For miles and miles and miles the southbound highway: stalled. A fog of idling cars’ combustion flogs the air: no progress. Stagnation is repeated in a wide arc to the city’s west and south. Every major and minor artery clogged.

To the east there are no cars: maybe a ferry or two: or a fishing vessel: Here Lies the Atlantic.

Glut is stamped into the morning of a major American city. Stamped on every other, major and minor, from sea to shining sea. “Glut” is the root of “gluttony”, one of seven cardinal sins. Wisdom traditions wisely name destructive behavior “Sin”.

A couple of years back, Amherst architect Tullio Inglese spoke to our ecovillage group about ways to build greenly: these materials, that insulation, this heating source, those solar panels.“But,” he said, “pouring money into a system that gobbles energy doesn’t solve a thing. You have to begin by USING LESS.”

Not a new idea, and wonderful to hear it again and again. One reason we are protagonists in war is our hyper dependence on oil. One reason we are leaning over an economic precipice, and our poor human non-heroic legislators are hog-tied and unable to affect change, is because We the People are arguably (and measurably) the most materialistic and consumptive culture the world has yet produced.

The following re-post is a piece I wrote for our intentional community’s web journal. With a few years of painstaking research and trial-and-error, we assembled egalitarian tools for decision-making, legal forms for sharing land as partners instead of landlords, and some open-hearted yet strong ways of maintaining harmony within our Circle – even with a variety of personalities bumping into one another as we worked to sort this all out.

As I stood under the shower’s spray this evening, allowing the warm water to wash away the day’s dust and travel, I found that as the dirt left me, so did peace and security.

I looked at my hands, and as I passed them along my arms, I suddenly felt an urgency, emergency, imagined I was rushing to remove an invisible poison – radioactive decay – that had collected on my skin and sifted through my clothing, as I sat cowering inside my home, whose chinks and gaps would never be airtight, whose doors and windows were designed to breathe as a human breathes, to move air in and around me so that I might have fresh oxygen to light my blood and to quicken my pulse.

Lessons can be learned by watching.

A system is only as strong as its weakest link; make a nuclear containment structure (theoretically?) plane-proof and bomb-proof, still the generator sits outside, its water source exposed, and a shut-down reactor cannot power itself; powered by fission, not fusion, its “steady state” is detonation, not stasis.

A viable solution to the nation’s energy crisis (finite fossil fuels, unsustainable sources of electricity) and a response to a near-universal consensus that global warming is a dire reality (universal to everyone without vested financial interests) must not rely on building more, but on learning to live with and use less.

I was thinking this weekend of the metaphor of the trees: those that cover the lower peaks of the White Mountains, their roots knitted together like fingers knotted in prayer, interwoven with matted grasses and weeds, and held in place by the understory of bushes and brambles. All of that green life exposed to the winds of winter and summer’s storms, in little more than a foot of soil: beneath that veneer, granite ledge.

Why did you reflexively contract when you read that title? Does it go back to the conservative’s 70s sound-bite, “tree huggers”, a term used (as usual) not to increase knowledge and understanding, but to ridicule and demean, the fear-response of a bullying child? Were you tainted by the bully’s threat?

Or does it touch on a sense of propriety which tragically - I have to use the word tragically here, because I imagine you as a child, reaching as a child does into a world of wonder and delight, opening all of the flavors and colors and textures and sounds and smells it offers - tragically, was some bleak “sense” of propriety laid over your heart, like a “black curtain over the windows of your soul”, that the brief and agreeable experiment in hugging a tree causes the heart to contract, and inhibition and embarrassment to crowd your mind?

– What if…

She opened a drawer in the kitchen, the one beneath the silver that held everything and nothing, like a purse, and dug about for a moment. She was sure it was there, just the sort of thing she would never throw out, and would never use. Half-empty blocks of twist-ties, a few clothes pins, the dull pair of scissors whose blades were loose, two corks, cheesecloth, three batteries as many years old (she took these in her hand). Her fingers reached deeper than the drawer would open, and aha! found the sticky-soft edge of a candle-stub lined up against the back wall, where the tide of shifting objects had rolled it and left it. She lifted it out, and closed the drawer.

Like a curtain being pulled back, revealing landscape which has not been previously witnessed, stepping from a boat into the waters above a reef and turning your eyes toward the ocean’s bottom opens a window on a world which could not have been imagined had it not been seen.

Had it not been seen, the language of the sea would continue to be the language of wind and waves, and weather that sweeps in on predictable currents, and the traffic of human hulls from one dry landing to another. Here, however, the life which moved undetected beneath our domain… one glimpse adds new words and new harmonies to the music of the planet, making one both smaller and larger at the same time.

Evolution is a process that most of us associate with a geological time scale — the slow elucidation of life over the last 3.5 billion years. We also tend to assume that the most recent signs of continuing evolution must be happening in species with short life spans and rapid reproductive rates.

A team of scientists has now discovered that an important human genetic trait — a tolerance in adults for the milk sugar called lactose — might have developed in several East African ethnic groups 2,700 to 6,800 years ago. That is astonishingly recent.