There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons.

What little wilderness remains displays the patterns we must return to, if our species and as many others as now remain are to persist here a while. Ideally this would call for a broad cultural rapprochment with the wild, a long overdue armistice in civilization's war upon it.

I enjoy being single, but I loved being married.

Given all that history has shown us of the consequences of technology - from the atlatl spear to the A-bomb - why have so few groups of human beings managed to resist the incursions of technology? Or be choosy about the extent to which they'll employ a technological innovation?

I'm 47 years old. I couldn't compete with Beyonce. I'm not competing with anyone. I've already established myself as an artist. I've been in this business for 30 years. There's no reason for me to compete with anyone.

Any prediction worth its weigh would consider the spiritual, material, and unintended consequences of introducing a new technology to the world. It would proceed from the kind of understanding Chellis articulated: Life is Whole.

Small groups have always been the locus of change. What they do, in a sometimes offhand way, is constellate new cultural forms and give birth to the unexpected. Sometimes the talk is the thing, sometimes the feeling. When we risk talking about something we really care about it's infectious. Like any good infection, such talk can produce heat, a fever of intellectual excitement.