Category Archives: Art and Ideas

Ron Paul and the Empire of Experts

Posted on by

Lila Rajiva (co-author with Bill Bonner of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,” on being Married to the Mob on The Michael Dresser Show tonight, September 5 at 6:00 p.m. EST)

What is it about Ron Paul that attracts as many and as diverse a group of people as are repelled by him?

For a number of people, right and left, it is his consistent opposition
to the Iraq war.

It is a good reason. Moral courage allied with wisdom is as much in short supply these days as chastity at a political convention.

For others, it is Paul’s fiscal responsibility.

Dr. No has been pursing his lips at every form of political candy offered by the junk food vendors at the Capital. While many of his colleagues are letting out their belts, the wiry obstetrician is running marathons at 71.

While they keep getting caught in what used to be called “indiscretions,” he has been married for fifty years. We would be foolish to judge people by the externals of their lives, for saints and sinners, puritans and bohemians not only cohabit, they frequently snuggle under the same skin. Nonetheless, it’s a relief to have a few people around in politics to remind us that it’s also perfectly all right to live uneventfully, even stodgily.

I say this as someone who has spent a large part of her life among musicians, writers, and now, financial newsletter writers – whose professional lives depend on their eccentricity and even contrariness.

There is however one critical difference between selling financial advice and intellectual nostrums on the one hand and delivering babies on the other – which is what Dr. Paul has done for most of his professional life. The success of obstetrics is pretty easy to verify. Either the child breathes and lives – or it doesn’t.

One can’t be a good obstetrician on theory alone. The practice is all.
Check the track record of the average stock tout and you might find nothing but bankruptcy filings and credit card debt. That, of course, will count for little with the tout’s avid customers who would mortgage their four walls and roof for his advice. And toss in their wives as a bonus.

As for the pedant, you wish he’d trip over one of his obtuse, meandering sentences and break his scrawny neck before he stuck it into the real world. But does anyone care? No. His pet theories may have driven the nation into premature recession if not down-right impotence, but the expert will be given not only an institute of his very own at some Ivy League, but the whole Earth along with it……. to run as he wishes.

There, winsome coeds will no doubt ornament every step of his way to a Nobel Prize.

Theory is easy. Any biped with a larynx and functioning synapses can come up with one.
It is practice that separates the goats from the sheep.

And that is the principal reason that the pundits are afraid of that revolution of the people that is the rise of Ron Paul.

Ron Paul wants to put the practice of citizenry back in the hands of citizens and take it away from the theorists.

Oh, the critics will tell you differently. They will tell you that Ron Paul is a theorist himself – and a crack-pot theorist as well. A patron of fringe economics. A gentlemanly loon. Or at least, dangerously far out on the right bank of the mainstream.

Since the mainstream has just finished wrecking a whole country abroad in a manner that Genghis Khan would have been proud of and is busy adding yet another to its sights; and since, in the meantime it’s also managed to find the time to dismantle several centuries worth of legal structure at home, you wonder why anyone would worry about that, anyway.

But there you have the sad truth about man. He isn’t much concerned about anything besides how other people think of him. That’s all he thinks about all day long. For that he sweats and schleps, roils and toils.

Status. Image. In groups. Out groups. Pariahs. Brahmins. The sum total of it all is — what does the other fellow think of me?

Right or wrong counts for far less. His conscience or soul — for nothing at all. If he feels a pang, he swigs gelusil and turns on the hypnotic lights of his TV set.

And why? Because with no real, concrete practical knowledge anywhere between his ears, his skull rings with the lethal chatter of newspaper headlines and talk shows.

The patter of Those Who Know Better.

Hedge-fund managers who promise that all risk can be ironed out of your portfolio and make you pay for the wrinkles that aren’t.

Political scientists who invade a country from their desktops, but don’t know how to boot it up again when it crashes.

Hucksters who dream up great stories for their products — and make a punch-line out of the patsies who buy them.

We live in an empire run by experts.
But in the empire of experts, the man with horse sense is king.

And Ron Paul has horse sense.

The horse sense of mustangs, not geldings.

The kind of horse sense that bucks and sends you for a toss just when you thought you had everything under control. The horse sense that stops you from thinking about things so far off you couldn’t possibly have spotted them — while tripping over things so close by you shouldn’t ever have missed them.

The experts would have you believe that they can control your life and the life of entire nations by thinking long enough and hard enough about it. This is a theory so full of holes it puts Swiss cheese to shame.

Studies have even shown (Philip Tetlock, “Expert Political Judgment – How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”) that canny laymen do as well as experts when it come to predicting the future. In fact, many do even better.

But it’s the experts who have broken us in.
The reason is simple. Experts promise us a simple, sharp tool to dissect the complexity of the real world.

But a dissection that thorough can only be a post-mortem. Cut through the warm body of society that fiercely and you turn it into a cadaver.

Gray is all theory, says Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust. The golden tree of life is green.

Here, we will improve on the devil. Between book covers, theory may be gray – but it is an intricate gossamer of gray – like the tracery in a Gothic cathedral or the mysterious depths of an engraving by Gustave Dore


I have no quarrel with theory. In fact, I have a weakness for it, as I have for all rich, superfluous things.

But a map is not a road, and a silhouette is not a human being. The trouble begins when experts begin to take their expertise so seriously that they forfeit their own road sense and their readers’. When they are so neutered by their reasoning that they cannot act – or worse yet, cannot stop acting. And the trouble grows into disaster when their credulous followers, junkies of every news and TV show, rush behind them like rats behind the Hamelin piper — into every frippery and fad, every financial folly and military madness.

And that is what we have today in our empire of experts. Worse than any war – which must at some point end — is the ideology that makes for war.

That tells us that “what is” is also “what must be.” You see, empires are made for experts as experts are made for empires. Without their theories to hold it up, the flimsy scaffold of government would fall of its own feebleness. And without that scaffold, the little men on top would be cut down to the same size as the rest of us.
And that, my friends, is the real reason why the experts fear Dr. Paul and the people love him.

Update:

This article was one of the top 10 articles on LRC. First time I made it. They all look like good pieces too.

  1. The Government-Created Subprime Mortgage Meltdown by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
  2. The Ultimate ‘Success Through Failure’ Manual by Gary North
  3. Phase III of Bush’s War by Patrick J. Buchanan
  4. Ron Paul and the Four Horsemen by James Ostrowski
  5. ‘They’ Hate Our Freedoms by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
  6. What Is Wikipedia, and What Is It Good For? by Dick Clark
  7. A Busy Week for the Front-Runner, Ron Paul by Rick Fisk
  8. The George W. Bush Freedom Institute by Karen Kwiatkowski
  9. Ron Paul and the Empire of Experts by Lila Rajiva
  10. Ron Paul’s Inaugural Address by Johnny Kramer

The Making of MOBS

Posted on by

“Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets” is coming out next week in the book stores.

Pretty exciting.

And the end of a year-long saga.

Bill and I began work on the book in July, 2006.

Well, sort of.

In fits and starts.

We couldn’t fit in what both of us wanted to say and we got a late start… September 2006, to be exact.

The late start came about because Bill convinced me (he is a powerful persuader) that I ought to transport myself to South America to help write the manuscript somewhere on his 250,000 acre ranch in the terrain beyond the colonial university town of Salta (it might have been twice that much — I’ve lost count of the zeroes), lost in the north-western mists of Argentina, near the border of Peru.

It says something, I suppose, that I seriously planned on doing it.

Although I don’t speak Spanish and had never set foot in South America before.

But I ended up hanging out in Buenos Ayres.

Not a bad place to hang out, by the way.

And no, I did not live in one of Agora’s magnificent French apartments on Nuevo de Julio, but that’s another story.
Getting back to the book. Bill is a prolific author, as anyone who knows him would say. Churning out words is not a problem for him. And I believe I am not lacking in loquacity either. Of course, we could cull material from his financial columns. But this book was not really only – or even mostly – about finance. It’ s on something very central to Bill’s thinking —  “public thinking” — the kind of pseudo-thinking about big issues that dominates the newspapers.

We ended up working in a bit of a frenzy.

The result was that between late September and the end of December ‘06, while we thought we’d put together a manuscript of about 500 pages, we turned out to have been counting in single- spaced pages — which meant we actually had on our hands some 1000 pages, almost three times the length of the usual financial book.

It was, needless to say, a singularly tedious January for me…..

But, finally, we did manage to turn in the finished product right on deadline in the first week of February.

It was by then a slimmer and a more toned opus, but even then, as Bill’s good friend, contrarian guru Marc Faber asked — who would want to read a 400- page book, when most people these days think they can become informed about everything everywhere in the world from 30-second TV spots?

Good question.

But, apparently, a lot of people do. A week before hitting the stores and with the marketing just gearing up, MOBS is already #4 on Amazon (it was briefly #3) and #1 in the business/finance section. (It’s actually backed off to #5 this evening).
That means it’s up there behind Harry Potter, a story by Khaled Hosseini set in Afghanistan, a memoir of a famous rock-and-roll trifecta (George Harrison-Patty Boyd-Eric Clapton), and a book about Mother Theresa.

Saints, Sinners, War — and Magic.

We, I suppose, must classify ourselves under Money.

But I rather think there’s really a bit of everything in the book. In a skewed helter-skelter fashion.

Money, of course. The genuine kind and the dubious stuff mounting up in gigantic heaps all over the planet like industrial waste.

War, course. That’s what empires do best. And we included a full complement of would-be saints and the herd of sinners who stumble after them.

The only thing we missed was magic. Although, come to think of it, we have a dollop of that too — in the chapters about central banks and paper money.

Talk about conjuring from thin air.

Hogwarts has nothing on the Bank of Bernanke.

Michelle Pfeiffer says the”m” word..

Posted on by

I’ve always liked Michelle Pfeiffer since I saw her in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989).

Now I like her even better.

From NewsMax:

 

” Speaking of eternal youth, Michelle seems to have found it in real life.

She’s also hung onto something else that in Tinseltown is quite rare — her modesty.

It turns out that Pfeiffer passed on the starring role of the film “Basic Instinct.”

Why? Because she didn’t want to bare it all for the camera.

Had she taken the movie part, Pfeiffer would have played scheming seductress Catherine Tramell. Instead Sharon Stone took the risqué role and the rest is sordid cinematic history.

“I just couldn’t do that one, because of the sexual parts, the nudity. My father was still alive. I’m kind of prudish,” Pfeiffer is quoted as saying by Contactmusic.

The star adds, “I am not that uninhibited about my body. I’m modest.”

Comment:

Modest? Modest? Prudish….and proud of it??

If we can’t rely any more on Hollywood stars to mouth meaningless drivel – whom are we going to turn to?

(Rhetorical question, of course, from anyone living within a 100 miles of the Beltway…)

 

The Free Online Dictionary says:

 

1. Having or showing a moderate estimation of one’s own talents, abilities, and value.

2. Having or proceeding from a disinclination to call attention to oneself; retiring or diffident. See Synonyms at shy1.

3. Observing conventional proprieties in speech, behavior, or dress.

4. Free from showiness or ostentation; unpretentious. See Synonyms at plain.

5. Moderate or limited in size, quantity, or range; not extreme.

Hmm. That’s a bit, well, modest. Let’s add a bit more:

Modest – as in, not letting every inch of your body parts hang out in public, no matter how pretty, no matter what someone’s paying you, and no matter how momentarily empowered you feel.

Modest — as in, not hogging all the limelight you can, bragging on yourself and taking away other people’s credit – especially other people, who haven’t the inclination or wherewithal to hound you in court about it….

Modest — as in, modest townhouse. That would be the opposite of, say, extravagant mansion in Greeenwich, Conn. bought with proceeds made from precarious leveraged bets on collateralized debt obligations with unsuspecting rich-but-dumb clients’ money…

At the end of a debt bubble extravaganza of Cecil B. De Mille proportions, modest would be a good word to make a come back…..on every front.

Martin Marty on the soul and tradition…

Posted on by

Also heard on Bill Moyer, Martin Marty, the influential Protestant thinker and writer:

The soul is not a pilot on a ship

The soul is not a ghost in a machine.

The soul is the integrated vitality of an organism that is open to the future..

Thanks, Bill. You’re forgiven.

Update:

And I had to add this from an interview with Marty:

“I think my own development through the years, both spiritually and intellectually, is to keep one part of the soul or foot on the ground of a tradition and on the other you feel free to roam and find ways to integrate other experiences and deal with the other. And, in a sense, I try to propagate that notion. I mean, Gandhi was really steeped in his tradition, and he could take Jesus with him. And Martin Luther King was a black Baptist pastor, and he could take Gandhi’s non-violence into it. The Pope, John XXIII, you can’t get more Catholic, and he could take it right into the community of the Jews. Thomas Merton, the Catholic mystic, is talking to Buddhist and Hindu monks the day he dies; he doesn’t stop being Catholic, but he enriches there…..”

Libertarian Revolution: Seceding from the American Empire….

Posted on by

From “Bye, Bye Miss American Empire,” by Bill Kauffman at Orion Magazine

“THE CRIMES AND FOLLIES OF THE Bush-Cheney administration have boosted secessionists’ fortunes, but when Bush-Cheney, like all things, passes, the case for radical devolution loses none of its cogency. The problem with the U.S. is one of scale, and it cannot be solved by electing new or different or better people to public offices. As Donald Livingston says, “The public corporation known as the United States has simply grown too large for the purposes of self-government, in the same way that a committee of three hundred people would be too large for the purposes of a committee. There needs to be a public debate on the out-of-scale character of the regime and what can be done about it.”

The average congressional district now contains 647,000 persons. And this is the “people’s house,” thought by the Founders to be the most responsive and grassroots of federal institutions. How is anything like representative government possible on such an enormous and impersonal scale?

Decentralizing power would have the additional virtue of localizing those coalition-splitters known as “social issues.” Case in point: When one of the southern delegates at the Burlington convention calls abortion a heinous crime, I sit back to watch the fireworks. They are doused in the fresh waters of federalism. There is general agreement on a mind-your-own-damn-business principle. If Marin County wants to serve joints with school lunches and Tupelo, Mississippi, wants the Ten Commandments in the classroom, well, that’s up to the people of Marin and Tupelo. Ain’t none of my business. Yours, either.

Let Utah be Utah, and let San Francisco be San Francisco. The policy will drive busybodies mad with frustration, but for the rest of us, it just might be the beginning of tolerance.

There is no reason why this kind of hands-off mutuality requires secession—they didn’t used to call the U.S. system “federalism” for nothing—but the urge to intervene is so irresistible to Dobsonian conservatives and Clintonian liberals that states and cities and towns have been deprived of the right to make their own laws, shaped by local circumstances, on such matters as the legality of marijuana and abortion and the proper way (if any) to define marriage. Does anyone really think that the Christian Right or feminist left will ever agree to denationalize such issues and trust local people to make their own laws?

Trust local people. That, really, is the soul of the case for secession. Bringing it all back home, as a small-town Minnesota boy who took the name Bob Dylan once wrote. For home is where secession must be rooted. Ideology of any sort is not so much a dead end as it is a road without end that carries the enthusiast far from any place resembling home. It unmoors him, it leaves her without anchorage, quick to blame societal ills on outsiders, on dark alien forces. I know: we live in the seventh year of the bloody and imperial Bush Octennium. If Dick Cheney isn’t a dark alien force I don’t know what is. But a healthy secessionist movement must be founded in love: love of a particular place, its people (of all ethnicities and colors), its culture, its language and books and music and baseball teams and, yes, its beer and flowers and punk rock clubs.

Maybe the Burlington conference was a sideshow, an amusing tour of the more outré precincts of American politics. Or maybe it was a harbinger.

Think what you will. This is radicalism deep-dyed in the American grain. “The military-industrial-energy-media complex is running an empire on the ruins of the republic,” says Rob Williams, who does not think that merely putting Democratic hands on the levers of power will solve anything. It’s the levers themselves that have to be removed.

Would the union miss Vermont? Sure. But as a young John Quincy Adams said, “I love the Union as I love my wife. But if my wife should ask for and insist upon a separation, she should have it, though it broke my heart.”

Besides, Vermont’s not going anywhere. Even if she were to secede, the Green Mountains will not be moved, the sap will still flow, the novels of Howard Frank Mosher and Dorothy Canfield Fisher will remain; hell, even Ben & Jerry’s will keep dishing it out. But why shouldn’t Vermonters run Vermont? Why should, say, Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator John McCain or Speaker Nancy Pelosi or President George W. Bush have even a whisper of a say in how Vermont orders her affairs?

“I want to leave my country,” says Kirk Sale, “without leaving my home.” That line packs a jolt, at least for this Little American. My home comes first. Yet I also want my country. I’m not sure what I think about leaving the U.S.A. But isn’t it time that we gave the matter some thought?”

Ron Paul’s American Revolution: land of the free:

Posted on by

Here are the sorts of people who support Ron Paul. Tell me, does she make sense? Isn’t this what this country is supposed to be about and not the well-heeled, smooth operators who clutter up the news and the gullible camp followers who trek behind them like rats behind the piper of Hamelin?

Claire Wolfe at the Backwoods Home Magazine writes:

12 QUALITIES OF A FREE MAN

THE FIVE OUTWARD-LOOKING VIRTUESThe free man within society

A free man:

Keeps his word. A good man’s word was once his bond. Now we expect our credit score to be our bond — but such data measures only one infinitesimal part of us. You cannot build feedom on a base of lies or habitual unreliability. Free men mean what they say and do what they promise.

Does unto others as he would have them do unto him. Helps those who help themselves. Commits random acts of decency. Aids those who are striving to be free. Does not meddle in the non-violent behavior of others, but is a good neighbor and powerful ally when one is needed.

Shuns indebtedness. This means more than shunning debt (though that, too). A free man owns his own life and thinks carefully before giving any part of it away. He rejects false loyalties and guilt trips (unwarranted claims on his life energies). If he accepts a favor he pays it back or pays it forward so others benefit by the aid he received.

Rejects coercive power. He neither seeks power over others nor accepts the right of others to hold such coercive power. You will never hear him say, “There ought to be a law.” He sees humanity not as an ignorant mass to be managed or mothered, but as individuals capable of running their own lives.

Is independent and self-responsible. A free man prefers the risks and rewards of self-reliance to the temptations of “security” provided by others. He takes care of himself and his family. The ultimate corollary to this virtue is self-defense; a free man does not delegate responsibility for his own sustenance, and certainly not for his own survival.

THE FIVE INTERIOR VIRTUES
The free man within

A free man:

Solves problems creatively. Thinks out of the box. Is fascinated by new ideas. Is perpetually self-educating. Anyone who spends a large chunk of his life sitting and whining about all the factors holding him back is by definition neither free nor ready to free himself.

Acts with daily courage and fortitude. While we await the jackboot in the door, tyranny arrives in daily demands for our collaboration. We require courage to say, “No, I won’t give that information”; “I have no interest in working for somebody who forces me to pee in a bottle”; “I won’t pay you to kill people in my name”; “My baby doesn’t need a government inventory number”; “That’s politically correct nonsense”; “Not without a warrant, you won’t”; or “It’s time for you to stand up and take care of yourself.” Free people own that kind of courage. It’s food for their souls. (Which is why I list it as an Interior Virtue rather than an Outward-Looking one.)

Lives by well-considered principles. A free man doesn’t just parrot “thou shalt not kill” or “thou shalt not steal.” He doesn’t behave just because he fears God or government may be watching. He has examined his morality. He knows why he acts or refrains from acting. Sound principles also provide the platform for standing up with courage and saying, “No” to intolerable acts.

Seeks balanced excellence. It may be a fine thing to make a million dollars or build a better mousetrap (or a more efficient solar cell or an innovative computer game). Free people do those things better than serfs. But our life is our #1 creation. Truly free people put as much energy into becoming good, wise human beings as they do into material accomplishments. To do otherwise is to remain off balance — and therefore very easy for “authorities” to push over.

Loves life. No, this does not mean a free man always goes around with a happy-face painted on his mug. It does mean that conscious, human life is the foundation of freedom. Despite its manifold flaws, human life is a miracle to be appreciated and defended against forces that waste or destroy it.

THE TWO FOUNDATION VIRTUES
What all the rest is built on

A free man:

Is self-aware. He knows who he is, what he loves, what he finds intolerable. Knows his own inner drivers, good or ill. Self-knowledge enables us to set satisfying goals and effective boundaries. It shows us our true path. Without self-understanding, we find ourselves constantly in bad relationships and bad jobs, living in conditions we hate — unable to say no and unable to articulate why we want to say no.

Has a spiritual center. A few years ago I’d never have put spirituality on any list of a free man’s traits. Now, I see it’s a foundation stone. Spirituality doesn’t necessarily mean religion. A person can be spiritual without even believing in God. Spirituality is simply the sense that an individual life has a deeper meaning than is evident on the surface. When daily temptations, disappointments, or demands for collaboration threaten to push us off course, transcendent purpose keeps us walking the path.

There it is. A free man is, in his own realm, an astonishingly civilized and moral being. To those who live by controlling others, however, he is a wild beast who can’t be tamed and who is too tough to make good prey.

A free man is also the cause of freedom. The sole cause of it.

When we have sufficient free individuals, political, social, and institutional freedoms will follow. They will arise not through revolution or politically driven reform, but from who we are and the choices we make every day.

We don’t require superhumans. We don’t even require a majority of free people. We do, however, require a larger minority of free individuals than we have today. “Doing your own thing” is one part of being free. But lasting freedom is a consequence of that old-fashioned and presently out-of-favor ideal: personal character.

We require that to create what so many of us crave: freedom that lasts.

My question for next time: “Can we create Sustainable Freedom?”

herd

Posted on by

“The critical thing about names is their plasticity and manipulability, they are mental constructs and so extremely malleable after considerations of latency and cognitive friction are taken into account.

Update: From the comments, this makes my point much clearer:

….The associated metaphysics is secondary to the potentiation of collective action. Once a flag gets carried across a tribal border, be it a tribal flag, a national flag, a religious flag or whatever in the home context, across the tribal border it’s generally a de facto tribal flag.

“I want to emphasize that this issue isn’t limited to religion & metaphysics. After all, how many communists read Das Kapital front to back? Religious or political movements need the appropriate psychological “hooks” to have mass appeal, but they also seem to gain credibility through the generation of obscure intellectual justifications….”

“In the name of a word,” by Razib at GeneExpression

Comment: Researching the witchcraft trials for a chapter in “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets,” I ended up with the same conclusion: a symbol isn’t enough. A red rag alone won’t do to get a crowd going. You need a half-baked theory that no one actually studies but which the cognoscenti can trot out as justification…..

An American Conservationist…..

Posted on by

The original link to MSN has disappeared so I’m linking this to a blog where I found the article reproduced:

“Eustace Conway is probably as close to Rousseau’s ideal of the “noble savage” as it’s possible to be in modern-day America. The product of a middle-class American family, Conway decided at an early age that being at one with nature was more important than being at one with conventional society.

So he left home at 17 and moved into a teepee. He wore buckskins and lived off the land. Still, he managed to earn a college degree with honors from Appalachian State University.

Within a few years he had begun to acquire acreage in the North Carolina mountains that eventually would become the 1,000-acre Turtle Island Preserve, a working 19th century Appalachian “heritage” farm that also serves as Conway’s environmental pulpit. His original audacious vision was that Turtle Island would be a green beacon lighting the way for a large-scale return to nature — think of John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” but in reverse.

Along the way, Conway, 45, has had the sort of adventures that rank him among the great outdoorsmen of all time. He has crossed the continental United States on horseback in a record 103 days, hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail and kayaked Alaska’s south shore, always living off the land or sea and carrying equipment more befitting a 19th century explorer than a modern-age adventurer. The details of his extraordinary life, as well as its whys and wherefores, are chronicled in Elizabeth Gilbert’s celebrated biography, “The Last American Man.”

But what of his vision? With Turtle Island recently turned 20, MSN asked writer Philipp Harper to talk with Conway about the way his vision — and his level of environmental optimism — have changed over the years.

MSN: Does how you live give you a greater respect for the earth?

CONWAY: Oh, my gosh, so much greater! It’s made an inestimable difference.

MSN: What was your goal when you retreated to Turtle Island 20 years ago? Did you see yourself having a profound impact on society?

CONWAY: I’m not exactly sure what was on my mind. I’m not sure I had a grand scheme. But basically the idea was that I’d show folks something invaluable and they’d see the light, that what they were doing was killing themselves and the planet.

MSN: Has this changed over the years?

CONWAY: Yes, but only because I’ve failed at the larger goal. I’ve gotten more in touch with the realistic perspective that masses of folks aren’t going to change because of my showing them the light.

MSN: How about changing behavior in small, practical ways?

CONWAY: There are so many possibilities. The main thing is to motivate people to reevaluate some basic assumptions. As far as practices, it’s about getting closer to some of the basics in life, not only where they come from but where they go.

For example, if you save your urine and put it in a sawdust bucket you produce compost, something which goes back into the life cycle. Now, take that compost you made and go grow something, even if it’s one tomato plant on a window sill.

It’s all about taking individual steps. Without that you can’t go any further, and the first step is usually the hardest.

MSN: What else?

CONWAY: Well, composting food waste. What is food waste and where would it go if I didn’t compost it? Start weaving a thread of consciousness. See waste turned around.

If we say we want to take better care of the planet, let’s just take five minutes a day thinking about compost or looking at our trash.

We’re the most wasteful people who’ve ever existed.

MSN: Describe your relationship with the environment.

CONWAY: Everything is about relationships. Everything is connected to everything else, all aspects of life. Every movement has an opposite and equal reaction. Every move we make as human beings results in consumption and degradation.

For 27 years I’ve used leaves instead of toilet paper because I think toilet paper is detrimental. As you get in touch with the natural world, the environment that’s the source of all things, you understand how life in modern America puts us so far away from it.

Personally, I am in touch. I went right out to where food comes from. I made my own shelter and my own clothes. I found out about the roots of existence. I feel the weather and I taste the fruit of my labor. I have really fresh food because I grow it and harvest it. My milk is fresh squeezed from my goats. I have a very deep conscious and unconscious oneness with the earth.

MSN: Some self-described environmentalists have criticized you in the past for killing and eating animals and clothing yourself in their skins. How do you respond?

CONWAY: When I shoot a deer and take its meat and skin, I’m intensely connected to the forest. Manufacturing blue jeans and T-shirts decimates the environment. So the environmentalist who wears blue jeans and a T-shirt and tells me I’m not doing a good job by killing a deer is missing the point.

MSN: What’s the energy situation like at Turtle Island?

CONWAY: For nearly 20 years we had no electricity but now I have a small hydroelectric plant and some solar on the edge of the compound at my shop. But in the main part of the preserve we have no electricity. We use fire for lighting and cooking and heating.

MSN: But in burning fossil fuels aren’t you producing greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming?

CONWAY: Well, firewood is a renewable resource, plus our level of consumption is extraordinarily different from what’s commonplace in modern America. Here you walk 30 feet and pick up some firewood instead of shipping it from the other side of the world. Also, it puts people back in touch with their roots.

MSN: Are you more or less optimistic than you used to be about man’s ability to save the environment?

CONWAY: Unfortunately, I’m less. I’m the last one who wants to give up, but the writing on the wall says that we’re going downhill. And it’s pretty indelible ink on that wall.

MSN: You haven’t lost your will to fight, have you?

CONWAY: No, I haven’t lost my will to fight, but I haven’t got as much will to fight as I used to. And I don’t have nearly the hope I used to have.

MSN: But isn’t there more awareness of the need to be

“green” than there used to be?

CONWAY: Yeah, there’s more information about it, but people aren’t doing more. If information is all over the place and people still aren’t doing one-twentieth of what’s needed, that’s a reason for deep concern, isn’t it?

MSN: Ok, then, what’s the answer?

CONWAY: One of the main things is education, especially starting with young people. Each individual has to have the dedication to care about what’s right. My hero, Jacques Cousteau, pointed out that people only care about what they understand. If people don’t understand the sources of life, how can they put a lot of energy into loving the planet? My argument all along is that we have to be interested.