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I told Paulo that sure, I wanted him to like me, but only because I liked him, not because he's indigenous. I also said I didn't much care if he liked me for my work; if he did like me I hoped it was because, as I said, "I'm a dang nice guy." I told him also that I'd been doing the work long before I met him, and that I would certainly continue whether he approved or not. Finally, I told him I had reasons entirely independent of him or anyone else for hating what civilization is doing to the world.

I briefly dated a woman who thought my activism was a form of acting out, and who said I despised the culture because it was safer to do so than to despise my father. I thought, and still think, that there was a shred, and only a shred, of truth in what she said, the shred being that he does provide me an avenue of understanding into many of the culture's otherwise incomprehensible actions. But on the main she was wrong.

I do despise my father for his own detestable activities. I am quite clear on this point. In the parlance of chemistry, I believe he was a catalyst for my activism. A catalyst is a substance that hastens a reaction. My father initiated the reaction, but the activities of our culture make the "sins" of my father seem minor— were they not properly understood as the micro version of our culture's macro activities. Discrete catalysts can be found for many other activists as well. The Forest Service clearcut behind the activist Barry Rosenburg's home sealed his decision to devote his life to the forests. The Plum Creek clearcut that destroyed Sara Folger's water supply pushed her in the same direction. But as in chemistry, the catalyst is only the beginning of a process.

The question I should have asked that ex-girlfriend before we stopped dating is why more people aren't activated by the ubiquitous catalysts they encounter daily. To return to chemistry, there is something called an activation energy, which is the amount of energy that must be present before a certain reaction can proceed. What, I should have asked, is your own activation energy? What's your catalyst? How much—and what—will it take for you to begin to act?

I never got to ask. We broke up, and lost contact, before I could articulate this response.

Violations come not only in paroxysms of rage, spasms of violence and violent orgasms. They come more often with constant erosion, as at Mount Graham, as everywhere, with an incessant imparting of the full knowledge that there is nothing, no one, nowhere, no thought, no action, that the violator will not seek out and attempt to control.

All through college I maintained some minimal contact with my father. I'm not sure why. I never called him, but he called me, once a month, or every other month. I spoke civilly to him, not bringing up the past.

Nor did I bring up the present. These evasions of all that was important gave our conversations a surreal, ungrounded feeling that I still can't quite wrap my mind around. What did we talk about? I couldn't bring up the present because he hadn't changed at all—he was still attempting to control me—and I couldn't bring up the past because I hadn't changed enough—I wasn't strong enough to stand up to his denial. The smell of his abuse still clung to my skin and to my clothes. It hung in the air around me.

He kept "spies" on me all through high school, college, and after. One morning in high school I nearly got in an automobile accident, and that night received a call from him asking if I was all right. Fellow students in high school—acquaintances, and even people I didn't know—upbraided me for mistreating my father. During college I was forced to ask many of my instructors not to reveal information about me to anyone without my written consent. I've since found they were bound by law to do this anyway, but the law never prevented my father from calling, nor did it prevent the instructors from talking to him.

The last time I saw my father was on the night of my senior