If Gold Has Been Prized Because It

When You Say 'mother' Or 'father' You Describe Three Different Phenomena. There Is The Giant Who Made You And Loomed Over Your Early Years; There Is Whatever More Human-scale Version Might Have Been Possible To Perceive Later And Maybe Even Befriend; And There Is The Internalized Version Of The Parent With Whom You Struggle- To Appease, To Escape, To Be Yourself, To Understand And Be Understood By- And They Make Up A Chaotic And Contradictory Trinity.

Politics Is Pervasive. Everything Is Political And The Choice To Be "apolitical" Is Usually Just An Endorsement Of The Status Quo And The Unexamined Life.

They Are All Beasts Of Burden In A Sense, ' Thoreau Once Remarked Of Animals, 'made To Carry Some Portion Of Our Thoughts.' Animals Are The Old Language Of The Imagination; One Of The Ten Thousand Tragedies Of Their Disappearance Would Be A Silencing Of This Speech.

For Millions Of Years, This World Has Been A Great Gift To Nearly Everything Living On It, A Planet Whose Atmosphere, Temperature, Air, Water, Seasons, And Weather Were Precisely Calibrated To Allow Us - The Big Us, Including Forests And Oceans, Species Large And Small - To Flourish.

If Gold Has Been Prized Because It Is The Most Inert Element, Changeless And Incorruptible, Water Is Prized For The Opposite Reason -- Its Fluidity, Mobility, Changeability That Make It A Necessity And A Metaphor For Life Itself. To Value Gold Over Water Is To Value Economy Over Ecology, That Which Can Be Locked Up Over That Which Connects All Things.