If your homeland were invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?

As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?

A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.

I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing.

If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.