Tools

Loss Think of yourself and your world, for a moment, without tools. The first thing you would notice is your nakedness. You would have no clothes, including no shoes or hat; you would be completely naked. Not only would you have no clothes on your body, you would have none in a closet. You would have no clothes, anywhere, and no expectation of getting them. You would also be without any human-made structure to provide a roof over your head or a wall to shelter you from the wind. No furniture would exist, to sit or lie in or eat upon. No water would be delivered to you, since this requires tools. You would not need water for cooking, since you would have no control over fire, and you would drink water from streams, rivers, ponds and lakes by mouth or with your hands. You would be without money, unable to buy food, anywhere. Indeed, there would be no buildings in which food would be kept. Food itself would have changed, since most foods you may now eat, such as rice, potatoes, corn, beans, onions, garlic, tomatoes, spinach, kale, collards, turnips, peppers, broccoli, peas, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, lamb, apples, pears, peaches, oranges, lemons, and many nuts are all tools, bred by us and sustained by our tool-dependent agriculture. In Los Angeles, you might catch trout or salmon from streams and rivers, but deep sea fish would be out of reach. You would be able to move from place to place only by walking, jogging, or running, or persuading someone else to carry you. There would be no vehicles, and no horses, donkeys, or other domestic species to carry you, since these are also tools. Railroads, roads, and even graded trails would be gone. The only paths would be those worn by feet, human or otherwise. Guns, knives, spears, bows and arrows, even sticks and rocks would also be unavailable, for aggression, defense, or hunting. You would communicate directly, by spoken voice or body language, or odor; the internet, telephones, printers, typewriters, pens and pencils, printing devices and therefore books and other written tools, would have vanished. The only way to store and access information would be through your memory and the memory of others in your company. There are many other tools which you now use, or from which you at least seem to benefit, whose absence you would notice. These include all of the machinery and equipment which is used in manufacturing, or in producing and delivering to you electricity, natural gas, gasoline, and the multitudinous civilized services such as sewage disposal, storm drains, fire fighting, and the reservoirs and aqueducts which capture, transport and store water for the humans of Los Angeles from distant regions of Mother Earth. The tools of film and television would, of course, be gone as well. You and I have, in short, a truly enormous array of tools which we favor, and by which we trust we are favored. Our dominant culture teaches us that we need them, and would do badly without them. Gain Mother Earth asks that we consider not only a world, herself, without tools, - which largely exist because of us - but also her whole creation in which we, toolless, would find ourselves, and what her creation would bring us, in addition to our naked selves. Being social creatures, we would not usually or by choice live alone. We would form communities, and we would live and act together. Tools do not give this to us. Our human communities would also not be isolated from the rest of her local creation, as they seem to be now. We would know and enjoy the cooperation of the trees and many other plants among which we would locate our communities, and the plants would, after their own fashion, know us. This would also be true of the animals in our immediate vicinity, and in our region. While some of the plants, and some of the animals, would be capable of harming us, they would not unless we threatened them, or became one of their foods. Our size, and our collective strength, would prevent all but a few animals from preying upon us, although the weakest among us might be killed and eaten by wolves, or mountain lions, or bears. We would also enjoy the intimacy of those creatures which we now do not consider alive, or capable of sensing themselves or their environment. These include the rivers, streams, and wetlands which would not only nurture us but also other species with which we shared the water. Mountains, hills, rocks, even soil and sand and the other natural surfaces we would walk upon would know us and we them. So too would the air, rain, snow and wind, and the fire which might come to us from lightning strikes or upheavals in the earth.

All of these creations of our Mother we would know and be known by not only as sources of nurture, or challenges, or even threats to our survival, but also as beautiful, exciting, rhythmic, musical, and sometimes ecstatic and overwhelming parts of our local and more distant universe. More than all of this, we would know our place as part of the great and for us transcending Mother Earth. We could and would hear her and speak to her and realize her constant and yet changing presence, connecting us to ourselves and our neighbors of every specie and even to distant realities in her other regions and to the Moon, Sun, planets, stars and galaxies around us. This joining with the rest of creation, through our creator Mother Earth, which we now struggle against, would also allow us to understand birth and death as intimately bonded to one another, part of the continuing creation and recreation by which Mother Earth renews our substance and herself, and alters both. We would know that we are all immortal, but not in a single form, and that taking a particular form for a time, and rejoicing in it, is more important than our immortality. Tools Returned However, Mother Earth did not intend for this natural, potent, wondrous world - in which, but for us, all the creatures of Mother Earth would live, die and be reborn - to be available to us without tools. She made us to stand upright, comfortably, and gave us hands with opposing thumbs, not needed for moving about, so that picking up and using a rock or a stick and fashioning other tools would be irresistible. She also made us with too few natural defenses against potential predators or natural abilities to acquire food, so that survival without tools would be very difficult or impossible. She made us to survive as tool makers and tool users. Yet most tools as we now know them alienate us from Mother Earth. They numb our senses to her and stand between us and the rest of her creation. They also assault her and her wonders, bringing outrageous death and destruction. This they have done and are doing now with the ready support of our remarkable hands and tool-wed intellect. Since she made us vitally dependent upon tools, does she welcome the outrage? Is she ready to yield to a synthetic and disempowering transformation, separating her from the natural universe? Has she given us and our tools dominion, at least over her? She tells me that she has not, and that she has hoped from us something quite different. While she intended us to be her first creatures for whom tools would become an intimate, pervasive part of their communal and personal existence, she desired at our beginning and even now that we would understand, fashion and use our tools as gifts from her, remembering that their substance, like ours, comes from her and that they are charged, and limited, by the character of the materials from which they are made. We would recognize as well, she has hoped, that our tools are forms of her, though new and strange. They would after a term be reshaped by her, just as we are. Knowing this, they would not then be designed by us to be used against her or her thoroughly wild creatures, or to assume superiority or power over them, but would instead become new creatures folded into the dynamic of her passage through time; and we would be honored to be bonded with our tools, not because of their power over wildness but because of their addition to it. More specifically, she tells me that there are four guides which she intended for us to follow, and to which the native people of Los Angeles, such as the Gabrielino/Tongva, Cahuilla, and Serrano, intuitively held. The first is that tools are for our survival within the wild, not victory over it. The power they bring us is to balance that which other creatures possess inherently, not to overwhelm and annihilate the others. The second is that our tools are not meant to prevent our timely deaths and reshaping, nor the disintegration and reshaping of the tools themselves. To use our tools for a pursuit of immortality, or even longevity much beyond that necessary for the reproduction and the nurture of our young, is foolish and destructive of wildness and renewal. Those whose tools are appropriate to Mother Earth know this. The third guide, derived in part from the first, is that appropriate tools are not designed to destroy wildness in order to improve the security and comfort of human beings. Neither do appropriate tools destroy wildness as the result of their use, even if they are intended for other purposes. The fourth guide, the most subtle and important, is that the gift of tools is not meant to distance us from Mother Earth and the preeminence of her presence as a knowing and benevolent creator of which we are as a species but one expression. Tools which seem to offer lives apart from wildness and Mother Earth, even independent of her, are not her gifts and are not acceptable to her. Humans, Tools and Mother Earth This message from Mother Earth is for me a revelation, as it may be for others who have not yet heard her. She seeks to lead us to the inescapable conclusion that today’s dominant human cultures and their precursors have been on a journey, of some 10,000 years as measured by archaeologists, to escape both her and ourselves. The wisest, most nearly perfect, most joyful, and most enlightening paths for humans are those which are narrow and winding and embedded within her. In Los Angeles, at least, they are the paths of those whom we have come to call hunters and gatherers. All of the native people in the Los Angeles region, who lived and prospered here for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans and their descendants, provided for their needs by hunting, fishing and gathering, and making and using tools necessary to these ends and in the support of their cultures, grounded in wildness. The same is true of all those who lived west of California’s high mountains and down to the Pacific coast. They thrived as part of Mother Earth, with their tools, and did not destroy the places or patterns of their fellow creatures who made up the wildness. Our most basic challenge in the 21st Century is not to participate, with ever more sophisticated tools, in genetically engineered improvements of ourselves or our foods, or the establishment of alien settlements on the Moon, Mars, or other planets, or even the development and adoption of complex sustainable economies using renewable energy sources, prohibiting poisonous chemicals and the weapons of nuclear war, and creating enduring peace and justice. It is quite different. Though we still as yet, in the year 2007, hardly know it, what we face instead is the irresistible need to move from where we have now come, to a complete turning over of our communities. We need to become a people of hunters, fishers and gatherers, in a wild, stunningly beautiful, land which will exceed the original paradise described in Judeo-Christian tradition - a new, wonderfully imperfect, but very real Garden of Eden. Mother Earth offers us this; or we will be given the alternative of extinction, in which we Angelinos and our tools are simply folded whole back into her constant renewing. Then, in Los Angeles, humans will dwell no more. Few now here can imagine that either alternative is possible, much less desirable; but Mother Earth is calling for us to begin this journey, if we will, without delay and to complete our bonding with this new world before the longest-lived of today’s young grandchildren are dead. To accomplish this, and not only to survive but to rejoice in it, we need the common will, and also much knowledge, which we now lack. The task is enormous, but Mother Earth believes that it can be done – and she knows us better than we do. I, for one, love my children and grandchildren too much not to seek passionately a human place, for them, in her. The next message from Mother Earth on this website tells more about where she asks us to start – with water, and in particular, the dams. Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth