Post by Wayne Hall on Jan 29, 2011 0:13:33 GMT -5
Hello James Brady,
Keith sent us your e-mail address, which is an invitation to write to you.
Your message to Keith differed from most of the input we receive from Greenpeace on chemtrails/geoengineering in that it was smart and apparently aware of the issues, even if I don't approve of your being ironical about such a terrible and serious subject.
As far as I am concerned I would be prepared to lay off hammering Greenpeace (not that I do any more: I've given up. But I support people who do) if I could see more evidence of backing from Greenpeace for, say, the ETC group and Hands off Mother Earth. Most countries in the world, due to the initiative these activists, have now signed a moratorium on most forms of geoengineering. It is not being implemented of course, but now we can at least theoretically go to the governmental representatives who signed it and ask them why they did so.
I would have no objection to doing this in conjunction with Greenpeace.
What do you say?
Here in Greece the citizens' movement ATTAC years ago had a public meeting on chemtrails/geoengineering in conjunction with Greenpeace.
www.attac-hellas.org/seminars/geoengineering/programme.htm
Nikos Haralambidis spoke at it. Because we linked the discussion with climate change he was able to focus on this without talking about chemtrails, geoengineering and/or climate modification. But even after the passage of all these years, if asked questions about chemtrails, as far as I know, he still behaves as if he is entirely ignorant of the subject. That is much less smart than the way you talk.
As I say, I would have no objection to collaborating with Greenpeace here in Greece in asking the politician Kostas Kartalis,
www.kkartalis.gr/
who signed the moratorium on geoengineering in Nagoya on behalf of Greece why he signed this moratorium that his government is not observing (that NO government is observing). This would not necessarily be an aggressive question. If the problem is too hard for the Greek government to solve, it would be in the Greek government's interests to help civil society internationally to help the Greek government.
Wayne Hall
www.enouranois.gr
From: Keith Lampe
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 7:23 PM
To: prez
Subject: FREE-ENERGY SPECIAL: Eco History, Chemtrails, SAMA
Volunteers for Planetary Climate Action (VPCA)
+ Replacing Toxic Energies Optimally +
January 28, 2011
Dear James Brady,
Thanks very much for this:
From: James Brady
Date: January 26, 2011 4:10:50 PM GMT-05:00
To: Keith Lampe
Subject: Re: CLIMATE URGENT: World Chemtrail Awareness Day!
Hey Keith,
Sorry to take so long to reply to this. I've been a bit swamped with subverting honest volunteers into fake activism and kissing up to 350 to see if they will flow me some of that sweet, sweet Rockerfeller money. Not to mention my active roles in suppressing 9/11 truth, over unity energy, reverse engineered alien technology, and the miracle man that was Tesla. As you can see, my corporate paymasters keep me hopping. I had not thought to address chemtrails but now that you mention it it is imminently worthy of suppression as well. I'll see what type of $$ I can get from the Rothschilds to funnel through Sierra Club to discredit the whole thing. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Maybe you could adopt a less condescending bullshit tone when you write to people. Then maybe less of your missives would sit unread in spam folders. GP and RAN are not able to address every problem in the world. You know that.
It is also cowardly for you to sit miles away and lob rubbish at everyone through the computer. Writing emails to people is not the same thing as helping people to get organized on a campaign. As a peripheral character from the early days of the enviro movement you know that as well. I don't like writing to you like this because I do read a good percentage of what you send out and some of it is really interesting. Try to quit talking shit and be more constructive.
Also, leave Ted Glick alone. He's not hurting you.
Keith Lampe's reply
I'm glad you have enough confidence in yourself to sass me in this manner--and it's interesting that you think you can get away with such an approach with the good folks in our Cc field.
However, I wish you had even more confidence in yourself so you'd have answered my question, which was "why the purportedly environmental organization Greenpeace still hasn't begun coping with chemtrails (please see below) and why it has a different mealy-mouthed excuse in each locale".
Yes, Greenpeace can't deal with everything--but it must deal with everything as devastating as chemtrails. And this includes the recent frame-up and murder in prison of Dr. George B. Manton, the gallant leader of the Gulf peoples' movement resisting BP's ongoing malevolent control of clean-up and compensation. If you don't understand what I mean by chemtrails being devastating, please see Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri's latest piece on them second below.
The reason you think my role in the early environmental movement was peripheral is that you're a victim of dumbed-down corporate environmental history. I was one of several arrested at the action (blocking a road to stop a truck carrying redwood corpses) which initiated the US environmental movement in early spring of '69. We began with a victory: logging of that sort was quickly made illegal in that county. Six or seven weeks later I started the planet's first environmental news service, Earth Read-Out, which occurred rather frequently in fifteen or twenty newspapers.
At that time David Brower was a bureaucrat within the quaint US conservation movement. Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and I had opened up such a broad meda-niche for the new environmental movement that David somewhat narcissistically moved over into it from the conservation movement so he could see his face on TV more often. I helped him with his transition--for example, helped publicize one of his speeches.
An editor at Herder & Herder was eager ("we'll do a good job") to publish Earth Read-Out in book form but I didn't allow him because he was unwilling or unable to give me a ballpark estimate of how many precious brother/sister trees would be screamingly sacrificed for the first printing of it. I'd wanted to include the figure in a foreword.
Since you're a victim of corporate environmental history, you probably regard Earth Day '70 as the start of the movement. No! That was the start of the corporate kiss-of-death of the movement. They wanted me to make a speech in Denver or Boulder (can't remember) but I told them to find a speaker in that locale because I didn't want to pollute the atmosphere flying there from California.
By early '70 my wife Judy Lampe (she and Judy Berg and Peter Berg and I were the founders of bioregionalism) and I had decided that we should graduate from merely talking the talk and start walking the walk, so in early spring we left Berkeley and bought 300 acres of pristine (bluebirds, antelope and many other splendid creatures) Sangre de Cristo land in northeastern New Mexico in order to form a hippie commune, grow clean food and free ourselves from dependence on ecocidal centralized monetary systems.
It seemed to us that two people owning so much land were part of the problem, so we let folks with little or no money onto the land and then removed ourselves as the controlling owners by establishing a legal entity wherein all adults living on the land were the owners.
A few weeks later the US military murdered four peaceful unarmed protesters on the Kent State campus. No one was punished for this--not even slightly--and thus the writing on the wall was clear for all activists: we'll kill you any time we want to and there ain't nothin' you can do about it.
These months were also the height of the dreaded USSP (US secret police) wipe-out of hippies. In mid-summer the adjacent hippie commune, Kingdom of Heaven, was attacked two consecutive nights with a rape during one attack and a murder during the other. Again the writing on the wall was clear: felons don't return to the scene of such a major crime just 24 hours later unless they're protected by the police or are the police.
This was especially nerve-wracking to me because just two years earlier a 30- or 40-page report on me sent to the Chicago police by the NYC police had described me as "an especially dangerous leader", so I had good reason to believe that I might be attacked next.
So I left the commune--partly because I thought my wife and two-year-old daughter would be safer if they weren't living with me but mainly because I'd realized that in any event I'd be of greater general help if I returned to an urban area to continue my press-relations specialty.
In '72 I started the planet's first biocentric press-relations firm, Living Creatures Associates--partly with a $1500 grant from Jerry Mander of the Point Foundation. This was the last time I was willing to accept money from a foundation. I did news conferences on behalf of endangered species and also provided a voice for indigenous spokespeople. Immediately after the first one, I was phoned from NYC by Ron Bonn, the environmental editor of CBS News, who asked me to phone him collect whenever I had "an idea for the show".
Rasa Gustaitis has a chapter on Living Creatures Associates in her WHOLLY ROUND (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, '73). If you're really interested in early US eco-movement history (which I doubt: I think you feel more secure being as crudely misinformed as you currently are), please check it out.
Also in '72 I was invited to the first UN climate conference, which took place in Stockholm. I felt it was more appropriate for North America to be represented there by an indigenous person, so Peter Blue Cloud--Mohawk poet, carver and a leader of the American Indian Movement's take-back of Alcatraz Island as a first step towards reclaiming all of Turtle Island (North America)--took my place.
Meanwhile, David Brower had taken a young spirited in-yer-face street-oriented movement and reduced it to a bunch of salaried bureaucracies wherein activism got redefined as predominantly writing letters and making phone calls. For which he was rewarded with icon status in pimp/whore corporate media and with a hall named after him in Berkeley.
One unusual thing about my activism was I that regarded fame as a trap. Thus I used three names so whenever one starting occurring in corporate media too frequently I could always slip into something more comfortable.
In '65 I was a co-founder of Veterans and Reservists to End the War in Vietnam under my original name of Keith Lampe--and I used that name as a co-founder of Yippie! in '67 and the US environmental movement in '69. But for Living Creatures Associates in '72 I used my Mohawk name Ro-Non-So-Te and for All-Species Projects in '78 I used Ponderosa Pine. (Directly below I'll paste an NY Times piece on the '81 All-Species Parade I produced in NYC so you can see what it was about; most of the real info is in the final seven paragraphs.) I can't remember which name or names I used when I founded the US Pro-Democracy Movement in early '91 during those vicious US bombings of Baghdad.
Also I can't remember which name(s) I used when friends in Chiangmai, Thailand, elected me prez of the US exile government as our response to the Bush Junta's theft of the '00 prez election in the US. Probably just Keith Lampe. My original intention was to form an exile community as a sequel to the one de Gaulle put together in England 70 years ago. Just as they'd strategized how to rid France of the Third Reich, so we'd strategize how to rid the US of the Fourth Reich. (Please see my '98 Earth Read-Out piece "The Fourth Reich, the Biosphere and the US Sector" at <http://usa-exile.org/robinhd/ero.html>.) But it didn't happen because I quickly became immersed in this news service.
By the way, if you wish to verify what I've said here about the early eco movement, please reach Steve Beckwitt, whose credentials are so conventional--for example, US Agency for International Development, State of California Sierra Nevada Conservancy--that he'll seem trustworthy to you. He was a contributor to Earth Read-Out in '69 and also a member of our Coyote commune in '70 in New Mexico.
* * * * *
I'm quite sensitive about being called cowardly, James.
As an artillery lieutenant early in '53 I volunteered for combat in the Korean war even though during that final fixed-lines phase of it I had the most dangerous job: forward observer.
In summer '64 during my third around-the-world trip I picked up a newspaper somewhere in Scandinavia and read about the racist murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner in Mississippi. So when I got back to NYC, I went to the group (SNCC) they were working for and volunteered for the job (voter registration) they were doing when they were murdered--and thus was sent to Mississippi as a replacement.
I'm living in exile now not from cowardice but mainly because my physical condition is such (emphysema, asthma) that I can no longer run in the streets with the younger folks. For the past decade when I'm walking I usually have to stop every fifty or hundred meters to catch my breath. I'll be 80 in mid-summer. It was this degree of debilitation that caused me to cancel plans in early '03 to meet the late John Ross in Turkey, then proceed to Iraq together as human shields.
Also I know that my commentary is more forthright when I live among people less frightened than the Americans.
I've been busted seventeeen times, received one death threat, a visit from the CIA and two visits from the FBI but have continued steadfastly as an activist ever since '64.
By far the most painful part of keeping on keeping on was having to leave my dear children. In '88 I had to leave my year-old twin sons because an unexpected loss of income meant I could no longer both raise them and be a full-time activist on their behalf, so I quite painfully chose the latter because it seemed to me that otherwise their lives would become nightmares within just a few decades.
Now 23 years later I cope with interludes where it no longer seems possible to avoid a nightmare planet--and then a demonic voice in my head starts haranguing me with "why couldn't you have foreseen it was impossible so you could have raised your children". Monumentally painful! Fortunately, though, I've thus far (knock on wood) been able rather soon to find another path--however slender--of hopefulness.
* * * * *
Okay, James, I must congratulate you on making me so angry that I've written a longer piece than any in years.
Don't you agree that it's important for today's youth to have easy access to an accurate history of the early US environmental movement?
In fact, I think we should prepare a history of all outstanding homeplanet activism between '65 and '75 because these were the years of peak confidence--not only for activists but for everybody.
The ongoing effort to dumb-down the US populace has already been so successful that most young people today think their lack of confidence is not conditioned but is human nature--when actually human nature in free circumstances is utterly confident.
Excerpts from Earth Read-Out can bring this home for today's campus generation. A prime example of what I mean is a '69 Berkeley teach-in to deal with the landmark People's Park issue, so I'll paste my piece on it third below.
Yes, '65 to '75 was the high-water-mark for Occidental activism. Most memorable of its many aspects was the effort to evolve beyond money--for example, the Diggers' free butcher shop and free bakery in the San Francisco Bay area and the Provos' free bicycles in Amsterdam.
If the hippies hadn't been wiped out by the police, they'd probably have been able to get enough publicity for Gary Snyder's '69 suggestion of transferring "prime human attention from objects to states of mind" that now more than forty years later Homo sapiens finally would begin to lessen its per-capita impact on our already-devastated biosphere.
By the way, the US left remained silent throughout the hippie wipe-out, which of course occurred in a variety of unconstitutional ways. The main incentive for this was that hippies were fifteen or twenty times more popular on campuses than leftists were.
* * * * *
Keith sent us your e-mail address, which is an invitation to write to you.
Your message to Keith differed from most of the input we receive from Greenpeace on chemtrails/geoengineering in that it was smart and apparently aware of the issues, even if I don't approve of your being ironical about such a terrible and serious subject.
As far as I am concerned I would be prepared to lay off hammering Greenpeace (not that I do any more: I've given up. But I support people who do) if I could see more evidence of backing from Greenpeace for, say, the ETC group and Hands off Mother Earth. Most countries in the world, due to the initiative these activists, have now signed a moratorium on most forms of geoengineering. It is not being implemented of course, but now we can at least theoretically go to the governmental representatives who signed it and ask them why they did so.
I would have no objection to doing this in conjunction with Greenpeace.
What do you say?
Here in Greece the citizens' movement ATTAC years ago had a public meeting on chemtrails/geoengineering in conjunction with Greenpeace.
www.attac-hellas.org/seminars/geoengineering/programme.htm
Nikos Haralambidis spoke at it. Because we linked the discussion with climate change he was able to focus on this without talking about chemtrails, geoengineering and/or climate modification. But even after the passage of all these years, if asked questions about chemtrails, as far as I know, he still behaves as if he is entirely ignorant of the subject. That is much less smart than the way you talk.
As I say, I would have no objection to collaborating with Greenpeace here in Greece in asking the politician Kostas Kartalis,
www.kkartalis.gr/
who signed the moratorium on geoengineering in Nagoya on behalf of Greece why he signed this moratorium that his government is not observing (that NO government is observing). This would not necessarily be an aggressive question. If the problem is too hard for the Greek government to solve, it would be in the Greek government's interests to help civil society internationally to help the Greek government.
Wayne Hall
www.enouranois.gr
From: Keith Lampe
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 7:23 PM
To: prez
Subject: FREE-ENERGY SPECIAL: Eco History, Chemtrails, SAMA
Volunteers for Planetary Climate Action (VPCA)
+ Replacing Toxic Energies Optimally +
January 28, 2011
Dear James Brady,
Thanks very much for this:
From: James Brady
Date: January 26, 2011 4:10:50 PM GMT-05:00
To: Keith Lampe
Subject: Re: CLIMATE URGENT: World Chemtrail Awareness Day!
Hey Keith,
Sorry to take so long to reply to this. I've been a bit swamped with subverting honest volunteers into fake activism and kissing up to 350 to see if they will flow me some of that sweet, sweet Rockerfeller money. Not to mention my active roles in suppressing 9/11 truth, over unity energy, reverse engineered alien technology, and the miracle man that was Tesla. As you can see, my corporate paymasters keep me hopping. I had not thought to address chemtrails but now that you mention it it is imminently worthy of suppression as well. I'll see what type of $$ I can get from the Rothschilds to funnel through Sierra Club to discredit the whole thing. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Maybe you could adopt a less condescending bullshit tone when you write to people. Then maybe less of your missives would sit unread in spam folders. GP and RAN are not able to address every problem in the world. You know that.
It is also cowardly for you to sit miles away and lob rubbish at everyone through the computer. Writing emails to people is not the same thing as helping people to get organized on a campaign. As a peripheral character from the early days of the enviro movement you know that as well. I don't like writing to you like this because I do read a good percentage of what you send out and some of it is really interesting. Try to quit talking shit and be more constructive.
Also, leave Ted Glick alone. He's not hurting you.
Keith Lampe's reply
I'm glad you have enough confidence in yourself to sass me in this manner--and it's interesting that you think you can get away with such an approach with the good folks in our Cc field.
However, I wish you had even more confidence in yourself so you'd have answered my question, which was "why the purportedly environmental organization Greenpeace still hasn't begun coping with chemtrails (please see below) and why it has a different mealy-mouthed excuse in each locale".
Yes, Greenpeace can't deal with everything--but it must deal with everything as devastating as chemtrails. And this includes the recent frame-up and murder in prison of Dr. George B. Manton, the gallant leader of the Gulf peoples' movement resisting BP's ongoing malevolent control of clean-up and compensation. If you don't understand what I mean by chemtrails being devastating, please see Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri's latest piece on them second below.
The reason you think my role in the early environmental movement was peripheral is that you're a victim of dumbed-down corporate environmental history. I was one of several arrested at the action (blocking a road to stop a truck carrying redwood corpses) which initiated the US environmental movement in early spring of '69. We began with a victory: logging of that sort was quickly made illegal in that county. Six or seven weeks later I started the planet's first environmental news service, Earth Read-Out, which occurred rather frequently in fifteen or twenty newspapers.
At that time David Brower was a bureaucrat within the quaint US conservation movement. Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and I had opened up such a broad meda-niche for the new environmental movement that David somewhat narcissistically moved over into it from the conservation movement so he could see his face on TV more often. I helped him with his transition--for example, helped publicize one of his speeches.
An editor at Herder & Herder was eager ("we'll do a good job") to publish Earth Read-Out in book form but I didn't allow him because he was unwilling or unable to give me a ballpark estimate of how many precious brother/sister trees would be screamingly sacrificed for the first printing of it. I'd wanted to include the figure in a foreword.
Since you're a victim of corporate environmental history, you probably regard Earth Day '70 as the start of the movement. No! That was the start of the corporate kiss-of-death of the movement. They wanted me to make a speech in Denver or Boulder (can't remember) but I told them to find a speaker in that locale because I didn't want to pollute the atmosphere flying there from California.
By early '70 my wife Judy Lampe (she and Judy Berg and Peter Berg and I were the founders of bioregionalism) and I had decided that we should graduate from merely talking the talk and start walking the walk, so in early spring we left Berkeley and bought 300 acres of pristine (bluebirds, antelope and many other splendid creatures) Sangre de Cristo land in northeastern New Mexico in order to form a hippie commune, grow clean food and free ourselves from dependence on ecocidal centralized monetary systems.
It seemed to us that two people owning so much land were part of the problem, so we let folks with little or no money onto the land and then removed ourselves as the controlling owners by establishing a legal entity wherein all adults living on the land were the owners.
A few weeks later the US military murdered four peaceful unarmed protesters on the Kent State campus. No one was punished for this--not even slightly--and thus the writing on the wall was clear for all activists: we'll kill you any time we want to and there ain't nothin' you can do about it.
These months were also the height of the dreaded USSP (US secret police) wipe-out of hippies. In mid-summer the adjacent hippie commune, Kingdom of Heaven, was attacked two consecutive nights with a rape during one attack and a murder during the other. Again the writing on the wall was clear: felons don't return to the scene of such a major crime just 24 hours later unless they're protected by the police or are the police.
This was especially nerve-wracking to me because just two years earlier a 30- or 40-page report on me sent to the Chicago police by the NYC police had described me as "an especially dangerous leader", so I had good reason to believe that I might be attacked next.
So I left the commune--partly because I thought my wife and two-year-old daughter would be safer if they weren't living with me but mainly because I'd realized that in any event I'd be of greater general help if I returned to an urban area to continue my press-relations specialty.
In '72 I started the planet's first biocentric press-relations firm, Living Creatures Associates--partly with a $1500 grant from Jerry Mander of the Point Foundation. This was the last time I was willing to accept money from a foundation. I did news conferences on behalf of endangered species and also provided a voice for indigenous spokespeople. Immediately after the first one, I was phoned from NYC by Ron Bonn, the environmental editor of CBS News, who asked me to phone him collect whenever I had "an idea for the show".
Rasa Gustaitis has a chapter on Living Creatures Associates in her WHOLLY ROUND (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, '73). If you're really interested in early US eco-movement history (which I doubt: I think you feel more secure being as crudely misinformed as you currently are), please check it out.
Also in '72 I was invited to the first UN climate conference, which took place in Stockholm. I felt it was more appropriate for North America to be represented there by an indigenous person, so Peter Blue Cloud--Mohawk poet, carver and a leader of the American Indian Movement's take-back of Alcatraz Island as a first step towards reclaiming all of Turtle Island (North America)--took my place.
Meanwhile, David Brower had taken a young spirited in-yer-face street-oriented movement and reduced it to a bunch of salaried bureaucracies wherein activism got redefined as predominantly writing letters and making phone calls. For which he was rewarded with icon status in pimp/whore corporate media and with a hall named after him in Berkeley.
One unusual thing about my activism was I that regarded fame as a trap. Thus I used three names so whenever one starting occurring in corporate media too frequently I could always slip into something more comfortable.
In '65 I was a co-founder of Veterans and Reservists to End the War in Vietnam under my original name of Keith Lampe--and I used that name as a co-founder of Yippie! in '67 and the US environmental movement in '69. But for Living Creatures Associates in '72 I used my Mohawk name Ro-Non-So-Te and for All-Species Projects in '78 I used Ponderosa Pine. (Directly below I'll paste an NY Times piece on the '81 All-Species Parade I produced in NYC so you can see what it was about; most of the real info is in the final seven paragraphs.) I can't remember which name or names I used when I founded the US Pro-Democracy Movement in early '91 during those vicious US bombings of Baghdad.
Also I can't remember which name(s) I used when friends in Chiangmai, Thailand, elected me prez of the US exile government as our response to the Bush Junta's theft of the '00 prez election in the US. Probably just Keith Lampe. My original intention was to form an exile community as a sequel to the one de Gaulle put together in England 70 years ago. Just as they'd strategized how to rid France of the Third Reich, so we'd strategize how to rid the US of the Fourth Reich. (Please see my '98 Earth Read-Out piece "The Fourth Reich, the Biosphere and the US Sector" at <http://usa-exile.org/robinhd/ero.html>.) But it didn't happen because I quickly became immersed in this news service.
By the way, if you wish to verify what I've said here about the early eco movement, please reach Steve Beckwitt, whose credentials are so conventional--for example, US Agency for International Development, State of California Sierra Nevada Conservancy--that he'll seem trustworthy to you. He was a contributor to Earth Read-Out in '69 and also a member of our Coyote commune in '70 in New Mexico.
* * * * *
I'm quite sensitive about being called cowardly, James.
As an artillery lieutenant early in '53 I volunteered for combat in the Korean war even though during that final fixed-lines phase of it I had the most dangerous job: forward observer.
In summer '64 during my third around-the-world trip I picked up a newspaper somewhere in Scandinavia and read about the racist murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner in Mississippi. So when I got back to NYC, I went to the group (SNCC) they were working for and volunteered for the job (voter registration) they were doing when they were murdered--and thus was sent to Mississippi as a replacement.
I'm living in exile now not from cowardice but mainly because my physical condition is such (emphysema, asthma) that I can no longer run in the streets with the younger folks. For the past decade when I'm walking I usually have to stop every fifty or hundred meters to catch my breath. I'll be 80 in mid-summer. It was this degree of debilitation that caused me to cancel plans in early '03 to meet the late John Ross in Turkey, then proceed to Iraq together as human shields.
Also I know that my commentary is more forthright when I live among people less frightened than the Americans.
I've been busted seventeeen times, received one death threat, a visit from the CIA and two visits from the FBI but have continued steadfastly as an activist ever since '64.
By far the most painful part of keeping on keeping on was having to leave my dear children. In '88 I had to leave my year-old twin sons because an unexpected loss of income meant I could no longer both raise them and be a full-time activist on their behalf, so I quite painfully chose the latter because it seemed to me that otherwise their lives would become nightmares within just a few decades.
Now 23 years later I cope with interludes where it no longer seems possible to avoid a nightmare planet--and then a demonic voice in my head starts haranguing me with "why couldn't you have foreseen it was impossible so you could have raised your children". Monumentally painful! Fortunately, though, I've thus far (knock on wood) been able rather soon to find another path--however slender--of hopefulness.
* * * * *
Okay, James, I must congratulate you on making me so angry that I've written a longer piece than any in years.
Don't you agree that it's important for today's youth to have easy access to an accurate history of the early US environmental movement?
In fact, I think we should prepare a history of all outstanding homeplanet activism between '65 and '75 because these were the years of peak confidence--not only for activists but for everybody.
The ongoing effort to dumb-down the US populace has already been so successful that most young people today think their lack of confidence is not conditioned but is human nature--when actually human nature in free circumstances is utterly confident.
Excerpts from Earth Read-Out can bring this home for today's campus generation. A prime example of what I mean is a '69 Berkeley teach-in to deal with the landmark People's Park issue, so I'll paste my piece on it third below.
Yes, '65 to '75 was the high-water-mark for Occidental activism. Most memorable of its many aspects was the effort to evolve beyond money--for example, the Diggers' free butcher shop and free bakery in the San Francisco Bay area and the Provos' free bicycles in Amsterdam.
If the hippies hadn't been wiped out by the police, they'd probably have been able to get enough publicity for Gary Snyder's '69 suggestion of transferring "prime human attention from objects to states of mind" that now more than forty years later Homo sapiens finally would begin to lessen its per-capita impact on our already-devastated biosphere.
By the way, the US left remained silent throughout the hippie wipe-out, which of course occurred in a variety of unconstitutional ways. The main incentive for this was that hippies were fifteen or twenty times more popular on campuses than leftists were.
* * * * *