All this rage and bitterness… useless, really; just preaching to the choir. We all owe our current plight to three things: (1) we are animals, and like all other animals, we follow the path of least resistance to the immediate gratification of our needs, desires, and curiosity; (2) we have learned to exploit what seemed an endless supply of net energy—fossil fuels— to gratify our needs, desires, and curiosity. And advertisers have simply taken advantage of this to manufacture and sell us more and better toys. Global environmental awareness is bad for business, so they suppress it to keep profits flowing; (3) the money system is and always has been a zero- sum game: more is always better, and what’s mine is not yours. Those are the rules, without which the game cannot be played. And on a finite (and rapidly deteriorating) playing board, these rules inevitably concentrate money into fewer and fewer hands, until the “winners” (the super-rich and their banks and corporations) own everything and the losers (the remaining 99.9 per cent of us) own nothing at all, and are in permanent debt to them. So what CAN we do? Globally, nothing; locally, we still have the option of growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. But make it invitational; railing against the machine only alienated people, whereas if you pursue an initiative that makes people feel more empowered, you’ll make new friends, learning, teaching, healing, and creating together…