part0018

2 For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and others boasted a belief that soon DDT and other miracle chemicals would enable us to eliminate all insects from the earth—a worthy goal, it was assumed. Then would we be able to conduct agriculture without the messy uncontrolled variables that insects and other life-forms represent.

3 Lewis L. Strauss, speech to the National Association of Science Writers, New York City, September 16, 1954.

4 João Pedro de Magalhães, “Nanotechnology,” jp.senescence.info/thoughts/nanotechnology.html .

5 David Pearce, “The Hedonistic Imperative,” http://paradise-engineering.com/heav22.htm .

6 Mayur Venkateswaran and Ganesh Pai, “Making the Impossible Possible,” http://techniche.tripod.com/nanotech.htm .

7 Moore’s law says that the complexity of integrated circuit chips doubles approximately every eighteen months. The naive interpretation is that computers are getting exponentially smarter.

8 Patrick Farley, The Guy I Almost Was , http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/ .

9 As of 2006, 12.5 percent of American babies are born prematurely, an increase of 13 percent since 1992 and 30 percent since 1982. See Preterm Birth: Causes, Consequences, and Prevention , report by the Institute of Medicine, July 13, 2006, http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11622 , and Born Too Soon: The Global Action Report on Preterm Birth , May 2012, www.who.int/pmnch/media/news/2012/preterm_birth_report/en/index.html .

10 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lifexpec.htm .

12 That is my personal estimate, but already some mainstream researchers are claiming that the new generation will be the first in two hundred years to have a lower life expectancy than their parents. In a paper published in the March 17, 2005, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine , a team of scientists claims that the obesity epidemic could shorten life spans by up to five years in the next few decades (S. Jay Olshansky et al., “A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century”). Other authorities disagree, citing “advances in modern medicine” that will offset these losses.

13 Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

14 From The Excursion , Book Eighth, starting on line 150. Kirkpatrick Sale quotes the same passage in Rebels against the Future , which is how it came to my attention.

15 L. Bowman, “51% of U.S. Adults Take 2 Pills or More a Day, Survey Reports” (Scripps Howard News Service), San Diego Union-Tribune , January 17, 2001, A8.

16 “Seniors and Medication Safety,” Minnesota Poison Control System, www.mnpoison.org .

17 Joseph Tainter. The Collapse of Complex Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

18 Eric Francis, “Conspiracy of Silence,” Sierra magazine, September/October 1994. The claim that PCBs are present in every living cell appears in a 1998 introduction to that article ( www.planetwaves.net/silence.html ).

19 Ziauddin Sardar, “Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West” in The Cybercultures Reader , eds. Barbara Kennedy and David Bell, (London: Routledge, 2000), 742.

20 Tom Hodgkinson, “The Modern Curse: A Philosophy of Boredom,” New Statesman , March 14, 2005. This is a review of Lars Fredrik Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom , trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).

21 Hinduism is similar to Buddhism in its explanation of suffering. As for Taoism, suffering could be said to result from ignorance of the Tao; that is, resisting the natural flow of life. This too is a form of separation.

22 Stephen Harrod Buhner, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers (Boulder, CO: Siris Books, 1998).

23 Richard B. Lee, The Dobe !Kung (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 50–55.

24 Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992).

25 Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (New York: Context Books, 2000), 85–86.

26 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), 30–31.

27 Price’s findings appear in his classic work, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (Santa Monica, CA: Price-Pottenger Foundation, 1970).

29 Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York: Mariner, 1996), 76.

30 Napoleon A. Chagnon, “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population,” Science 239 (February 26, 1988): 985(8), n. 4843.

31 Thomas Melancon, Marriage and Reproduction among the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela , PhD dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, UMI, 1982, 42. Cited in a Brazilian Anthropological Association letter to Anthropology News , 1989.

32 Juno Gregory, “Macho Anthropology,” Salon , September 28, 2000.

33 Patrick Tierney, “The Fierce Anthropologist,” The New Yorker , November 6, 2000.

34 Margaret Power, The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

35 I spend time watching bees’ nests outside my home. Often ten or fifteen bees (wasps, actually) congregate “on the doorstep” outside the hive. Occasionally they will crawl around, touch feelers, and groom, but much of the time they really do nothing at all except wave their antennae or be still. Of course, even then they may be gathering data about their environment, but it is not a stress-induced effort. We need not be driven. Merely by being, we can live in the world.

36 Martín Gusinde, The Yamana (New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files, 1961), 27, cited by Sahlins, 28.

37 Quoted by Michael Shermer in “The Gradual Illumination of the Mind,” Scientific American (February 2002): 35.

38 I mean “atoms” in the sense of indivisible minimum units, in this case sub“atomic” particles. The most recent version of the atom would be the vibrating strings of String Theory.

1 Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover (May 1987), 64–66. However, note that Diamond’s later writings tend to the opinion that agriculture was inevitable, not a bad choice as the word “mistake” implies.

2 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 105.

3 Jeffrey K. McKee, The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 107. Note that various authorities offer widely varying dates for the origin of fire use.

4 Lauren Kosseff, “Primate Use of Tools,” www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/psych26/primates.htm#monkeys .

5 Jane Goodall and Hugo van Lawick, “Use of Tools by the Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus) ,” Nature 212 (1966): 1468–69.

6 Henry Gee, “The Maker’s Mark,” Nature (May 6, 1999), www.nature.com/nsu/990506/990506-9.html .

7 Precellular life might be an exception to this homeostatic principle, except for the fact that there is no evidence that noncellular life has ever existed. The so-called “naked” replicating ribozymes of the proto-biotic soup exist in theory only, and this theory is more a projection of our culture’s notions of self than it is a plausible account of biogenesis. See Chapter 6.

8 Even this form of separation can be considered an illusion when we speak of combinatorial rather than thermodynamic entropy. It gets at deep questions about how an initially low-entropy universe came to be in the first place. At some point, usable energy had to be created out of nothing; either all at once in Big Bang cosmology, or ongoingly in steady-state cosmology. The deep question here is, “Do we live in a universe of scarcity or of abundance?”

9 For a lucid exposition of lateral gene transfer in bacteria, see W. J. Powell, Molecular Mechanisms of Antimicrobial Resistance (Food Safety Network, February 2000).

10 John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: C.A.L. Press), 1999.

11 During the witch hunts of Europe, the primary repositories of plant knowledge—the female herbalists—were belittled, demonized, and even exterminated. Although these and other crimes against woman and indigenous cultures certainly had the effect of eliminating competitors to the dominant fire-based technology, I am referring instead to the deeper imperative underlying and unifying such campaigns.

12 Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (New York: William Morrow, 1949), 20.

13 Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2002), 111. Pearce fixes the blame for this decline mostly on television—another very likely culprit!

14 Usually, the word “true” in this passage is rendered in English as “eternal.” However, the Chinese word chang has a very complex meaning, with connotations of permanency, perdurance, and therefore of being real or true.

15 These sounds are mentioned in some of the very earliest works on qigong , at least back to the “Frolic of the Five Animals” of 200 BCE, and are still practiced today.

16 Joseph Epes Brown, Teaching Spirits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 42.

19 In Sanskrit, prana means both breath and spirit. In Chinese, qi also refers both to breath and to a spiritual energy. The same word is used in Japanese and Korean. I’ve been told the same identity exists in ancient Hebrew and Arabic. Even in English, the word “respiration” literally means to re-spirit oneself.

20 Jack Johnston, Male Multiple Orgasm (audio CD) (Ashland, OR: Jack Johnston Seminars, 1994).

21 Ivan Fónagy, Languages within Language: An Evolutive Approach (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1994), 18, 87–106.

23 Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), 88.

25 Arthur S. Diamond, The History and Origin of Language (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). Cited in Zerzan, 33.

26 Interview with Derrick Jensen, published in The Sun , April 2001. Reprinted at http://hiddenwine.com/indexSUN.html .

27 Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden (London: Constable and Robinson, 2004), 30.

29 Projecting our present selves backward into a prelinguistic setting would be misleading: the frustration and inconvenience we would experience may be a product of our atrophied direct perceptions. Atrophied, but still present in vestigial form and capable of development.

31 James Burke and Robert Ornstein, The Axemaker’s Gift (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1997), 68.

32 Interestingly, the first Chinese dictionary was compiled in the first century CE.

35 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (New York: Humanities Press, 1926), 181.

36 Aristotle, Metaphysics . Cited by J. B. Wilbur and H. J. Allen, The Worlds of the Early Greek Philosophers (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1979), 86.

37 Wilbur and Allen, 87.

38 Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (New York: Context Books, 2000), 41.

40 Burke and Ornstein, 45.

41 The original definition of the meter was abandoned when it was realized that the circumference of the earth is not absolute and unchanging. Now we are beginning to suspect the same may be true of the physical “constants” of the universe. This might be another example of the doomed quest for certainty described in Chapter 3.

43 David Deutsch demonstrates convincingly the impossibility of perfect realitysimulation on a classical (nonquantum) computer; however on a quantum computer the very uncertainties of uncontrolled reality creep back in in subtle ways.

44 David Brin, “Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society!” Salon , August 4, 2004, www.salon.com/2004/08/04/mortal_gods/ .

45 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1963, 1934), 14, cited by Zerzan, 23.

46 Thomas Pynchon, “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” New York Times Book Review , June 6, 1993.

47 Paul F. Campos, Jurismania: The Madness of American Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32.

48 Mumford, Technics and Civilization , 15.

51 Daniel Greenberg, “When Does a Person Make Good Use of His Time?” in The Sudbury Valley School Experience , eds. Mimsy Sadofsky and Daniel Greenberg (Framingham, MA: Sudbury Valley School Press, 1992), 105.

52 Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society,” excerpted from Stone Age Economics .

54 Oppenheimer, 120.

57 John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards (New York: Free Press, 1992), 427.

63 Jonathan Shainin, “Politics-a-palooza,” Salon , May 12, 2005.

69 Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 112–13.

70 Daniel L. Everett, “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language,” Current Anthropology 46, no. 4 (August–October 2005).

71 Peter Gordon, “Numerical Cognition without Words: Evidence from Amazonia,” Science (August 19, 2004): 496–99.

72 Video footage by Peter Gordon, available on his Columbia University website.

76 See for example R. F. Sage, “Was Low Atmospheric CO 2 during the Pleistocene a Limiting Factor for the Origin of Agriculture?” Global Change Biology 1 (1995): 93–106.

77 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel , 99. The inevitability of agriculture (that it developed every place where there were domesticable species) is a main theme in Diamond’s book.

78 Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (New York: Bantam Books, 1995).

79 Martín Gusinde, The Yamana (New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files, 1961), 27, cited by Sahlins, 28.

80 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1971), 191.

85 Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels against the Future (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 59.

87 Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 55.

88 Oppenheimer, 101.

89 The lack of standardization, referred to by Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel (p. 38), is highly significant, because standardization implies a division of labor and the possible commodification of products.

91 Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 74.

93 John Zerzan, “Future Primitive,” www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm .

94 Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution’s End (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 154–72.

2 I’m not actually sure if Wudka originated this phrase, because it is all over the internet. It matters little: the belief it articulates is centuries old.

3 The verb is facere (to make, do, or perform). The root of “fact” might also be the participle factus , “made” or “done.”

4 Modern depictions of the Minotaur show the head of a bull atop a human body, but in many classical drawings it was reversed.

5 Tom Cowan, “The Fourfold Approach to Cancer,” November 13, 2005, presentation at the Wise Traditions Conference, Chantilly, Virginia.

6 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine , vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1974), 53.

7 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , Part II (1748).

8 René Descartes, Discourse on Method , Part 6 (1637).

9 Johannes Kepler actually predicted a moon landing in his book Dream , written at the outset of the seventeenth century, and even accounted for the various difficulties he foresaw.

10 These quotes and many more appear in Frank White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution , 2nd ed. (Library of Flight Series) (Reston, VA: AIAA, 1998).

11 Actually, except in simple linear systems, as a practical matter neither predictability nor control follows from determinism, but this was not widely understood until the advent of chaos theory in the last half-century.

12 This passage created a very strong impression on me when I first read it in a college philosophy class. It is not insignificant that disputes can and most certainly do arise between accountants! Propositions can be proven within a formal system, but the correspondence of that system to reality cannot be proven mathematically but only argued for empirically.

14 Actually, the ascription of an atomistic ontology to the Chinese is somewhat of a misnomer. The five elements (wu xing ) are better translated as the “five phases”; they are interdependent and, like yin and yang, do not have a separate and independent existence.

15 The reason that they lead back to animism is that these hidden variables are unknowable. They are a mathematical artifice for deriving the results of quantum mechanics, but can never be experimentally isolated. Thus, while the hidden variable theory seems to advance the reductionist program, it actually buries it.

16 Kervran’s work is hard to find in English, but I refer the reader to Biological Transmutations (Magalia, CA: Happiness Press, 1989). I also searched for a convincing refutation of his work, but mostly what I found were accusations of elementary errors, based on the logic “The result could not be true, so he must have failed to account for XYZ.”

17 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine , vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harvest, HBJ, 1974). Cited in John Alevizos, “Is Mumford’s ‘The City in History’ Relevant After More Than 40 Years?” on www.JohnAlevizos.net .

19 Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (New York: Viking Press, 1972; Compass reprint, 1993), 76.

20 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1934), 51.

21 Although contemporaries such as Leibniz and Berkeley disputed Newton’s idea of “absolute space,” insisting that position could be defined relative to stars and other objects, the absolute Cartesian coordinate system is very hard to get rid of whether or not it is seen as physically real. That is because it is encoded into the Euclidean mathematics of Newton’s theory. Even if there is no physically real absolute space, the fact that properties such as position, length, and time are invariant across frames of reference allows one to mathematically construct an absolute coordinate system.

22 Max Velmans, Understanding Consciousness (London: Routledge, 2000), 264.

23 Cited by Anthony D’Amato (with Sudhir K. Chopra), “Whales: Their Emerging Right to Life,” American Journal of International Law 21 (1991): 85.

24 See for example Andrew Newberg, Eugene G. D’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002).

25 Acknowledgment for tracing Vitalism through Aristotle back to Thales goes to Johnjoe McFadden in Quantum Evolution (Scranton, PA: Norton, 2001), 7–9.

26 Contrary to what is taught in medical school, the mechanical pump model does not successfully explain the circulation of the blood at all. I refer the reader to Craig Holdrege’s The Dynamic Heart and Circulation (Fair Oaks, CA: AWSNA, 2002) or Tom Cowan’s The Fourfold Path to Healing (Warsaw, IN: New Trends, 2004). Notice that the traditional heart-driven model of circulation, in which the blood vessels are passive carriers of blood, is more at home in a dualistic worldview than the alternative hydraulic ram model in which circulation is an organic property of the whole system.

27 Lynn Margulis, [interviewed in] The Third Culture by John Brockman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 133. Cited by Brig Klyce, www.panspermia.org/neodarw.htm#%202txt .

28 The foregoing is actually an account of gradualism, the classical form of Neodarwinism still espoused by many biologists such as Ernst Mayr (see his book What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001) for a pure exposition of this now-crumbling orthodoxy). However, the tide seems to have turned toward Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which argues that the fossil record shows not gradual evolution but sudden, dramatic jumps followed by long periods of relative stasis. While some evolutionary biologists try to explain these jumps as statistical artifacts arising from the fossil record’s incompleteness, most accept at least some version of punctuated equilibrium. Their attempts to reconcile it with the gradual accretion of mutations usually involve some way of accumulated mutations resting unexpressed in the genome until triggered by a mutation in a coordinating gene. These attempts are highly problematic, but necessary in order to preserve the nonpurposefulness of evolution.

29 Talk to the Green Nations Gathering, September 2003.

30 To be sure, game theoretic models of cooperation demonstrate that it is consistent with self-interest, but they are subject to the same “bootstrap problem” that plagues every step of evolution that requires a significant jump in complexity. See Chapter 6 for more on the bootstrap problem.

31 The flip side of the coin is the prevalence of economic terminology in talking about ecosystems: the “profits” and “costs” of various adaptations.

32 For example, in The Descent of Man (1871, 201) we read regarding the future progress of humanity, “ The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the Gorilla .”

33 Quoted by Michael Shermer in “The Gradual Illumination of the Mind,” Scientific American (February 2002): 35.

34 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Vintage Press, 1972), 145–46.

36 From “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903).

37 I am indebted to Wendell Berry for the use of this quote in this context: see “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” from his book Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992).

1 We might become friends with our professional colleagues, especially to the extent we are devoted to a common cause. However, the possibility of workplace friendship is poisoned by the preeminence of money as the main motivating factor in our work. And personal gain is not a common cause. On the contrary, all too often workers must compete for promotion, tenure, or other benefits. Since money is the primary motivation sending people to work, to make money naturally supersedes any joint creation as the primary goal of that work. Workplace friendships are therefore often highly qualified.

2 Lewis Hyde, The Gift (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 17.

3 Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World (New York: Random House, 2001), 186.

4 By “specialist” I mean someone paid to perform a specific function, in this case preparing food. It does not imply that the work requires a high level of training or technical expertise.

5 The figure varies from source to source. The figure was 50 percent in 1998 as reported by the USDA President’s Council on Food Safety, August 4, 1999. Other sources state a figure of 50 percent for meals eaten outside the home, so I suspect the addition of ready-to-eat takeout meals would bring that figure even higher.

6 Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels against the Future (Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1995), 38.

7 Cited by Charles Siegel, The End of Economic Growth (Berkeley, CA: The Preservation Institute, 1998).

8 Some vestiges of the old days remain at Yale, where students still gather at Mory’s, a private club associated with the university, and sing old songs. Such behavior is exceptional, however.

9 For example, in Sweden, the right of allemansrätten allows individuals to walk, pick flowers, camp for a day or two, swim, or ski on private land (but not too near a dwelling).

10 When I most recently asked this question to my class, I was nonplussed to find that a surprising number of students don’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt over shoplifting either. Keep this in mind as you read the discussion of intellectual property. Could it be that on some unconscious level, they realize that indeed, “Property is theft”?

11 Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813. This quote is widely cited.

12 These are the terms of the Copyright Term Extension Act passed in 1998 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003—just as Mickey Mouse and other iconic characters were to have passed into the public domain.

13 Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (New York: Random House, 2001), excerpted at www.the-future-of-ideas.com/excerpts/index.shtml .

14 I have read that images such as commercial storefronts and the New York City skyline are also proprietary. In the human world, that covers the entire landscape. I imagine that as the natural landscape turns increasingly toward proprietary crop and animal varieties, nonurban landscapes might require rights clearance too.

15 Based on comments of Dr. Jonathan Kind, Professor of Genetics at MIT, quoted by Bernard Lietaer in The Future of Money (London: Century, 2002).

16 Overlawyered.com , “Trademark Litigation Hall of Fame,” April 2001, www.overlawyered.com/archives/01/apr1.html ; and Overlawyered.com , “Michigan Lawyer’s Demand: Get My Case Off Your Website,” June 2001, www.overlawyered.com/archives/01/june2.html .

17 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1934), 142.

18 Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 101.

19 David Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). Also, David Pimentel, “Soil Erosion: A Food and Environmental Threat,” Environment, Development and Sustainability 8 (2006): 119–37. (U.S. = three billion tons per year: p. 123.)

20 Several of these USDA composition tables comparing vitamin and mineral content between 1975 and 2001 are laid out in Alex Jack, “The Disappearing Nutrients in America’s Orchards,” December 14, 2004, published online by the National Health Federation, www.thenhf.com/article.php?id=107 .

21 PatWalters, “AralSeaRecovery?” http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100402-aral-sea-story/ . Thanks to restoration efforts, fish are returning to the Aral Sea.

22 World Medical Association Statement on Water and Health, WMA General Assembly, Tokyo, 2004.

23 To be sure, some forms of agriculture dispense with some of these steps, but the general principle remains valid that some work is required to lift the land beyond its natural carrying capacity (for human beings).

26 Tom Brown Jr., The Tracker (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978), 56.

27 Quoted in Adbusters magazine 12, no. 5 (September/October 2004).

30 Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution’s End (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 162.

32 Steve Connor, “Out for the Count: Why Levels of Sperm in Men Are Falling,” The Independent , April 26, 2010.

33 After some years of controversy, the phenomenon of falling sperm counts was confirmed by a massive meta-study led by Shanna Swan of California’s Department of Health Services (Maggie Fox, “Sperm Count Decline Confirmed,” Reuters, November 24, 1997). No one agrees on the reason, but I think the main culprits are toxic estrogen-mimicking chemicals like PCBs, excessive soy in the diet, hormones in industrial meat animals, and tight underpants. Just kidding about the last one.

34 See for example, Sudha Ramachandran, “India’s New Outsourcing Business—Wombs,” The Asia Times , June 16, 2006.

35 These were the official words of the Nobel Foundation when it issued Becker’s prize in 1992. For more details see http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1992/press.html .

36 To see the hyperrationalism and abstraction of this approach, see Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner’s blog, www.becker-posner-blog.com .

37 Mumford, Technics and Civilization , 104.

38 Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce (New York: Harper, 1993), 76.

39 Ronald H. Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” The Journal of Law and Economics 3 (1960): 1.

40 Thomas Carlyle, “Gospel of Mammonism,” Past and Present , Book 3, ch. 2, quoted by Kirkpatrick Sale in Rebels against the Future .

41 See Robert Schenk, “From Commodity to Bank-Debt Money,” http://ingrimayne.com/econ/Banking/Commodity.html , for a basic yet thorough description of the process by which money is created.

46 The reason that an infinite amount of money can have a finite “net present value” is that it comprises a converging series.

47 These quotes are taken from “Let Us Eat Cake,” Adbusters magazine, no. 55 (September/October 2004).

48 William Greider, One World, Ready or Not (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

49 This refers to the fact that oil product will soon reach, or has already reached, its peak level of production. Petroleum geologists are nearly unanimous in asserting that discoveries of new reserves cannot possibly keep pace with the depletion of old reserves.

2 The doctrine of total depravity has been expounded upon by generations of Protestant theologians. I refer the reader to Arthur Pink’s The Total Depravity of Man (available online) for an articulate exposition. Given the atrocities perpetrated by Luther, I wonder if he was merely projecting his understanding of his own self onto reality.

3 There are esoteric interpretations of these concepts that do not depend on Original Sin, however.

4 Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), 38.

5 See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002).

6 Another way that fundamentalist Christianity dovetails with the Scientific Program is in the literalist interpretation of the Bible, which accords to words an absolute meaning and reified status. Their goal is to discover an inerrant standard by which to determine truth, an absolute reality “out there” that is beyond the subjectivity of cultural construction—how similar indeed to the goal of the scientific method. Superficially very different, fundamentalism and science share many of the same ontological assumptions and goals.

7 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 71.

8 This quote is usually attributed to Dostoevsky, but David Cortesi ( www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/cortesi1.html ) contends that these words actually do not appear in The Brothers Karamazov , as commonly attributed. I have seen other versions of this sentence quoted as well. Perhaps it is a matter of translation. In any event, the sentiment is surely there.

9 Christopher Columbus, Letter to the Sovereigns, First Voyage (February 15–March 4, 1493).

10 See Marcel Mauss, The Gift (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000) (originally published in French in 1923).

11 Richard Posner, “A Theory of Primitive Society, with Special Reference to Law,” Journal of Law and Economics (April 1980).

12 Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004), 212.

14 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967), 206.

15 Here are a couple of children’s tales’ endings, from Tales of the Brothers Grimm: Rumpelstiltskin: “Then, in his passion, he seized his left leg with both hands and tore himself asunder in the middle.” Aschenputtel: “Afterwards, when they were coming out of church, the elder was on the left, the younger on the right, and the doves picked out the other eye of each of them. And so for their wickedness and falseness they were punished with blindness for the rest of their days.” And Snowdrop (also known as Snow White): “But iron slippers were heated over the fire, and were soon brought in with tongs and put before [the queen]. And she had to step into the red-hot shoes and dance till she fell down dead.” A little different from the Disney version!

16 I do not mean here to dismiss the concept of an afterlife. It is just that we smuggle into our understanding of the afterlife the same misconception and misdefinition of self that we apply to our current existence.

17 Thomas Hanna, Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004), 90.

18 Thomas Hanna, The Body of Life: Creating New Pathways for Sensory Awareness and Fluid Movement (New York: Knopf, 1980), 58–59.

19 Charles Eisenstein, The Yoga of Eating (Warsaw, IN: New Trends, 2003), 144.

21 I remember reading this once in some ’60s manifesto, but I cannot find the source.

22 Kristen Gelineau, “Babies Work Out in Bid to Counter Obesity,” Salon (June 13, 2004).

23 Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 85.

24 Jack Erdmann with Larry Kearney, Whiskey’s Children (New York: Kensington, 1998), 198. I recommend this book to anyone who thinks he is in any way superior to an addict.

25 John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education , rev. ed. (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2003), 62.

28 For an insightful discussion of this trend, see Hilary Flower, “Abridged Too Far,” www.salon.com/2004/03/29/willows/ .

29 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), 520.

33 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Perennial, 1972), 2–3.

34 William Torrey Harris, The Philosophy of Education (1906), quoted by Gatto, 105.

36 General Education Board, Occasional Letter Number One (1906), quoted by Gatto, 45.

39 U.S. Census Data: www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf .

40 The details in this paragraph and the quotations following it are taken from Linda Baker, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” May 20, 2004, http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/05/20/traffic_design/index.html . However, anyone who has lived in a Third World city has already seen this model in action.

41 Paul F. Campos, Jurismania: The Madness of American Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.

45 I have simplified the statement of the theorem by neglecting the distinction between a formal system (or theory) and the interpretation (or model) of that system. The correct statement would be that there are unprovable sentences that are true in an interpretation of that system. The difficulties inherent in the distinction between mathematical theory and model also pertain to the law, and are partly responsible for the endless elaboration and repetition that characterize legal writing.

46 The exception is for axiom systems that are not consistent, that contain an embedded contradiction, from which it is possible to prove anything. This is actually closer to the state of the law, which embodies many contradictory principles arising from contradictory social values. An example is free speech versus restriction of hate speech. If both these principles are written into law, certain actions will be legally justifiable according to one and unjustifiable according to the other. And this contradiction seems to persist no matter how fine a distinction is made.

48 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 1976), 86.

49 Illich, Medical Nemesis , 16.

50 For a typical example, see “The Antibiotic Arsenal,” www.microbeworld.org/htm/cissues/resist/resist_2.htm .

51 Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2002), 139.

52 One way this happens is through the introduction of simian viruses into humans via the vaccine culturing medium. See for example J. S. Butel et al., “Molecular Evidence of Simian Virus 40 Infections in Children,” Journal of Infectious Diseases 180 (September 1999): 884–87. Many also blame the large quantities of mercury used as a preservative in many vaccines.

53 Vijendra K. Singh, PhD, “Phenotypic Expression of Autoimmune Autistic Disorder (AAD): A Major Subset of Autism,” Annals of Clinical Psychiatry 21(3) (2009): 148–61. For a more accessible discussion, see Singh’s “Autism, Autoimmunity and Immunotherapy: A Commentary.”

54 The parts of the Third World that still harbor such epidemics are still “in the past” in the sense that their alienation from nature has not reached the phase it has in the West.

55 “Fowl Play: The Poultry Industry’s Central Role in the Bird Flu Crisis,” www.grain.org/a/22 .

56 For an in-depth discussion of the origins and faulty science of pasteurization, see Ron Schmid, The Untold Story of Milk (Warsaw, IN: New Trends, 2003).

58 For a similar analysis of psychiatric disorders like ADD, depression, and so on read Commonsense Rebellion (New York: Continuum, 2001) by the renegade psychologist Bruce Levine.

59 Illich, Medical Nemesis , 135.

61 Gatto, 129. Chautauqua refers to an ideal of social engineering that you can read about in his book.

62 See Pearce’s The Biology of Transcendence (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2002) for a remarkable exposition of the necessity and means of transcendence and the consequences of its frustration.

63 For an eloquent and ardent overview of this phenomenon read Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler , eds. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).

64 Martín Prechtel, speech to the Green Nations Gathering, September 2003.

1 While David Bohm’s “hidden variables” interpretation of quantum mechanics attempts to restore determinism, it does nothing to rescue the program of complete understanding/control, because these hidden variables are fundamentally unknowable.

2 For examples of the intentional use of observation to affect reality, I suggest reading about “null measurements” or “Quantum Zeno Effect.”

3 This was demonstrated once and for all in the Aspect experiment, which demonstrated an observer effect when the observation happened outside the space-time light cone of an affected part of the system.

4 And even then you may never know for sure. It could very well be that running the Turing Machine for a billion iterations tells you only that it does not halt for the first billion iterations.

5 Basically what that means is that given a random list of arbitrary mathematical truths, there is in general no shorter way to characterize that list: the list itself is its own shortest description. These results are presented in depth in Chaitin’s controversial classic, Information Randomness and Incompleteness: Papers on Algorithmic Information Theory (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1987).

6 Gregory Chaitin, Meta Math! The Quest for Omega (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 20.

7 Jonathan Borwein and David Bailey, Mathematics by Experiment (Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 2003), 4–5. There is a recent trend in mathematics toward experimental mathematics “which forgoes the certainty of traditional analytic proof, and seeks insight instead through the use of computers. There may be certain basic truths that are inherently unprovable in present axiom systems; for example, the conjecture that all irrational algebraic numbers are Borel-normal. This has been computationally confirmed for some numbers up to trillions of digits. While at first glance experimental mathematics may seem just another form of empiricism applied to mathematics, and thus consistent with the Baconian assumption of an objective universe out there,” the matter is actually extremely tricky. If the digits are in some sense random, in what sense do they exist or in what sense are they necessarily what they are, before they are calculated? This question is not trivial, but more involved ruminations are beyond the scope of this book. I refer the reader to the works of Gregory Chaitin for a philosophical discussion of related issues.

8 A detailed technical overview of these constants is offered in the classic The Anthropic Cosmological Principle , by Frank Tipler and John Barrow. Their explanation, which is really an anti-explanation, is that these constants have to be what they are because if they weren’t we wouldn’t be here to even ask about them. Most people find their reasoning sound but deeply unsatisfying. Why are you reading this book? Well, obviously everything in your life that brought you to this book had to be that way, else you wouldn’t be reading this book.

9 I have vastly oversimplified a complex issue here. If the hyperbolicity conjecture for the Mandelbrot Set is true, then the set (actually its intersection with the algebraic complex plane) is in a certain sense computable. However, that conjecture remains unproven despite enormous efforts to prove it.

10 By random here I mean not recursively enumerable. Philosophers might quibble with the equation of randomness and nonrecursive enumerability, so let me note in passing that this is essentially equivalent to the definition of randomness used in algorithmic information theory (AIT). In AIT a set of numbers is random if there is no computer program shorter than the set itself that can generate the set.

11 Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

12 Provided the initial setup contains a finite number of white squares or a finite number of black squares.

13 Even if such a proof were to be found, there are other emergent properties of cellular automata that are formally undecidable. John Conway’s “Game of Life” is one example. Conway proved that this cellular automaton can be configured into the equivalent of a universal Turing Machine, which implies via the Halting Problem that there is no finite, general way to decide whether a given starting configuration grows without bound.

14 Dale Allen Pfeiffer, “Drawing Lessons from Experience: The Agricultural Crises in North Korea and Cuba,” www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/111703_korea_cuba_1_summary.html . Attempts to plan out artificial societies have been uniform failures. The more determined the effort to exercise centralized control, the more dysfunctional the society becomes: Stalinist Russia and North Korea are two excellent examples. On a smaller scale, communities such as the Owenite experiments of the nineteenth century disintegrate swiftly unless the foundational “plan” is allowed to coevolve with the society it underlies.

15 Actually, Darwin, who was a humble and modest man, did not himself contend that this was the sole mechanism of evolution, just that it could explain a lot. In that sense, Darwin was not himself a Darwinist.

16 Quoted by Michael Shermer in “The Gradual Illumination of the Mind,” Scientific American (February 2002): 35.

17 The same nondualistic understanding central to animism, the mother of all religions, has been shared by the world’s great spiritual teachers over the millennia, despite interpretations to the contrary. It can be found at the heart of all modern religions.

18 H. F. Nijhout, “Metaphors and the Role of Genes in Development,” BioEssays 12 (1990): 444–46.

19 Bruce Lipton develops this case in The Biology of Belief (Santa Rosa, CA: Mountain of Love Productions).

21 From the Preface to George Bernard Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1921). It is worth reading the whole of the remarkable essay, which eloquently lays out many of the spiritual ramifications of the Darwinian paradigm.

22 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, ou exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals) (1809); trans. Hugh Elliot (London: Macmillan, 1914); reprinted by University of Chicago Press, 1984.

25 Studies supporting this assertion are almost too numerous to mention. Many have been done with bacteria, for example L. Loewe, V. Textor, and S. Scherer, “High Deleterious Genomic Mutation Rate in Stationary Phase of Escherichia Coli,” Science 302 (2003): 1558–60.

26 Susan M. Rosenberg and P. J. Hastings, “Genomes: Worming into Genetic Instability,” Nature 430 (August 5, 2004): 625–26.

27 John Cairns, Julie Overbaugh, and Stephan Miller, “The Origin of Mutants,” Nature 335 (1988): 142–45.

28 B. G. Hall, “Activation of the bgl Operon by Adaptive Mutation,” Molecular Biology and Evolution (January 15, 1998): 1–5.

29 Susan Rosenberg, “Evolving Responsively: Adaptive Mutation,” Nature Reviews Genetics 2 (2001): 504–15. This is a comprehensive review of the state of research on adaptive mutation.

30 Tim Beardsley, “Evolution Evolving,” Scientific American (September 1997): 15–18.

31 Johnjoe McFadden, Quantum Evolution (Scranton, PA: Norton, 2001).

32 Charles Darwin, 1876 letter to Moritz Wagner, referenced in Obituary Notices of the Proceedings of the Royal Society 44 (1888).

33 I did the research for this section several years ago. Now it seems that the RNA world is falling rapidly out of favor.

34 Gerald F. Joyce and Leslie E. Orgel, “Prospects for Understanding the Origin of the RNA World,” in The RNA World , 2nd ed., eds. Raymond F. Gesteland, Thomas R. Cech, and John F. Atkins (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1999), 68.

35 G. F. Joyce et al., “Chiral Selection in Poly(C)-Directed Synthesis of Oligo(G),” Nature 310 (1984): 602–4.

36 Joyce and Orgel, 51.

38 David P. Bartel, “Recreating an RNA Replicase,” in The RNA World , 143–59.

39 Kauffman’s more recent book At Home in the Universe will be more accessible to the lay reader. It applies the same concepts far beyond biogenesis and evolution, and is an excellent resource to help develop nondualistic intuitions about the origin of order and beauty in the universe.

40 Left-hand diagram: http://stat.kaist.ac.kr/OurWork.php . Right-hand diagram: E. Ravasz, A. L. Somera, D. A. Mongru, Z. N. Oltvai, and A.-L. Barabási, “Hierarchical Organization of Modularity in Metabolic Networks,” Science 297 (2002): 1551.

41 Also keep in mind that even in the world of masses and forces, there is much we are ignorant of.

42 The emergent property of soul might be associated with a bound energy that contributes to the mass of a living being. Death brings a decoherence of innumerable processes of life, an enormous loss of embodied information and energy, and thus an equivalent loss of mass. I realize that standard physics admits no way for the mass—measured at several ounces—to just disappear without being converted to energy on the order of 9×10 16 joules. Where does it go? I’m not going to try to answer that question right now.

43 Ingrid Wickelgren, “Immunotherapy: Can Worms Tame the Immune System?” Science 305 (2004): 170–71.

44 Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2002), 163.

46 Just for fun, I shall note here that some renegade geologists think the planet does grow, and cite this as an alternative explanation for continental drift.

48 The lack of new, more complex organisms is hidden by the fact that complex and unforeseen patterns of behavior indeed arise among the seed creatures and their variants, which do indeed evolve, only not toward leaps in complexity. See Richard E. Lenski et al., “The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features,” Nature 423 (May 2003): 139–44 for some interesting examples.

49 Liangbiao Chen, Arthur L. DeVries, and Chi-Hing C. Cheng, “Evolution of Antifreeze Protein from a Trypsinogen Gene in Antarctic Notothenioid Fish,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 94 (April 1997): 3811–16.

50 Brig Klyce, “The Origin of Antifreeze Protein Genes,” www.panspermia.org/neodarw.htm .

51 Thanks to Brig Klyce’s close reading of the paper for spotting this teleological phrase.

52 Jeffrey McKee, The Riddled Chain (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 196.

53 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), 154, cited in Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press, 2006).

57 Catherine Grillot-Courvalin, Sylvie Goussard, and Patrice Courvalin, “Bacteria as Gene Delivery Vectors for Mammalian Cells” in Horizontal Gene Transfer , 2nd ed., eds. Michael Syvanen and Clarence Kado (New York: Academic Press, 2002).

58 D. L. Hartl, A. R. Lohe, and E. R. Lozovskaya, “Modern Thoughts on an Ancyent Marinere: Function, Evolution, Regulation,” Annual Review of Genetics 31 (1997): 337–58.

59 Nick Campbell, “Give and Take,” Nature Reviews Genetics 5 (2004): 638–39.

60 Kathy A. Svitil, “Did Viruses Make Us Human?” Discover (November 2002): 10.

63 Nicole King, Christopher T. Hittinger, and Sean B. Carroll, “Evolution of Key Cell Signaling and Adhesion Protein Families Predates Animal Origins,” Science 301 (July 18, 2003): 361–63.

64 Brig Klyce, “Neo-Darwinism: The Current Paradigm,” www.panspermia.org/neodarw.htm .

65 Sylvia Pagán Westphal, “Life Goes On without ‘Vital’ DNA,” New Scientist (June 3, 2004).

66 For you sticklers out there, I understand that what Darwin implies is not “The purpose of life is to survive” but “The purpose of life is to survive long enough to pass on my genes and ensure their survival and further replication.” Don’t you think the first sentence has a better ring to it though? Anyway, the upshot is the same.

67 www.panspermia.org/whatsne33.htm .

68 See Halton Arp, Seeing Red (Montreal: Aperion, 1998), and Eric Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened (New York: Vintage, 1992).

2 Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988).

3 Patrick Farley, “Chrysalis Colossus,” www.electricsheepcomix.com/chrysalis/ .

4 Silvio Gesell, The Natural Economic Order (1906), trans. Philip Pye. I consulted an online version: http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/The_Natural_Economic_Order .

5 Today this could all be done electronically of course.

6 Bernard Lietaer gives a nice discussion of the history of demurrage in The Future of Money (London: Century, 2002).

7 Gesell, Part 4, ch. 1.

8 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), 209.

9 Richard B. Lee, The Dobe !Kung (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 101.

10 Gesell, Part 4, ch. 5E. Gesell also advocated the abolition of land ownership.

11 Gesell, Part 4, ch. 4.

12 For example, in a deflationary depression the scarcity of money leads everyone to hoard it, exacerbating the scarcity.

13 Gesell, Part 4, ch. 4.

14 Lewis Hyde, The Gift (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 23.

15 The waste of food is at all stages of production and consumption, from the barn to the dinner plate. At the production stage, economic efficiency trumps solar efficiency in the conversion of sunlight into food, with the result that labor-intensive farming that can achieve higher nutritional yields cannot compete with machine agriculture (especially with its hidden subsidies). There is further waste at the processing stage, for example in the failure to use organ meats and imperfect fruits and vegetables. At the distribution stage there is enormous waste at supermarkets, which must throw away everything that spoils or expires. As for the consumption stage, simply go to a university cafeteria and observe the window where students bus their trays.

16 Jessica Prentice, “Stirring the Cauldron—New Egg Moon,” April 13, 2005, http://cauldron.wisefoodways.com

17 Most of the “efficiency” is actually due to their bargaining power, not their productive efficiency. A large purchaser can demand lower prices from producers without necessarily being more efficient in any other way.

18 Gesell, Part 4, ch. 4.

19 The quote and general outline of this historical incident are from Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money (London: Century, 2002), 156–57.

20 Income tax reinforces the regime of control in another way too, by requiring that one keep records of all income and allowable deductions. As life becomes increasingly economic, more and more of life goes on record and thereby becomes data.

22 “Nontoxic” is not an absolute category. Substances must be produced in quantities small enough for the biosphere to utilize, as many substances that are beneficial in small quantities are destructive in large quantities. It is not the chemical constitution of the substance, it is whether it contributes to a cyclical flow. That means that no action can be understood in isolation from its place and time. The same substance that is poison in one location might be food in another.

23 The discussion of the “intelligent products system,” green taxes, and pollution permits draws its basic facts from Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce (New York: Harper, 1993) as well as Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins (New York: Little, Brown, 1999).

24 I am not exaggerating when I say “amazing.” Your heart will probably leap when you read “Mushroom Power” by Paul Stamets, Yes! (Spring 2003).

25 Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce (New York: Harper, 1993), 21.

27 Interview with Derrick Jensen, The Sun , April 2001.

28 Many of the ancient world’s great agricultural civilizations eventually destroyed their ecosystems. The deforestation of the Greek islands and the desertification of Mesopotamia and North Africa illustrate the destructive capacity of even low levels of technology. On the other hand, I have read that certain areas of China have been under continuous cultivation for five thousand years.

29 I first discovered Emoto’s work in a Chinese translation of his original Japanese book. Some water-crystal photos are available online: see www.wellnessgoods.com/messages.asp .

30 See for example, Dean Radin, Gail Hayssen, Masaru Emoto, Takashige Kizu, “Double-Blind Test of the Effects of Distant Intention on Water Crystal Formation,” Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing 2(5) (September 2006): 408–11. Also, http://odewire.com/170441/scientists-investigate-water-memory.html .

32 At the present writing, most of these are for medical applications. For example, Cyberkinetics Inc. has built an implantable device that allows paralysis victims to control prosthetic devices. And implantable microchips are now commonplace for a variety of medical and security applications.

33 The deep problem with genetic engineering is that it tries to impose linear control over something that is highly nonlinear. All kinds of unexpected consequences arise from such bumbling. We know not what we do. I think we are thousands of years away from having the knowledge and wisdom to use this kind of technology.

34 See for example the work of the Institute of HeartMath, the International Institute of Biophysics, and the Qigong Institute.

35 This is a complex topic. The blogosphere and traditional journalism are growing into a symbiotic relationship from which something entirely new will emerge. Neither will swallow up or replace the other. A similar process is beginning to transform the tottering scientific journal system.

36 In the case of Amazon, the free information comprises the vast database of user reviews, reviews of user reviews, and so on. Of course that is not the sole reason for Amazon’s profitability, but giving something away for free is certainly one way in which the company profits.

37 A software crack is a procedure for making illegal copies of commercial software operable.

38 Note, however, that much of the work of modern life is an artifact of our compulsion to maintain separation from nature. Woodchucks and hunter-gatherers do not clean toilets or wash dishes. Most do construct and maintain dwellings however. To undo even that form of separation, we must go back to a premammalian state.

39 When I speak of a garden, I have a concept in mind of cooperation with nature and not control. A garden can embody either. On one extreme there is the Victorian garden of exotic species, each precisely positioned in a total human imposition on the land. On the other extreme, there is simply the altered ecosystem that arises from any animal’s interaction with its herbal environment.

40 As for the issue of economic irrationality, calculate how much money you save by growing your own lettuce instead of buying it at the supermarket. Then factor in the time you spend. I doubt you’ll save more than fifty cents an hour, even if you buy organic produce.

41 Daniel Greenberg, Free at Last (Framingham, MA: Sudbury Valley School Press, 1995), 3.

44 This quote is from my earlier book, The Yoga of Eating (Warsaw, IN: New Trends, 2003), which has an extensive discussion of the fallacy of willpower.

49 I mean a self-attack, not an attack by the HIV virus. Irrepressible evidence is mounting that HIV is a symptom and not a cause of AIDS. For an exhaustive demonstration of this, see Henry Bauer’s series in the Journal of Scientific Exploration , Fall 2005 through Summer 2006.

50 Ted J. Kaptchuk, The Web That Has No Weaver (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2000), 4.

52 Matthew Wood, The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004), 115.

54 Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1979), 78–79.

56 The lingua adamica is humanity’s hypothetical Original Language, the “language of Adam.” It is described in Chapter 2.

57 Of course, birdsongs have far more meaning than most of us realize, and indeed are part of the Original Language of Nature. The metaphor refers to the modern listener.

58 Ivan Fónagy, Languages within Language (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2001), 181.

59 Joseph Epes Brown, Teaching Spirits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 35.

60 The forced, contrived, premature opening of boundaries in the absence of love does not bring one any closer to the lingua adamica , but only invites violation.

2 Charles Eisenstein, The Yoga of Eating (Warsaw, IN: New Trends, 2003), 75–76.

3 Le Pere Paul Le Jeune, “Relation of What Occurred in New France in the Year 1634,” in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents , vol. 6, ed. R. G. Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows, 1897) (1st French ed., 1635). Quoted by Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics , excerpted in the online article, “The Original Affluent Society.”

4 Spoken by Zeus in Hesiod, Works and Days 55.

5 Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious (New York: Viking, 1975). Reprinted by Condor Books, 1995.

6 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.89.

7 But be careful to distinguish this from the commodification of spirituality, the attempt to market the teachings of the various spiritual traditions and thus convert this form of cultural or spiritual capital into yet more money. The “knowledge” I speak of here is not in the form of information, secret teachings, and so on. It is a way of being.

8 See Vernor Vinge, A Fire upon the Deep (New York: Tor Books, 1993) for a very accessible portrayal of the emergent nature of intelligence. It’s a great story too!

9 Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution’s End (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 190.

10 Of course, we are not yet and will probably never be at the point of complete material independence of Mother Earth; we are not even close. Our dependence on the geophysical and organic processes of Gaia is far greater than most people imagine. We are, for example, a long way from being able to manufacture an artificial atmosphere capable of sustaining human life; nor is synthetic food yet a viable alternative. Much of our technology-derived independence from nature is really an illusion, especially when it comes to the food supply. Yet such independence is not a prerequisite for adulthood, just as the tribal youth is not expected to live independent of the tribe. The key difference is a change of attitude, away from “It is mine to take” toward “It is ours to honor.”

Perhaps someday we will become independent of Mother Earth, in some science-fiction scenario of space-roaming biospheres or consciousness uploaded onto computers, or alternatively, a New Age vision of spiritualization, the shedding of material bodily needs or even of the body itself, to live in the realm of pure spirit. Yet I suspect that even if such scenarios come to pass, it will not be as an escape from a planet we have ruined, but as the fruiting of a healed and vibrant earth moving into the next stage of its development.