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Years ago, if you recall, I was in a couple of emotionally abusive relationships, where the women would call me names, harangue me for days, and so on. When I’d ask them to stop they’d say I was trying to censor or control them.

Finally, a friend asked me, “What will it take for you to say ‘Fuck you’ to this woman and walk away?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“That would be rude.”

“She’s not being rude to you?”

“I don’t want to put myself on the same level. I don’t want to cross some sort of middle line between us. I can talk about things on my half . . .”

“Ah, you’ve been to counseling! You can say, ‘When you call me names, it makes me feel bad,’ but you can’t say, ‘Cut this shit out!’ then hang up the phone . . .”

“Hanging up on someone is unacceptable.”

“So it’s okay for her to perpetrate unacceptable behavior on you, but you aren’t allowed to call her on it, nor even to absent yourself? That’s crazy.”

I opened my mouth to say something, then shut it, then opened it again, then clamped it shut.

That very night the woman called and began haranguing me. I said “Fuck you!” and hung up the phone. (Unfortunately, and this reveals how stupid denial makes us, it took me quite a while longer to figure out that after hanging up on her I didn’t have to answer when she called back! It didn’t take much longer than that, though, for me to realize that not only did I not need to answer the phone, I could simply not allow anyone to harangue me. If they do, I kick them out of my life. What a concept!)

There is an idea, no, a wish cherished by many, that love implies pacifism. If we love we cannot ever consider violence, even to protect those we love. I’m not sure that mother grizzly bears would agree, nor mother moose (I’ve heard it said that the most dangerous creature in the forest, apart, of course, from civilized humans, is a moose when you’re between her and her child), nor many other mothers I’ve known. I’ve been attacked by mother horses, cows, mice, chickens, geese, eagles, hawks, and hummingbirds who thought I was threatening their children. I have known many human mothers who would kill anyone who was going to harm their little ones. If a mother mouse is willing to put her life on the line by attacking someone eight thousand times her size, how pathetic it is that we construct religious and spiritual philosophies that tell us that to attack even those who are killing those we most dearly love—or those we pretend we love—is to not love at all. That leads to the fifteenth premise of this book: Love does not imply pacifism.

I have a friend, a former prisoner, who is very smart, and who says that dogmatic pacifists are the most selfish people he knows, because they place their moral purity—or to be more precise, their self-conception of moral purity—above stopping injustice.

Years ago I spoke with the wonderful philosopher and writer Kathleen Dean Moore about why calling the earth our mother is not always helpful. I first asked her what were some of the lies we tell ourselves about our relationship to the land.

She responded, “In order of outrageousness: That human beings are separate from—and superior to—the rest of natural creation. That Earth and all its creatures were created to serve human ends. That an act is right if it creates the greatest wealth for the greatest number of people. That a corporation’s highest responsibility is to its stockholders. That we can have it all—endlessly mining the land and the sea—and never pay a price. That technology will provide a way to solve every problem, even those created by technology. That it makes sense to barge salmon smolts past dams to the sea, so that grain can move down-river in barges. That a pine plantation is the same as a forest. That you can poison a river without poisoning your children. And the biggest and most dangerous lie of all: That the Earth is endlessly and infinitely resilient.”

I asked why that is so dangerous.

She said: “We are doing damage now—to the atmosphere,