The post-modern faithful are in motion tonight. From all over California, artists, dreamers, idealists, innovators, old hippies and young visionaries are on the move toward Burning Man in Nevada.
I am touched by many departures. My buddy Tom hits the road tomorrow. My son Peter passes through here Saturday night and on to Nevada on Sunday. My house mate Elizabeth just dropped off some plants for me to water. She's driving east tonight.
This year's theme is "green." It is completely thrilling to see ecological consciousness pervade our culture, from the center to the edges, before my time on earth is through.
Let me explain.
As a child, I was attuned to birds, trees, plants, fish, water, soil, and air in ways that might be best labeled obsessive-compulsive disorder. Yes, it was pathological, but luckily, I was not alone in my illness.
All over the world, people were growing up in the '50ss and '60s who perceived a vulnerability in the environment around us. I cannot explain it any other way than this: As I walked through fields and woods, sometimes with my dog and my shotgun, sometimes alone and unarmed, what tended to catch my attention were the degradations that were clearly observable even half a century ago.
Eroding hillsides, dying trees, pest explosions, lakes smothered by weeds fueled by agricultural runoff, dying frogs, disappearing birds -- all of these were apparent by the time I was a teenager.
As soon as I found my writing voice, at age 19, I started writing about these subjects. It seems so, so long ago now. It took over twenty years for these stories to rise to the level of the front page of the New York Times.
Over the past two decades, there has been a slow escalation of awareness. Someday soon, perhaps a majority of my countrymen will comprehend what a HUGE footprint we impose on this, our common earth. Maybe then, we will begin to scale back and adopt a more modest existence, one with a better chance of accommodating the continuing presence of all of us, whatever color or nationality we might represent, on this planet.
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