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By Root 2434 0

removed from freedom? I know parts of my genealogy back several hundred years, and though I count a U.S. Secretary of State (William Seward) and Danish royalty among my relatives, there is not a free man or woman as far back as I can see. Far from freedom flowing through my veins and permeating every cell and informing every step and breath I take, if I wish to be free I must endeavor to squeeze out every drop of slave’s blood as I find it, straining and pushing hard against everything the culture taught me: how to submit, how to not make waves, how to fear authority, how to fear perceiving my submission as submission, how to fear my feelings, how to fear perceiving the killing of those I love as the killing of those I love (or perhaps I should say the killing of those I would love had I not been taught to fear love, too), how to fear stopping by any means necessary those who are killing those I love, how to fear and loathe freedom, how to cherish and rely on insane moral structures stamped into me since birth. It’s a lot of work to try to cleanse oneself of several thousand years of inculcation, even when this inculcation is into a society so obviously self- and other-destructive as this one, which is one reason so many people fail to make this effort.

Another way to say all of this is that a difference between the conversation on the discussion group and those around the campfires is that most of the participants around the campfires probably weren’t insane. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the rest of us. (In related news, the front page of yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle carried the first installment of a thirty-nine part series. The subject of this in-depth coverage? Global warming? The biodiversity crisis? The murder of the oceans? Sorry, no. The series is on wine. But in the interests of full disclosure I must mention that the paper did cover something environmental that day: a buried article stated that since albacore tuna have less mercury in them, conscientious consumers may wish to choose to purchase them over other species. No mention was made of why any tuna have mercury in them at all.)

The good news is that, beyond and beneath that several thousand years of inculcation into this culture of slavery, our bodies carry deep inside them memories of the freedom that is the birthright of all of us, whether we are animal, plant, rock, river, or anything else.

Another difference between the conversations in the discussion group and those held by the indigenous is that the former were held in “cyberspace,” which means in no place at all, but were instead entirely abstracted from place, from our bodies, from each other.

Further, most of us today have never experienced a healthy natural community. We have all been born into a world of wounds, a world being murdered, and we simply don’t know what it would be like to be beneficial and welcome partners in the ongoing creation that is the daily life of a forest, river, mountain, desert, and so on. Recall the person who wrote to me stressing the need for us to remember, who said, “I’ve realized that outside of radical activist circles and certain indigenous peoples, the majority has completely forgotten about the passenger pigeon, completely forgotten about salmon so abundant you could fish with baskets. I’ve met many people who think if we could just stop destroying the planet right now, that we’ll be left with a beautiful world. It makes me wonder if the same type of people would say the same thing in the future even if they had to put on a protective suit in order to go outside and see the one tree left standing in their town. Would they also have forgotten? Would it still be a part of mainstream consciousness that there used to be whole forests teeming with life?” When Tecumseh warned that “Soon your mighty forest trees, under the shade of whose wide spreading branches you have played in infancy, sported in boyhood, and now rest your wearied limb after the fatigue of the chase, will be cut down to fence in the land which the white intruders dare to call their