The Beginning of the First Step

Although I am blessed to be a son, husband, father and grandfather, a caregiver, a writer, teacher and singer, I am also one voice of Mother Earth. I am writing this as a way of understanding and communicating what Mother Earth asks me to say. To speak for her is my choice, and my joy, though I do it fully aware that I am flawed, fallible, and not particularly strong or quick. I do not believe that she chooses me alone. She asks me to say the following. Death and Rebirth Most of those who accept today’s dominant global culture consider the Los Angeles megalopolis to be one of the world’s great cities. Yet the present L.A. – indeed its unfolding character since Europeans first began settling here in 1771 - is an offence to Mother Earth, and she has finally decided that it is unacceptable, whatever we humans may think of it. Her choice about L.A. is also part of a much larger decision she has made to see the speedy end of similar communities elsewhere on her surface, accomplished by means of thousands of regional transformations at more or less the same time. But those are other stories. Her reasons are both beyond our present understanding and also quite simple. Put simply, in this culture human beings have power but lack humility, self-understanding, and a practiced respect for the importance of her other creatures and herself. In this we have been long determined and are still growing. We have therefore become and are becoming even more harmful then we know. We are failing as a species, and we have become too dangerous to ourselves and the rest of her creation. The death of the current Los Angeles will not take long. Either we as communities will accomplish it, with her guidance, in less than a generation, or she will do it without us, by a swift, breathtaking deliverance of earthquake, fire and Pacific storm. If the latter occurs, many humans living here will die, and most of the rest will flee, perhaps to more sensible communities outside this region. If we choose to seek our place in her, there will be a rebirth and maturation of Mother Earth’s Los Angeles - defined roughly as the watersheds of the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, and Santa Ana Rivers - which embraces us, and stretches far ahead of those adults now living here. It will be walked largely by the ones ahead of us: our children, their children, and the generations ahead of them. Our Nonviolence I want to be quite clear about this. Los Angeles as we know it now will soon pass away, but if we humans cause it to happen, then Mother Earth would have us do it together, without violence against each other. One of the reasons that we have become so dangerous is our habitual willingness to fashion tools as instruments of slaughter, and with them to maim and kill not only ourselves, but members of other species as well. Mother Earth sees this pattern as part of our madness, and she will not accept any change that we might initiate if it entails more violence against her creatures, including humans. Only she, because we are part of her body and creation, may reasonably transform Los Angeles, without our collective consent, by means of destructive force. And she will, if we, as communities, do not act first. Mother Earth and Me You might like to know something of my connection to Mother Earth as one of her voices, and what I understand in general about her. You may need to reckon what forms and nurtures my perspective, and whether or not it may be legitimate. You might also want to know at least some of the pertinent parts of my personal history. Mother Earth is to me real and tangible. She is the presence that is most often called simply Earth, or Planet Earth, and sometimes more revealingly, Gaia. She is of course known by many other names as well, in other languages and in English. She is not strictly speaking immortal, nor does she have the omniscient powers associated with Yahweh, God, Allah or other infinite persons described by organized religions. We are certainly not made in her image, she is not like us, and she is not feminine in the human sense, although I believe that we see her more clearly if we think of her as Mother. At the same time, all of us, both female and male, are a part of her, and she is in us and we in her. She is aware and self-aware, sensitive, willful, reproductive, regenerative, creative, communicative, animate. She was born a very long time ago: perhaps, as geologists would have us believe, billions of years ago. Her life expectancy is so great that she is still young, if youth and old age have any meaning to her. However, she could be killed, by accident or maybe even design, though not by our weapons, at least not yet. What we understand as life on this planet is a part of her, her creation, but literally only a superficial part. Life was part of what she was born to do, but she can if necessary start over, as she seems to have done before. In any case, she cares about life within her, wants it to be well and prosper. That includes but is certainly not exclusive to humans. The communicative part of Mother Earth can and does speak to, and hear from, every part of her. She is, in other words, in touch, intimately, with her body. She is talkative, interested, and loving by nature to all of life here, and to her mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, oceans, continents, air, and her even more mysterious interior as well. She seeks an ever-changing harmony and full flower among her parts. She is also quite able and willing to remove parts that prove incompatible with that harmony. Like a gardener, she can be ruthless. She also has a strong sense of self-preservation and protects herself if required. Hearing Her Although it may seem bizarre to many of my readers, I hear her. I believe that she speaks to all of us, but that most of us don’t or can’t hear her voice. Those who are deaf are so by training and inclination. Our oppressive, technically flooded culture in L. A., as in other cities and towns across her skin, is what they are tuned to, not her voice. Most Angelinos suffer this deafness. Unlike the physical impairment, it need not be permanent. One can learn to hear her. As with most others who know her voice, she reaches me with greatest ease when I am in or close to wildness, whether a mountain, ocean wave, or single small plant, growing through a crack in the concrete. This should not be surprising, since she herself is wild. I hear her, not, as far as I can tell, acoustically, but with my whole body, in much the same way as a glass is filled with water, or a sail with wind. It may happen slowly, or it may come quickly, in a rush. Often, her voice seems to be already there, for everyone and all the time, but it also seems to be for me, personally. Surprisingly, what I hear tends to stay with me, and soak into me, leaving plenty of room for more. It may be different for others who hear her. You’ll have to ask them, or yourself. I first became aware of Mother Earth, as a conscious presence, in the woods beyond the farm fields, at the back of the northwestern Louisiana home where I grew up in the 1940’s and 1950’s. I didn’t have a name for her in those days. I simply knew that beyond the wonderful grass, trees, bayous, streams, birds, snakes and other creatures of that wood, there was an encompassing something, aware of me and both sympathetic and testing. I was attracted and frightened together, and usually went no further than the wood’s edges, partly to avoid becoming lost, partly because I couldn’t understand what I was meeting there. Later, as an adult in East Africa, Mother Earth struck me like a bright, porous hammer, full of power and magic, incredibly rich in stunning detail, and yet still warm and welcoming. Over the eight years I lived there, mainly in the very African city of Dar es Salaam, but with safaris to mountainous rain forests, rolling woodlands, upland grasslands spotted with active volcanoes, and the beaches and coastal islands of the Indian Ocean, she taught me much. I am still learning from that experience. My beloved Tanzanian wife of 36 years and her people, who have embraced me, are deeply connected with Mother Earth in their places and have also taught me much about life, love, and our planetary Mother. So have our four children, three born in Tanzania and one in Canada, and our two grandchildren. It was not until Canada, where I lived for 22 years, that I learned her name, from enlightened mothers and native people there, who were sometimes, but not always, one and the same. It was also in Canada that I learned a little of the meaning of her snows, and her great northern forests, fresh waters, granite mountains and vast prairies. Native people in Canada also reinforced for me what I have learned from my Tanzanian family, which is the central importance of our children, to our future and to Mother Earth. In Los Angeles, where I now live with most of my immediate family (including a wonderful dog), I am learning of arid and semi-arid regions, young quaking mountains, her greatest ocean, and how varied she can be from mile to mile in some places. I am also learning what water means when there seems to be so little of it. In all these parts of my life, my home has been in or near cities. I have never been, for more than a month or two at a time, away from cities – Shreveport, London, Dar es Salaam, Toronto, – from which, until now, I learned the most - and Los Angeles. Although Dar es Salaam is closest to Mother Earth, while increasingly unwell and growing like a cancer, it is the megalopolis of Los Angeles upon which, for me, Mother Earth's messages focus. I hope to tell what the first steps are here, as Mother Earth has told me, and some of the reasons they are necessary. Wildness As Mother Earth is wild, so too, created by her, are we humans, even though this is willfully masked by the tools with which we surround ourselves. It may be that she is acting decisively now because we are about to use the tools of genetic engineering to refashion our bodies into tools, becoming for the first time the antithesis of wild. While it seems clear that human beings, as wild creatures, have an ability to create and use tools as a survival characteristic which is unequaled in Mother Earth, we also cannot survive if the barriers which our chosen tools have raised against the wild, and Mother Earth, become too potent. In L.A. and in many other places this is now accomplished, and our culture revels in it. Ending this intolerable L.A., and creating livable communities here, involves removing those barriers which are most destructive of the wild and which bar us from the wild’s essence. Water is the first key; part of this is L.A.’s rivers and streams, and the mountains which gather the rain that feeds them. Mother Earth has made them, they are wild, and, unlike the native people of this region, those with European ancestors who have settled here have tried to wall them in, control them, or bury them. Mother Earth tells me that this is where we must start our new beginning. Dams The dams erected in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains, and their foothill and lowland counterparts including those west of the San Jacintos, need to be decommissioned and removed, starting now. These are the most blatant, abhorrent, regional expressions of our oppression and fear of the wild; unless we reject them, she will not recognize any pretension on our part to a meaningful rebirth. Let me name them: Pacoima Dam, Big Tujunga Dam, Devil’s Gate Dam, Eaton Wash Dam, Santa Anita Dam, Sawpit Dam, Cogswell Dam, San Gabriel Dam, Morris Dam, Big Dalton Dam, San Dimas Dam, Puddingstone Diversion, Puddingstone Dam, Live Oak Dam, Thompson Creek Dam, Lopez Dam, Hansen Dam, Sepulveda Dam, Santa Fe Dam, Whittier Narrows Dam, Brea Dam, Fullerton Dam, San Antonio Dam, Big Bear Dam, Seven Oaks Dam, Prado Dam, Carbon Canyon Dam, Railroad Canyon Dam, and Hemet Dam. The hydroelectric dams on the Santa Ana and its tributaries will also be removed, including those on Lytle Creek, Mill Creek, and the upper Santa Ana itself. In addition, there are numerous smaller weirs, channels and other artificial obstructions along L.A.’s rivers and streams; these, too, over time, will be removed. Even Angelinos may not know where these dams lie; to place them, you will need maps. I suggest the Thomas Guides for Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties, or DeLorme’s Southern & Central California Atlas & Gazetteer. All these imprisoning barriers exist; their history is brutal to Mother Earth and her creation. If we do not remove them, with some consensual control over the consequences for our communities, both difficult and splendid, Mother Earth soon will. This is part of what I hear. Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth