When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

If you only had a limited time to life (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time?

Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.

It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.