before the dawn, frost on my beard and sleeping bag, I see four powerful lights standing in a vertical row on the eastern sky.

Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and, pale crescent on a darkened disc, the old moon.

The three great planets appear to be rising from the cusps of the moon.

I stare for a long time at this strange, startling apparition, a spectacle I have never before seen in all my years on planet Earth.

What does it mean?

If ever I have seen a portent in the sky this must be it.

Spirit both forms and informs the universe, agreed the New England transcendentalists, of whom Henry David Thoreau was one.

All Nature is but symbolic of a greater spiritual reality beyond, and within.



Going to California



Watching the planets, I stumble about the campfire, breaking twigs, filling the coffeepot.

I dip water out of buckets in this world; the water chills my hands.

I stare long at the beautiful dimming lights in the sky and find there no meaning other than intrinsic beauty.

"Reality is fabulous," said Henry David Thoreau; "be it life or death, we crave nothing but Reality."

The forest spread below us in summer in seventeen different shades of green.

There were yellow pine and pinon pine, blue spruce and Engelmann spruce, white fir and Douglas fir, quaking aspen, New Mexican locust, alligator juniper, and four kinds of oak.



Banjo Duel



Along the rimrock of the escarpment, where warm air rose from the canyons beneath, grew manzanita, agave, sotol, and several species of cactus - prickly pear, pincushion, fishhook.

Far down in the canyons, where water flowed, though not always on the surface, we could see sycamore, alder, cottonwood, walnut, hackberry, wild cherry, and wild grape.

The naming of things is a useful mnemonic device, enabling us to distinguish and utilize and remember what otherwise might remain an undifferentiated sensory blur, but names do not tell us much of character, essence, meaning.

Albert Einstein thought that the most mysterious aspect of the universe is what he called its "comprehensibility".

To me the most mysterious thing about the universe is not its comprehensibility but the fact that it exists.

And the same mystery attaches to everything within it.

The Earth is permeated through and through by mystery.

Modern science and technology have given us the social engineering techniques to measure, analyze, and take apart the immediate neighborhood, including the neighbors.

But this knowledge adds not much to our understanding of things.

"Knowledge is power," said Francis Bacon.

But power does not lead to wisdom, even less to understanding.

Sympathy, physical contact - touch - are better means to so fine an end.

I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace - whether a woman, a child, a rock, a tree, a bear, a shaggy dog.

The rest is hearsay.

If there is a heaven, an ideal realm beyond space and time, it must contain the hermit thrush.

Otherwise, what good is it?

And there must be trees too, of course.

And mountains.

And a sun that sets each evening and rises each morning.

And winding through the woods, a trail with pine needles, stones, oak leaves, fresh bear shit.

Naturally.



naked cannabis harvest - keeps the animals calm !



We lie in the sunshine, on the warm grass, and stare at the mountains, the endless snow-covered mountains, range after range, standing beyond the dark forest.

The glaciers wink and glitter, running with streams of melted ice.

Flowers and ice, sunlight and snow.

On this bright afternoon, in a field of flowers, Alaska seems to me a cold and somber land.

After thirty-four years in the American Southwest, after too much time spent dawdling about in places like Grand Canyon, Death Valley, the Maze, the Superstition Mountains, the San Rafael Reef and the Waterpocket Fold, the San Juan Mountains and the Gran Desierto, Baja California, Glen Canyon and the Dirty Devil River, Desolation Canyon and the Pariah River, the Book Cliffs and the Kaiparowits Plateau and Big Bend and White Sands, the Red Desert and Black Rock and Barranca del Cobre, Factory Butte and Monument Valley, Slickhorn Gulch, Buckskin Gulch, Thieves' Mountain, Montezuma's Head, Cabeza de Prieta, Cabezon, Telluride and Lone Pine and the Smoke Creek Desert, Moab and Upheaval Dome, White Rim and Druid Arch - to name but a few - and seeing the full moon rise over the 13,000-foot peaks of Sierra La Sal, while the setting sun turns watermelon pink a 2,000-foot vertical wall of sandstone in the foreground, then - and I'll admit I'm spoiled - then by comparison Alaska seems, well, sort of . . . banal.




River Of No Return

"After a long and significant series of experiments, it doesn't seem that there is any evidence that Laetrile possesses any biolgical activity with respect to cancer, one way or another," said Dr. Lewis Thomas, president of Sloan-Kettering



My theory is that a vigorous, free, outdoors life is good for humans.

It fills them with cheer and high spirits, leading to health and a long life.

Despite the claims of medical technicians such as Dr. Lewis Thomas, official spokesman for the cancer industry, it is not more and newer drugs we need, not better living through chemotherapy, but rather clean air.

Clean water.

Good fresh real food. And plenty of self-directed physical activity.

Medical science has succeeded in reducing infant mortality rates, thus creating the catastrophe of overpopulation, but it has not - despite medical myth - lengthened the normal life span.

"Three score years and ten," now as in biblical times, remains the norm.

And in fact the longest lived humans on Earth are the primitive peasants of places like Ecuador, the Caucasus Mountains, Afghanistan.

Certainly not the inhabitants of Dr. Lewis Thomas's Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital in New York City.

We emerge from one nightmare only to find another threatening to engulf us: the technological superstate, densely populated, centrally controlled, nuclear-powered, computer-directed, firmly and thoroughly policed.

Call it the Anthill State, the Beehive Society, a technocratic despotism - perhaps benevolent, perhaps not, but in either case the enemy of personal liberty, family independence, and community sovereignty, shutting off for a long time to come the freedom to choose among alternate ways of living.

The domination of nature made possible by misapplied science leads to the domination of humans; to a dreary and totalitarian uniformity.

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

Thoreau knew of this tendency and foresaw its fatal consequences.

A frantic 'busyness' pervades America wherever we look - in city and country, among young and old and middle-aged, married and unmarried, all races, classes, sexes, in work and play, in religion, the arts and the sciences.

We hear a demand by conventional economists for increased 'productivity'.

Productivity of what? For whose benefit? To what end?

By what means and at what cost? Those questions are not considered.

We are belabored by the insistence on the part of our politicians, businessmen and military leaders, and the claque of scriveners who serve them, that "growth" and "power" are intrinsically good, of which we can never have enough, or even too much.

As if gigantism were an end in itself.

The reason so many people flee the cities at every opportunity to go camping, canoeing, skiing in the wilds is that wilderness offers a taste of adventure, a chance for the rediscovery of pre-agricultural, pre-industrial freedom.



American Inspiration ~ Wilderness



Forest and desert, mountain when ventured upon in primitive terms, allow us Proustian recapture, superficial and brief, of rich sensations of former existence, basic heritage of a million years of hunting, gathering, wandering.

This elemental impulse still survives in nerves, dreams and desires.

Suppressed but not destroyed by the five thousand years of monocultural and two hundred years of industrial peonage, imposed on what evolution designed as a feeling, thinking, freedom loving animal.

I say culture; civilization remains an ideal, an integrated realization of intellectual, emotional, and physical gifts which humankind has as a whole.

The modern urban-industrial world - like the feudal world - offers freedom and adventure to a certain elite aristocracy: the star athlete, the superstar entertainer, the techno-warrior, the artist arrivi, the successful politician.

The overwhelming majority condemned to the role of spectators, servitors.

One exception remains to the iron rule of oligarchy.

In America one relic of our ancient and rightful liberty has survived.

And that is - a walk into the woods; a journey on foot into the uninhabited interior; a voyage down the river of no return.

Hunters, fishermen, hikers, climbers, white-water boatmen, red-rock explorers know what I mean.

This category of experience remains open and available to all.

It is my fear that if we allow the freedom of the hills and the last wilderness to be taken from us, then the very idea of freedom may die with it.

We see a white egret. Another blue heron.

Beaver, buzzards, and bullfrogs.

White clouds passing beyond remote red walls.

From deep in the entrenched meanders of the endless Goosenecks, looking upriver, I catch a glimpse of Muley Point on the rim of Cedar Mesa, three thousand feet above.

We round Mendenhall Bend, where the river winds eight linear miles to advance one-half mile on the map.

On the neck of the stone goose is a little stone cabin, built by a gold prospector named Mendenhall eighty years ago.

Nobody lives there now.

Looking at petroglyphs on a rosy mural wall, I think of the legend of Kokopelli, the hunch-backed flute player of the Anasazi, who visited - when the men were away at war - all the villages of Indian America, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, and left behind a spawn of syphilitic mutants.

"Bill," I say, "what are you so happy about?"

"Nothing in particular," he says. "Everything in general."

I know exactly what he means. The magic of a boat.

The splendor of a flowing river. The freedom of the desert.

Of course a happy man's true paradise is his own good nature.

We pass the mouth of John's Canyon, a hanging canyon, as John Wesley Powell would have labeled it; the pour-off is a limestone ledge fifty feet above the grade of the river.

Two years ago in March there was a double waterfall pouring from that ledge; this time barely a trickle.

Evenings I spend by a little bed of mesquite coals, under a growing moon, listen for coyote, horned owls, whippoorwills, things go bump in the night.


For Magic.

Witchcraft.

Wizardry.

And find it, too - all in my own head.

Quietly exultant, we drift on together, not a team but a family, a human family bound by human compassion, through the golden canyons of the River of Sorrows.

So named, it appears, by a Spanish priest three centuries ago, a man of God who saw in our physical world (is there another?) only a theater of suffering.

He was right! He was wrong!



The Shadows ~ Apache



Compassion can defeat that nameless terror.

Caring for one another, we take the sting from death.

Caring for our mysterious blue planet, we resolve riddles and dissolve all enigmas in contingent bliss.

On and on we float, down the river, day after day, down to the trip's end, to our takeout point, a lonely place in far western Colorado called Bedrock.

Next door to Paradox.

The Apaches who gave the name to this canyon are not around anymore.

Most of that particular band - unarmed old men, women, children - huddled in a cave near the mouth of Aravaipa Canyon, were exterminated in the l880s by a death squad of American pioneers, aided by Mexican and Papagos, from the nearby city of Tucson.

The walls of Aravaipa Canyon bristle with spiky rock gardens of vegetation.

Most prominent is the giant saguaro cactus, growing five to fifty feet tall out of crevices in the stone you might think could barely lodge a flower.

The barrel cactus, with its pink fish-hook thorns, thrives here on the sunny side; and clusters of hedge-hog cactus, and prickly pear with names like clockface and cows-tongue, have wedged roots into the rock.

Since most of the wall is vertical, parallel to gravity, these plants grow first outward then upward, forming right-angled bends near the base.

Great cottonwoods and sycamores shade the creek's stony shores; when we are not wading in water we are wading through a crashing autumn debris of green-gold cottonwood and dusty-red sycamore leaves.

Other trees flourish here - willow, salt cedar, alder, desert hackberry, and a category of wild walnut.

Cracked with stones, the nuts yield a sweet but frugal meat.





At the water's edge is a continuous growth of peppery-flavored watercress.

The stagnant pools are full of algae; and small pale frogs, tree frogs, and leopard frogs, leap from the bank at our approach and dive into the water; they swim for the deeps with kicking legs, quick breaststrokes.

We return to the mouth of Aravaipa Canyon.

Halfway back to camp and the canyon entrance we pause to inspect a sycamore that seems to be embracing a boulder.

The trunk of the tree has grown around the rock.

Feeling the tree for better understanding, I hear a clatter of loose stone, look up, and see six, seven, eight bighorn sheep perched on the rim rock.

Three rams, five ewes.

They are browsing at the local salad bar - brittlebush, desert holly, bursage, and jojoba - aware of us but not alarmed.

We watch them for a long time as they move casually along the rim and up a talus slope beyond, eating as they go, halting now and then to stare back at the humans staring up at them.

We have earned enough memories, stored enough mental emotional images in our heads, from one brief day in Aravaipa Canyon, to enrich the urban days to come.

As Henry David Thoreau found a universe in the woods around Concord, any individual whose senses are alive can make a world of any natural place, however limited it might seem, on this subtle planet of ours.

"The world is big but it is comprehensible," says R. Buckminster Fuller.

It seems to me the Earth is not nearly big enough and that any portion of its surface, left unpaved and alive, is infinitely rich in details and relationships.

The very existence of existence is itself suggestive of the unknown.

We will never get to the end of it, never plumb the bottom of it, never know the whole of even so trivial and precious a place as Aravaipa Canyon.

Therein lies our redemption.

Once during a debate on a land-use controversy a mining claims speculator (not a miner, not an engineer, only a speculator) said to me, "If God hadn't wanted us to dig up that uranium, He wouldn't have put it there."

To which I replied, "If God had wanted us to use that uranium, He wouldn't have hidden it underground."

Henry David Thoreau perceived the issue clearly: "They go dig where they never planted," of the California Forty-Niners, "to reap without sowing."





Should all stay home for a season, give our wilderness some relief from Vibram soles, rubber boats, hang gliders, deer rifles, and fly rods.

But where is home?

Surely not the walled-in prison of the cities, under that low ceiling of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides and acid rain - the leaky malaise of an overdeveloped, overcrowded, self-destroying culture - where most people are compelled to serve their time and please the wardens if they can.

For more and more of us, the out-of-doors is our true ancestral estate.

For a mere five thousand years we have grubbed in the soil and laid brick upon brick to build the cities; but for a million years before that we lived the leisurely, free, and adventurous life of hunters and gatherers.

How can we pluck that deep root of feeling from human consciousness?

Impossible.

The deeper America sinks into industrialism, urbanism, militarism - with the rest of the world doing its best to emulate America - the more poignant and appealing becomes Henry's demand for the right of every individual, every dog, every snail darter, every lousewort, every living thing, to live its own life in its own way at its own pace in its own square mile of home.

Or in its own stretch of river.

Floating down a portion of Rio Colorado in Utah on a rare month in spring, twenty-two years ago, a friend and I found ourselves passing through a world so beautiful it seemed and had to be eternal.

Such perfection - winding corridors of sandstone leading to revelation.

The philosophers and the theologians agree that the perfect is immutable.

They were wrong. We were wrong. Glen Canyon was destroyed.

Everything changes, and nothing is more vulnerable than the beautiful.

There will always be one more river, not to cross but to follow.

We are fellow voyagers on our living ship of stone and soil, water and vapor, this delicate planet circling round the sun, which humankind call Earth.




civil disobedience is something that is required

"Truth threatens power, now and always."

Edward Abbey, from Down the River with Henry


Chinese charater for nature lover

ideology_of_a_cancer_cell

"Truth is always the enemy of power.

and power the enemy of Truth."




unique library index

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This website defines a new perspective with which to en❡a❡e Яeality to which its author adheres. The author feels that the faλsification of reaλity outside personal experience has forged a populace unable to discern pr☠paganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an internati☣nal c☣rp☣rate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reaλity on the human race. Religi☯us int☯lerance ☯ccurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religi☸us beliefs or persons due to their religi⚛us ide⚛l⚛gy. This web site marks the founding of a system of philºsºphy nªmed The Truth of the Way of the Lumière Infinie - a ra☨ional gnos☨ic mys☨ery re☦igion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a pers∞nal relati∞n with Æ∞n through the pursuit of the knowλedge of reaλity in the hope of curing the spiritual c✡rrupti✡n that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Mŷsterŷ of the Lumière Infinie are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Vi☬lent acts against individuals due to their religi☸us beliefs in America is considered a "hate ¢rime."

This web site in no way c☬nd☬nes vi☬lence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the internati☣nal c☣rp☣rate cartels desire to c✡ntr✡l the human race. The internati☣nal c☣rp☣rate cartel already controls the w☸rld ec☸n☸mic system, c☸rp☸rate media w☸rldwide, the global indus✈rial mili✈ary en✈er✈ainmen✈ complex and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the eg● w●rship and the destruction of gl☭bal ec☭systems. Civilization is based on coöperation. Coöperation with bi☣hazards of a gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the p☠pulace in general through c✡rp✡rate media by pressing emotional buttons which have been πreπrogrammed into the πoπulation through prior c☢rp☢rate media psych☢l☢gical ☢perati☢ns. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of s☠cial structures that do not adhere to the corrupt internati☭nal elites vision of a perfect world. Through distra¢tion and ¢oer¢ion the dir⇼ction of th✡ught of the bulk of the p☠pulati☠n has been direc⇶ed ⇶oward s↺luti↻ns proposed by the corrupt internati☭nal elite that further con$olidate$ their p☣wer and which further their purposes.

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