I was born, grew up, and so far, lived all my life at the furthest reaches of Western civilization. I first grew up in Los Altos Hills in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spent most of my early education in Palo Alto, while also living in Menlo Park next to the Stanford Linear Accelerator. After high school I headed south to junior college in San Luis Obispo. Then I went to Santa Cruz where I deprogrammed myself from society expectations. The deprogramming was in the pleasure of writing poetry. It led me to a life-long commitment to making a difference as an Environmental and Social justice activist. My story is rooted in what Wallace Stegner tells us:

"Trying to capture America in a sentence, Gertrude Stein said, "conceive a space that is filled with moving." If she had been reared in Boston she might not have seen it so plainly; but she was reared in Oakland. She knew that few Westerners die where they are born, that most live out their lives as a series of uprootings."

I was born and raised during the seedtime before the boon of Silicon Valley. Before this new digital era this land was where people drove home to after working in the city of San Francisco. It was the land of the first commute west of the Mississippi. Before that, this land was shaped by the gold rush, visions of El Dorado, or if all else failed unlimited supplies of giant Redwoods were ready for profitable cutting.

In the nineteen-seventies and eighties my childhood in Silicon Valley was loaded with vacant lots and orchards. Then the land was covered over in 16 -lane highway interchanges, big buildings, and even bigger parking lots. Back then the computer boon had not yet hit. Then the capitol "I" in the word innovation was born and to this day there's a higher innovation value per worker in this valley then anywhere else in the world. Even though none of us yet knew what the internet was, collectively, we all had this gut-feeling about where we were headed. We had a sense of what our sprouting seed was.

When I visit these streets decades later I see a different world. The computer has sprouted and grown to cover our world in thick vines of communication. Far from my elementary school bragging that Palo Alto was the "divorced mothers capitol of the world" a quaint forested hometown has changed to mansions and millionaires. All the many families I once knew have moved on. The others who took their place in these homes, they have moved on as well. These homes were renovated into the status symbols of mini-mansions that barely fit on the small million dollar lots. My childhood streets are haunted with ghosts of families who once dwelled then moved on after a handful of years. Stegner says:

"California, it should be said, is a separate problem, hardly part of the west at all. As one anthologist recently put it, it is west of the West. But there are few of common characteristics in western writing and in western life, and California shares most of them. For one thing, the whole west, including much of California, is arid country, as I've been reiterating ad nausiem for fifty years, and aridity enforces space, which in turn enforces mobility. In an Oasis civilization, especially one that has been periodically raided for its extractible resources, you don't find the degree of settled community life that you would find in New England, the Midwest or the South

Space does something to the vision. It makes the country itself... Look at any book that is western in its feel-- Roughing It, The Grapes of Wrath, The Big Sky, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, On the Road, the Way to Rainy Mountain-- and you will find that it is a book not about place but about motion, not about fulfillment but about desire. There is always a seeking, generally unsatisfied."1

Growing up at ground zero of the computer boon before it launched taught me about stored energy, stored human potential. It taught me about what human innovation feels like. In the seventies and eighties amid the psychological futility of bomb drills during elementary school I remember the teacher closing the thick drapes to protect us from a supposed atomic blast. Of course we all knew that we lived within a mile of prime missile targets. It reassured us that we would be incinerated rather then threatened with the nightmare of dying a slow death from fallout. Life on the cutting edge always has been shadowed by the threat of nuclear apocalypse. Watching "The Day After" on TV, watching all the spin-offs of the same theme, all these things turned me down the path of activism before I even knew what an activist was.

As I look back on where we have come in 33 years I see an innate truth revealing itself in me. It's a truth that works for human progress, then nudges it a step further. Step by step, one issue at a time, our sparsely connected global activist family grows as it fights to end injustice to all humans as well as all species.

When I was growing up in Silicon Valley there was a sense that our community was on the cutting edge of our species. Few of us really knew what it was but there was something about our town getting to the future before all the other towns got there. Just as Television nurtures our competitive spirit, our desire to be the winner, so to did our collective sense of community see us as the winner even before the race began.
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In 1980 in middle school I signed up and got a computer tutor. This guy wasn't interested in teaching, he wanted to do his own thing, but he had to teach me. I remember all the switches and diodes; I remember these big blue metal boxes with fans blowing and lights blinking. It was a classroom full of outdated machines donated to us so we could learn about them. I learned of a program called BASIC. I learned how to write simple command line programs and I tried to build my own program. It was a game I made up that mimicked the launch of the first space shuttle. But quickly I was confused and overwhelmed by the amount of interconnections that had to be dealt with. I was much more interested in being outside.

My inspiration comes from being with the land; it inspires sounds, words and visions that need sorting. I write poems to increase my abilities of sensing and sorting. Back then, the more I was sensing, the more physical reality became only one relatively minor aspect of what the world was. I felt trapped, there was so much more to reality, yet what I perceived could not be conveyed in the words or culture I was growing up in. In my early years I found comfort, as well as a vague role model in the local tech society's buzz of its newest and latest. As those big old computers in middle school became smaller I shifted from writing on a typewriter to writing on an Apple computer at community colleges. As computers became faster and more integrated my awareness began to develop at the same pace. A natural yearning to move beyond just the orchestration of words into poems led me into the humanities. I wanted to understand social and political change. It led me to the writings of Erc Fromm, Ram Dass. Abbey Hoffman, Rod Mckuen, Dylan Thomas, Martin Luther King, Buddha and so many others. The answers led me to read newspapers and seek out alternative media. I over-involved my heart in the stories I read. I wanted to feel more not less. I remember crying for ordinary airplane disasters and all the other tragedies of the times.

The realization of who I was came sudden when the Persian Gulf War started. I woke up. I found a new family at those first protests. My family shut down the freeway, or we marched, or we simply gathered in candlelight. My intolerance of what was wrong in our world found sharp limits in the law enforcement that surrounded and monitored our obstructive actions. The inconveniences we created reminded people of a far greater inconvenience, a far more deadly inconvenience. The fraud in our war, what our dissent spoke out against, it overwhelmed me with anger. People who flew their flag and supported our nations acts of misery and suffering made me so angry. Rather than just getting pissed I had to get a message out. I was no longer going to just stand by and watch.

I quickly learned why I was always rooting for the underdog when I watched sports on TV. I learned the hard lesson of how a dedication to justice in politics was not only almost impossible, but it was also the path that enraged my passion. Put simply, none of us had the right to live a lifestyle that makes other people and other species suffer. By looking inside, always returning to look inside I kept finding the bad knowings that caused us to mistreat others. So after careful scrutiny of what works versus what doesn't work I jumped into the routine of activism. I organized my first rally. I put out fliers with the Declaration of Independence printed on them. I made a request in the flier for drummers to show up and drum. Quickly, the empowerment I learned from that rally inspired me to grapple with environmental issues, racism, women's issues, as well as the plight of Native Americans. I was flooded with so many causes and I refused to cast any issue aside as less important then any other.

I wanted to help all, but by what process? How could I put all these seemingly disjointed concerns of many different issues into something that made sense to others and myself? The academics of my activism felt as if I studied in spite of, and opposition to, mainstream academia. I got out of school because I abhorred the way teachers went about replicating there own beliefs rather then making a fluid space where people could seek out and find there own version of the truth. Academics has alienated itself from the reality its citizenry existed in. It was not just the schools, it was the whole linear construct of Western thinking.

Earning what little money I needed by working in back yard gardens taught me about circular thinking. Native Americans also taught me how to think in a circular way. Their books taught me how to be in verbs and metaphors rather then physicality and literalism. The linear world enrages me and if I am to keep from being destroyed by this rage I have to learn how to focus. I have to learn how to find ways to shift society and myself out of our collective ''live in the real world'' disease. We need more renewal, we need a sense of rejuvenation rather then obliteration. More succinct: "How can I be more effective?" My mind and heart will forever be obsessed with this simple question. With continuing analysis, a continuing process of sourcing info from odd places, I am free of the burden of: "suppose to be studying something specific." The more I learned outside of school the easier it was to see injustice everywhere. The more I looked the easier it was to scream and yell and be upset at others by way of educating them in a offensive, yet theatrical way.

I feel loads of anger from all the world's injustices. It's easier to simply respond with apathy or rage.
I almost always reject apathy, and rage is my fuel that burns in a thick walled furnace of dedication and responsibility. To use this energy in an efficient way I again and again ask: ''how can I be more effective?''

The articulate Dr. Helen Caldicott's voice stirred me to action after the anti-war movement took to fizzle. It was 1991 and Helen's message of "10 years left to save the earth" got me going. I passed out fliers for my second big event: ''Earth Vigil: Every Sunset on Sunday at the Santa Cruz lighthouse until the next millennium!'' The event was never organized beyond passing out fliers; I wanted the event to have a life of its own. All the unknowing tourists and drummers didn't catch on; I wasn't going to push it either. I showed up each Sunday and thought about my week as a person and as an activist. Even in the middle of rainstorms I was standing there for the sunset, then the light on the lighthouse turning on, then heading home. I showed up every Sunday for nearly four years until I missed my first Sunday. I was drawn too far inland to sustain the vigil. It all started to unravel in the second year with a freak wave almost washing me off a big cliff at the lighthouse during sunset. It made me decide to get to work and not just sit around and vigil. So I went across the street and mapped out every trail, tree and shrub of the entire 30-acre Lighthouse Field State Park. I didn't understand what exactly I was doing with this map work; it was a mystery to me. It seemed the landscape was teaching me to orchestrate a project that was much larger then a backyard garden. I knew I could figure out the mystery if I researched what was
written of the park, If I met with the key players who influenced the park's future. I then proposed my vision of amazing forests, lagoons and wetlands. That's when tree planting and restoration crashed into its first bureaucratic brick wall. I learned that what I want, what the earth wants; it was easily ensnared in very common egos of very common administrative processes.

Quickly putting this project aside I chased after many new environmental ideas. I was drawn further inland, further into the beauty of forests and trees. I began growing native plants and seedlings, hiking nearby parks, reading, reading, reading! This freedom I found was because I cut myself off from being a traditional member of the work force: I retired at 23. I became a hand-to-mouth survivor doing gardening work to pay for the bare minimum. With every spare minute I could earn I was back out exploring, playing and learning in nature. Pretty soon I had hiked greater distances then the parks could contain. To know the land better "trespassing" was essential. That's when I began meeting giant threatened redwood trees, the last of the ones that will be logged from the San Francisco Peninsula for at least another century. The loggers were turning these rare trees into giant stumps and I was aiming to stop them. My activist wheels began to spin with a passion beyond anything I had experienced before. These century old trees had powers that no one was valuing and that power was pouring into me, helping to refine my thinking, helping to better connect my instinct to caring for others.

No matter how hurt or angry I was about earth-destruction my determination to save this place, or that tree, it was never derailed. The trials of lost battles, lost forests, each tree lost was of even greater devastation. If I got to know the tree before it was cut it was worse yet. Seeing fresh chopped bodies on trucks rolling down the road, it's been a horror that's been in my dreams since I was a small child. Their chopped up bodies on the hi-ways and roads, another loved one of old time on exhibition. Ever since my earliest days of looking at logs I've always wondered why I see things so differently then everyone else? Why don't people see what I see when an old growth tree on a log truck drives by? One time I saw the logs as unique chopped up pieces of cartoon characters. Overall my studies have taught me that trees seem to be some type of intangible energy source, or natural computer. They record tree data in their tree rings, branches and bark. They are also, in some as yet unexplainable way, equivalent to what a CPU and a hard drive are on your computer. The interface of keyboard and screen, that's the landscape itself. These old trees are our future networks and hubs of so many things we haven't begun to know.

Saving forests drains me more then any other activism. The future interactions of humans and old trees will be much different someday. Our battle cries: "If we could just save this one tree!." "If we could just save this one forest." "We can save this forest, there is a way!"

Most often these statements ran into a brick wall of blue sky and sawdust. What is most effective is to file lawsuits, which required enormous bureaucratic endeavors. The rules and regulations of the State of California, as well the federal government, was slippery and vast. These forests were often on steep ground with lots of landslides. The time it took to absorb the administrative language, to learn steep slope hydrology, to learn regulations and surveys for endangered species, it challenged me. The motivation that kept me going was more then just the trees, it came from occasional realizations: "wow, I'm really beginning to know these laws better then the foresters themselves," or "gee, those loggers really are starting to realize how harmful their profession is."

I joined up with Greenpeace, Earth First and other activists that were trying to not only save these rare trees through the courts, but also with civil disobedience. Tactics like locking ourselves to gates and living in threatened trees appeared to be feeble, desperate attempts. But the attempts reminded me that I was not alone in my concern, reminded me that we're a movement that could capture attention through the media. Of course there was plenty of backlash, jail time and failed environmental challenges in the courts.

In Santa Cruz our biggest battle was over a steep forested area named Butano. It was slowly being lost. This was 4000 acres of the last remaining unprotected old growth trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains. As the enthusiasm to save this place waned I didn't give up and as a result I inherited stacks and stacks of an administrative record that I studied obsessively. I worked with a friend on a third last chance lawsuit, which turned into a settlement agreement, which turned into us hiring a forester to independently oversee and ultimately endorse the cutting of the old growth in disregard of the settlement.

I needed to learn more every day if I was to become effective. It led me to got a job planting trees for a forester that lived around the corner. This job not only allowed me to see what the most environmentally sensitive state laws in the world were doing to destroy our forests, but it also allowed me to plant 13,000 two year old Redwood seedlings. From these early beginnings I experienced landscapes that fed me with knowledge of how timber cutting and mono-crop forestry was harmful. I gained a much deeper knowing of the land that gave rise to visions of a future forest restoration society. Out in these cutover forestlands in the mountains above Silicon Valley I could feel a whole new spirit of innovation that was much like the comfort of my childhood. I knew, and in time would prove, that these lands could carry so much more than a single-species of conifer. I realized the mono-crop of industry was a waste and a whole new era of innovation in cultivating native species was soon to sprout as a new family that will heal all the earth's landscapes.

With all this information pouring into me I was fast becoming a workaholic. To keep up with applying my dreams to reality my mind was moving all over the local mountains. My mind was studying countless maps and aerial photos. I began seeking out landowners and writing forest restoration plans for them. Amid all this I was also learning about the heart of all the world's forests, a landscape not unlike where I lived. Our lands shared the commonality of being a place where the tallest trees in the world once grew. It was then that I learned that I wasn't living separate from this land at all. I was already in this forest. I was in the southern reaches of what once was a giant contiguous temperate rainforest. This forest reaches north of my homeland; it reaches all the way up the coast of Alaska.

I missed my first Sunset on Sunday in 1994. I went to an Earth First Rendezvous at a lake in Oregon. It was in the East Cascades, ancient pines, lava fields, and giant clearcuts. As the sun set that first Sunday I was in a forest and I couldn't see the horizon. The sky was in ribbons of white clouds, I wasn't where I was suppose to be, yet surrounded by ancient pines, I knew there was more to this world then the redwood nest I just jumped out of.

Twenty-eight months later I was living in the heart of the Willamette Valley chasing after paper work and timber sale planners on US forest Service lands. I was a homeless revolutionary living at almost no expense with my fellow comrades. We were all veterans of the forest defense wars of the mid 90's. We had lost many loved trees in the Pacific Northwest, yet the ones we saved gave rise to Cascadia Free State. We were more then just this free state road blockade that was wiped out by the cops in month eleven. We were the last wild forests come to life. We rose up to defend ourselves; our direct-action saved several forests amid hundreds lost. Now our seed was well burrowed in the city of Eugene, Oregon. The city became a Mecca for activists. We went from saving forests to building a whole new society. We began to renovate and rebuild what the kids of the 60's started to build in this town. With Food not Bombs, Seeds of Peace, Cascadia Forest Defenders, Food not Lawns, and Icky's tea house, we became a new counter-culture of mutual aid. Our movements' new ties were with anarchists, outcasts and punks.

Of course my work reached much further then the city of Eugene, Oregon. Every fall it' time to pay my due to the redwood family and go live at base camp in Northern California in defense of the last pristine groves of ancient redwoods. Sometimes for months I worked to save the ancient redwoods at these dysfunctional societies known as base camp. Our dysfunction required at least two to three hours of "circles" or meetings every day. These campaigns in the late-nineties were a high-pressure competitive gaggle of idealistic middle-class white folk getting beat up by loggers and then thrown in jail. Our civil disobedience and victimization was a painful way to get the message of saving forests out to the world.

All of us wanted to be talented and effective with our direct action egos, but there were too many of us. The task at hand was always quite the opposite of being effective. Rather then get sucked into all the showboating, and competing to get to play the lead role. I instead told war stories about Oregon and claimed I was on vacation. I wanted to be effective in my efforts for the redwoods so I sat back and watched people fight for illusions of opportunity. I studied all aspects of the campaign and found a diverse array of lowly tasks that others hadn't thought of doing. From working in the media center editing video, to sorting out soggy supply tents and going on supply runs, I went to whatever task allowed me to focus in, whatever allowed me to fill the gap in our collective effort. I also went to spokes council meetings as well as brief trips into the backwoods where the logging was. These vacations became a place where I focused on skill development rather then commitment to saving a particular forest. I kept my distance from wanting to save trees, I knew that back home in the Willamette was my priority and I wasn't going to get burned out until I tried to make my mark against the corruption of the federal timber sale program in the Willamette.
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It was in Humboldt County that the modern chaos of arboreal villages of protesters came into vogue. The skills I learned as a treeclimber in my original home of the coast redwoods was what I carried back home to the volcanoes and glaciers of the Cascades. Before Oregon treesitting could starts its own arboreal village I had to find a target, an ancient forest in need of saving. The ravages of years gone by kept my fellow revolutionaries out of the woods. They had been hurt too many times. So instead of being in the woods I was in the books. Eighteen months of crazy mind-numbing administrative comments, appeals and information requests. Staring at papers or staring at maps, putting it all together in formal legal challenges by staring at out outdated computers, it was my daily pre-occupation.

I worked out of Icky's Teahouse. It was a gathering place for punk kids outcasts and Anarchists. My first year in Eugene was primarily spent at Icky's. Our Cascadia Forest Defender's office was set up there. By this time Computers had become much more then what I experienced on an Apple computer in school more then a decade earlier. My use of these machines was now essential. Cascadia Forest Defenders received donations of old computers and we made do with what little we had. While surfing the Internet and streaming audio and video via a website was becoming the norm for others, we were far from it. On a good day we could check email and use a functional word processor. After a time of living, eating and breathing timber sales that were administered under the Northwest Forest Plan the effort began to pay off and we started to save forests again. Of course we lost many precious forests in order for us to gain the proof we needed to win our arguments in court.

Even though I didn't know it at the time, my main role was to draw media attention with treesits. Over the course of several years, all across the Pacific Northwest, I helped to start, or was part of 18 different tree villages. One of these arboreal villages in Fall Creek, Oregon is the longest lasting upper canopy occupation in modern history. It has continued on for four years now! From Northern California to the Willamette Valley, and even up in Washington and British Columbia treesitting has become a way to capture favorable media attention. I worked all these campaigns; so much blue sky, stumps and tiny tree trunks is what became of most of them. The loggers never hesitated to remind that those tiny trees were the future of certified eco-forestry. It seems the future of what our family wants, our ability to articulate with treesit theater, it has shifted social consciousness a wee-bit. We found a smidgen of momentum as a social movement.

Our momentum gave a new spirit to civil disobedience. It became far less civil. The youth of Eugene in the late nineties: anarchists, punks and forest defenders united in rallies that to turned riots. We united, because the oppressive presence of cops in full riot gear was just enough to provoke one kid to do something wrong, then they would move on us. From the Rodney King riots, to the Chiapas rebellion, to the newborn tradition of trashing Nike town, I ended up in the middle of it all trying to keep quiet. In the middle of a riot you need to be calm in order to judge when to dance, when to scream, when to advance, and when to retreat. Around me people smashed windows and phone booths. At first I objected, but after listening to what these people had to say I decided the value of what they destroy is far less then the value of their need to express themselves and be listened to. To be a healthy society we need everyone to be listened to, we need a more natural process of self-determination. If no one is listening to you and you break a window and everybody says "why did they do that?" It gives you the impression that people are listening. It caters to the type of news the media can hype, which means larger ad revenues, which means we get more air-time. All of a sudden we're a moneymaker. All of a sudden the world hears our messages:

"We want de-centralization and re-integration into the landscape."

"We can no longer allow massive centralized conglomerates to erode our freedoms."

"Capitalism is destroying the world."

Our message was no longer a Cascadia Free State that was trying to look nice and respectable. Instead we morphed into Red cloud Thunder and we thrived on shock value. We giggled to no end as we fanned the flames of our family persona as public enemy number one. After June 18th, 1999 the day over 100 cities across the world mobilized in a global Reclaim the Streets protest, the rioters in Eugene were one step ahead of the rest of the world when it came to sensation and terror. On June 18 the cops were outnumbered and beaten; occasionally the cops would all jump in their cars and drive away from the riot with their sirens screaming. The many businesses that were damaged, the people terrorized, we took advantage of the hype by announcing the same event was going to occur every month. In a letter to the editors of the mainstream media outlets I pledged: "Because of the ineffectiveness of our "democracy," extreme life-affirming acts of defiance are necessary."

The resultant negative media and politics put pressure on our community. I was in a position where the media was trying to track me down to find out "what I had planned," even though it was not me who was planning, it was the greater group. But the chief of police singled me out and wrote me letters making me the responsible party for the next rally. All the while our message against globalization, corporations and freedom continued to spread over the airwaves. As revolutionaries we were soon to get some very rough lessons in how the powers-that-be deal with hubris and defiance. In the meantime we were getting as much mileage out of our message as possible. When the big rally day came footage of National Guard riot control training camps played on everyone's TV and nearly 70 reporters covered our quiet gathering of 100 activists in the park. Satellite trucks, news reporters, and many cops surrounded us. I explained to the LA Times reporter who showed up that it was like a sporting event with part of the population rooting for the cops and part of the population rooting for the activists and anarchists.

It's rare that Social and Environmental Justice movements get much air-time in today's corporate media. In the late nineties events transpired in Eugene, Oregon which reached its pinnacle at WTO in Seattle in 1999. All of sudden it was not just our free states in the woods that were succeeding. It was all about 50,000 people shutting down global corruption. It was about the Black Clad Messenger, a Eugene publication that hailed the new era of activism, which was not only intelligent, but far less civil. The Messenger's stance was that waving protests signs and having rallies was worthless. It was about young people rising up wanting to break the establishment apart. What made it intelligent was that these window breakers were learning and studying. They wanted to live in a better way and they were just starting to envision and articulate the way that they wanted.

After WTO Eugene had that same sprouting-seed-sense that I was raised with in Silicon Valley. We were on the cutting edge of society, we were the light bearer of a far more just and respectable world. A Eugene-based video documenting these times is called "Breaking the Spell." That's what breaking windows and other property damage does. It exposes the obsessive neurosis that our society has when its exclaimed: "someone is messing with my stuff." It's a notion that makes for tall fences and a lack of trust. It makes our personal belongings a sacred preoccupation, which in turn feeds the cycle that manifests threats to our preoccupations. The reaction gained from breaking objects exposed the tip of the iceberg of the neurosis, which is only the first step in curing the illness.

Our weakness was that we all suffer from the same neurosis. We were playing on fear rather then compassion and creativity. We expressed our aggression and we created illusions of even greater aggressions. In the battlefield of the riot zone our hubris often squelched our effectiveness. This stage was necessary because our society speaks the language of fear. The language of compassion and creativity is a bit harder for people to understand, especially when our society's learning often comes from a television or a mainstream newspaper.

The debates about property damage as violent or non-violent freaked all the Vietnam War protesters out; they sided with mainstream media, who portrayed us as wild, unpredictable violent adversaries. It made for great drama. It had our neighborhood crawling with CBS, ABC, 60 Minutes, the New York Times and Harper's magazine. The reporters roaming our streets were bitter because almost none of the activists wanted to talk to them.

As the story got old, police oppression intensified, we found our ultimate enemy within. As a community of revolutionaries we were not listening to our fellow revolutionaries. I'm not talking about the Vietnam War protesters who decried our broader array of tactics; I'm talking about the more core issue of how we treat each other. I'm talking about man's subtle, and not so subtle, oppression toward women. There is an imbalance in the power structure of our organically organized groups. Obviously it can't simply be reduced to a difference between men and women. It's more about the difference between the feminine parts of us versus the masculine parts. The imbalance is that all of us are in a world where the masculine now has to learn to yield to the feminine. A Bulldozer doesn't often engender the image of feminine nurturing, but what of a line of people holding hands as the bulldozer crawls towards them? What are the thoughts of the bulldozer driver when he shuts down or keeps moving ahead? Just as we are in seedtime before a whole new worldwide craze of ecological restoration; so too are we in seedtime for many aspects of the feminine to be released from chains of oppression. We live in an era where our physical, verbal and emotional violence towards each other has swung us so far over to the masculine that the feminine is the only place we can now travel towards. The Internet is communication, a much more feminine act then fighting wars. The economy of communication is on the verge of overtaking the economy of war.

Of course direct action in defense of the forest has always been a war zone. Even though we adhere mostly to non-violent acts of civil disobedience the war we were in made us hardened and desensitized towards each other. So as the sensation of treesits combined with legal pressure forced the loggers to back-off in their war against our forests we were given an opportunity to look closer at the social order of our free states. Our enemies left us alone so we studied the enemies within. Most offensive were belligerent men who verbally or physically abused other people in the campaign. In the ensuing confrontation these men squared off with the women in our community. A war of angry words between the sexes ensued. The abuse, exclusion and denial that the men acted out on the battlefield was no longer something we could overlook any longer. The women of our community made it clear to the men how much baggage is unloaded on them on a daily basis. Because men and women are both oppressed in this world many of the men felt like they were being treated unfairly and not being listened to. The men were unwilling to genuinely look at every aspect of what makes equality difficult for women. Those same men ultimately were asked to leave as the decided solution for the outrageous events that were occurring. Though we were not entirely successful the abusive men finally left and we gained a little ground in our collective ability to dialogue and communicate. But to do justice to the plight women endure it's important to affirm that we've hardly even begun to deal with this harmful imbalance. It's at the root of what makes or breaks our future.

To further recognize the needs that revolutionary women of our family want addressed an annual conference was organized. It's called "Against Patriarchy." Last year the conference had less then a hundred attendees. This year 500 people from all over the country showed up. When I first came to Eugene the big annual conference of the year was the Environmental Law Conference (ELAW), founded by David Brower. In the mid-nineties these conferences felt like my childhood landscape of the seed waiting to sprout in Silicon Valley. But as the desire to be more effective pushed me to look deeper within and be more aware of the core issues, I found the seed sprout of ELAW a much less then the important expansion of the Against Patriarchy conference. The real seed that must sprout is not in saving a single forest or a particular landscape, the true power of seed comes strongest when equality among gender and species allows for a co-creative seedbed. By this, and this alone, all the earth's life forms will flourish or decay.

So I continue to move forward into a new millennium. I now live in Olympia and I finally have my very first computer that's not outdated or half broken. With the comfort of my high-speed internet connection I'm able to digest about four hours of information from my computer each day. I have returned to school to write about the learning gained from my activist adventures. I'm also regrouping and preparing to take what I've learned as an activist to the next level. I'm attending Evergreen to gain the credentials I need to build the support network that will turn the earth back into the paradise it came from. The first step of this process is to write about what I have done, what I have been, and where I see new seeds sprouting.

The transient nature of living in the west amid all the uprootings I've endured has shown me how fast we can all move forward. It also warns me of how easy it is to forget that what we do to the Earth and each other is not transient, it can't simply be moved away from. It sticks with us in our landscape, as well as in our memories. It is in this way that the old trees watch over us and remind us to not be out of balance and to always see our periodic uprootings as opportunities rather then demise. This plight is again best summed up in the words of Wallace Stegner:
"For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous recognizable culture has been growing... It is a product not of the boomers, but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in. There are many of these, too, than there used to be, and they know a great deal more, and are better able to resist and sometimes prevent the extractive frenzy that periodically attacks them."

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