There is, of course, a caution for our species in Pig #6707. When an organism grows beyond its design, nature will determine it to fail—a fact of life, in the strictest sense. Nowhere in evolutionary theory is hypertrophic growth posited as the key to success. What is key is optimum size, what we’d more accurately call right size. All living things have a right size, and historically evolved to that size because it was optimal for survival. So, for example, elephants and giraffes and rhinoceroses, though comparatively huge, are in fact just the right size—their bigness operating as a defense against predators, allowing for greater reach in forage, and much else. The same goes for polar bears and walruses and whales, which require extra tissue volume to retain heat against cold water and long winters. Dinosaurs, as we all know, were likely the biggest creatures to walk the Earth, but bigness didn’t help them meet the challenge of changing conditions. The largest of the dinosaurs disappeared altogether, the smaller ones got even smaller and eventually evolved into birds, while the animals of more moderate size, the marsupials and primitive mammals, found that being small in the first place was a blessing.

On the cellular level, biologists have long understood that large cells, the kind found in cancer, are always unstable and heading for collapse. In physics, too, the principle of right size holds fast. “Atoms of middle weight are stable and inert,” writes Sir George Thomson, the nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate, “but the light as well as the heavy atoms have stores of energy. If one thinks of the heaviest atoms as overgrown empires which are ripe for dissolution and only held together by special efforts . . . one may think, on the other hand, of the lightest of the atoms as individuals which run together naturally for mutual help and readily coalesce to form stable tribes and communities.” As with atoms and empires, so also the stars, which when grown too big will collapse under their own weight in the spectacle of the supernova. So also for animal communities, which rarely aim for bigness. Birds fledge their nests; they don’t keep crowding in. Bees and ants split their colonies when they grow too large, decentralization as instinct. Trees self-prune when laden with too much ice or snow or assailed by wind, dropping limbs to sustain the trunk. Naturalized goldfish in the carp family, kept in an outdoor garden, will only grow to a size proportionate to their pond—unless they are fed (and if fed too much, they grow terribly obese and soon lose the knack for swimming, procreating, and everything else that makes a fish a fish).

Nothing in nature just keeps growing, except where the usual evolutionary constraints are removed from the picture. Isolation from predators, in the example of island gigantism, allowed a host of species to grow to outsize proportions. The elephant bird of Madagascar, the giant gecko of New Zealand, the giant ducks of Hawaii, the giant rabbits of Mediterranean islands, the famed dodo—all were extinguished at astonishing speed after meeting the wily Homo sapiens and his diminutive camp followers (dogs, cats, rats). Without effective competition to keep them fit, the island gigantics were in fact terribly vulnerable when conditions changed.

The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness is the prejudice of American life, our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something is big it is automatically better. Why we’ve been saddled with love of bigness as a people perhaps comes down to the matter of geography, the vastness and richness that the landscape offered for the taking from the moment of European settlement. Size was our birthright, our conditioning, the justification for our exceptionalism, bigness our manifest destiny, and for a long time, whole centuries, it worked. The free land and timber and animals to be hunted down and coal and oil and ore to be dug out of the ground made us very wealthy very fast, taught us that growthmania was the norm, the shape of progress, the American way.

Thus, we prefer our Big Macs and our Whoppers, our food portions supersized, our big cars and sprawling cities, our enormous football players (growing bigger every year, the average offensive lineman now topping three hundred pounds), our big breasts and big penises and big houses (up from an average of 1,200 square feet in 1950 to 2,216 square feet today), our big armies with big reach, and, though we complain about it incessantly, big government that spends big money running up big debt (more now than at any other period in our history). That we allow corporations to grow to outrageous size is just another symptom of the disease. Bigness worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.

WHEN LOUIS BRANDEIS WROTE The Curse of Bigness in 1934, he had been a lawyer for many years and, famously, a Supreme Court justice, and much of his work in the courts was busting up bigness. He was particularly concerned about the corporate monopolies that afflicted American life at the turn of the twentieth century. The Curse of Bigness was not a big book, because the arguments were pretty obvious. The great robber baron trusts—in oil, rubber, steel, tobacco, sugar, and railroads (and let’s not forget the Writing Paper Trust, the Woolen Trust, the Upper Leather Trust, the Paper Bag Trust)—had rigged bids, defrauded patentees, crushed labor movements, and could sway prices in any direction regardless of supply or demand. The ur-trust that by 1904 controlled 91 percent of U.S. oil production, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, was found by the Justice Department to have secured its position via “discriminatory practices in favor of the combination by railroad companies; restraint and monopolization by control of pipe lines . . . ; contracts with competitors in restraint of trade; . . . espionage of the business of competitors, the operation of bogus independent companies”—the stratagems as expectable as they were ugly.

The threat that behemoths like Standard Oil posed to the republic, wrote Brandeis, was their concentration of economic power and decision making to the extent that they were effectively a state within the state, operating under their own laws. Many of the trusts were shattered, in a long struggle that Brandeis pioneered. It was his advocacy that helped push into effective action the antitrust mechanisms in government (the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the Federal Trade Commission), which led to the breakup of Standard Oil and many of its sister monopolies by 1911. “American development can come on the lines on which we seek it, and the ideals which we have can be attained, only if side by side with political democracy comes industrial democracy,” Brandeis wrote. “It is the relatively small man who pre-eminently needs the aid and solicitous care of industry and government. We have, gentlemen, to bear all the time that democratic view in mind.”

But we have not. Today we find ourselves in an unprecedented age of corporate gigantism. This situation is characterized not by the outright monopolies that worried Brandeis, but by the rise of oligopolies, a few very obese firms, the Big Three or Big Six, dominating their sectors while being insulated from failure by the hand of government. Republican and Democratic administrations alike for the last thirty years, spellbound by so-called laissez-faire ideology, abandoned their antitrust duties and watched as the total value of mergers and acquisitions rose to an unprecedented $20 trillion—abetting, in other words, the growth of stupendous privileges in the corporatocracy. At the same time, federal and state governments have done most everything they can to ignore, discourage, and imperil the small man in the world of business.

It’s an old story, and it bears repeating: Government subsidies favor large-scale standardized activity (in farming, manufacturing, retail—the list is long) at the expense of the local, the small, the diverse, the upstart. By 2005, four firms controlled 60 percent of the nation’s grain business. The four largest meatpackers controlled 70 percent of beef supply. In some states, the four largest grocery chains controlled as much as 88 percent of all retail sales. Today, a handful of merged energy companies, the Big Five, dominate the petroleum business, with ExxonMobil, Chevron-Texaco, Conoco-Phillips, BP, and Royal Dutch / Shell proving, in the words of Lord Browne, former chief executive of British Petroleum, that “many of the components of the old Standard Oil [trust have] been brought together.” The pattern of oligopoly holds in banking (Citigroup, Chase, and Bank of America now issuing one out of every two mortgages, two out of every three credit cards), accounting, tobacco, automobiles (the triopoly of GM, Ford, and Chrysler), defense, steel, telecommunications (Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint-Nextel), pharmaceuticals, airlines (Delta, American, United), in every major stage of the food business (even including grain elevator storage), and in the generation, transmission, and local distribution of electricity.

What we’re told is that all this consolidation, this predilection for bigness, always and every time—per the usual knee-jerk size-valuation—brings “synergies,” “economies of scale,” efficiency, innovation. But the opposite is too often the case. To take perhaps the obvious example: The Big Three automakers, which for the last half-century have trumpeted “efficiency” and “innovation” as the bywords to justify their great size, in fact failed over the years to produce automobiles at prices and quality comparable to smaller Japanese automakers like Honda and Nissan, the U.S. oligopoly by the 1980s requiring nearly twice as many engineering hours per new car project, and today taking up to two weeks to change plants for new model assembly while little Honda does it in one night. And all this for products that are more expensive and less advanced than those of the competitors. GM, among all automakers, was routinely the least efficient, the least visionary, its mastodonic bureaucracy trained to crush new ideas in the cradle. “At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is to hire a consultant on snakes,” said Ross Perot during his tenure on GM’s board of directors. “Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you can discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is—nothing.” One might go so far as to charge that the neglect and recalcitrance of the Big Three in the field of invention, their strangling of innovation, has been a danger to the public and disastrous for the environment. They ignored and sometimes actively suppressed safety innovations (seatbelts, padded dashboards, shatterproof glass), a decision that arguably cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of motorists who otherwise might have survived crashes. They have consistently resisted fuel economy and emissions technologies. They colluded to destroy public transit in cities throughout the nation, with the planned effect of getting more people into cars (which rendered cities, by default, more destructively auto-dependent). They killed the electric car—invented out of their own labs, years before anyone had heard of a Prius (and now, as it happens, they are seeking tax dollars to reinvent it). If the nation is to be efficient in its use of fast-dwindling fossil fuels, innovative in curbing pollution and greenhouse gases—effective at imagining even the possibility of a sustainable future—the Big Three are, and will continue to be, a monstrous hindrance.

But why confine ourselves to automakers? Look at U.S. Steel, the “big sprawling inert giant,” in the words of the company’s own assessment, which survives only by government subsidy and protectionist measures from friends in Congress. The smaller steel companies, the so-called mini-mills operating throughout the U.S., produce at lower cost and with fewer man-hours and better pay for workers. Or look at IBM, where a senior vice-president once described the managerial hierarchy as “a giant pool of peanut butter we have to swim through.” The company was out-invented at every turn of the 1980s, in the dawn of personal computing, by upstart Microsoft, which preyed on the inventions of Apple. (Microsoft today is an oligopolist like no other, with the Windows operating system installed on 95 percent of personal computers worldwide.)

Or consider how giant pharmaceutical firms license scores of products from tiny innovative biotech labs every year, perfect and mass-market the inventions of the little companies, but invent few, if any, new drugs inside their own labs. It has always been thus: the big private research laboratories of the modern age are marked by their creative barrenness, a pattern identified by no less a luminary than the former vice-president of the General Electric Company back in 1953: “Not a single distinctively new electric home appliance has ever been created by one of the giant concerns—not the first washing machine, electric range, dryer . . . razor, lawn mower, freezer, air conditioner, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, or grill. The record of the giants is one of moving in, buying out, and absorbing after the fact.”

Kodachrome film? Not invented by Eastman Kodak, but by two musicians in a bathroom. The earliest turbojet engines? Blew in from none of the major aircraft firms. The Google search platform now fast becoming—in one of those tasteless ironies we have learned to expect—an internet monopoly? Conceived by two geeks in a dorm room. You don’t paint the Sistine ceiling by committee, though perhaps one day a corporation will try. Creativity, in any case—the radical’s creativity, which is the only kind—is not what the corporation looks for. Rather, it pursues what William Whyte called “the fight against genius.” It looks for Whyte’s “Organization Man,” who seeks protection, safety, succor in bigness, who can be relied on to conform and submit. What it lacks in creativity, of course, the big corporation makes up for in coercion.

THE STANDARD OIL PLAYBOOK, it turns out, is very much alive, because with corporate obesity always comes the institutionalization of unfairness. Economists Walter Adams and James Brock have done more than any contemporary scholars to chronicle the effects on the ground. They find, for example, that the oligopolists in the grain and meat industries drive down prices for family farmers and ranchers, starving the small men out of business. The defense industry, they report, consolidates in the 1990s, and what follows is an explosion in contract fixing and price fraud, with procurement costs skyrocketing at the Pentagon. The oil oligopoly intentionally withholds gasoline supplies from the market in 2001—a “profit-maximizing strategy,” in the words of the Federal Trade Commission—costing Americans billions of dollars in overcharges. The giant airlines tacitly collude to fix prices, always higher and higher, and so do the automakers, while service and quality continue to decline. In the ninety-seven top radio markets, where two broadcasters now control some 80 percent of the spectrum, we hear allegations of censorship, and we stop hearing the music and opinions considered unpalatable by corporate ownership. The power of bigness everywhere corrodes the regulatory instruments of government through the usual means (lobbyists, campaign money, revolving doors, conflicts of interest). And all this is tolerated, which is to say it is not questioned (so much for regulating with a “democratic view in mind”). It can’t be otherwise, when money and influence grows with every aggrandizement of industry, and corruption of the state is only a matter of the size of the checks one can write, the stature of the executives one can place to gorge in the henhouse. American government, write Adams and Brock, “is in constant danger of being transformed into a welfare state for powerful private interests.” The danger has swallowed us whole; we are now living inside its belly.

I think particularly of Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful players in the banking oligopoly, which for two decades has been a berserker in the marketplace, sowing discord, leading people into shoddy investments and out of their homes, making huge money in the process, all while dictating terms to government and looting the public treasury. Matt Taibbi, in an article in Rolling Stone, recently deconstructed how effective Goldman has been in exploiting its bigness. The achievements in regulatory capture alone are momentous: Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, architect of the 2008 bailouts, was a former CEO of Goldman; Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under Clinton, spent twenty-six years at Goldman; former Goldman director Ed Liddy was placed in charge of the bailout of crumbling insurance goliath AIG (which owed Goldman billions of dollars); the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were Goldmanites; and on and on.

Taibbi reports that Goldman was among the chief promoters of the tech stock bubble of the 1990s (and profited from the collapse), the real estate bubble of the 2000s (and profited from the collapse), and throughout these debacles it was variously accused of securities fraud, tacit bribery, insider trading. Goldman’s commodities bubble predations in 2008 are perhaps most illustrative of how a bigness complex with tentacular reach touches all Americans. With friends placed on the Commodities Futures Trade Commission, Goldman quietly secured an exemption from a Depression-era federal law, specifically the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936, which limits the number of speculators in the commodities market, stating that if speculation gets too big in those basics of existence—corn, wheat, coal, oil—it’s a risk to society as a whole. Armed with the exemption, Goldman was free to set its traders loose in the commodities markets to balloon oil prices even though oil production was up and consumption was down. Due in part to Goldman’s manipulations, Taibbi writes, the average barrel of oil in the summer of 2008 was traded twenty-seven times before it reached the consumer, and with the parasitic middleman taking his cut through aggressive—often lawless—interference in the laws of the marketplace, we had four-dollar-a-gallon prices that crimped the livelihoods of tens of millions of drivers.

For this good work, the company demanded a bailout, stretching its many arms to twist the necks of these same taxpayers. Goldman executives were brought in to help plan the bailout arrangements, for themselves and other banks, and the $700 billion was dispersed mostly in secret, with little or no oversight. They helped to oversee the AIG bailout, because Goldman’s investments were bound up in AIG, and, as anticipated, when AIG received $85 billion at the direction of ex-Goldmanite Paulson at the Treasury, $13 billion was promptly routed from AIG to Goldman. Goldman then machinated for its own bailout, while Paulson opted to let Goldman’s chief competitor, Lehman Brothers, collapse for the pickings. This had the benefit of allowing Goldman to sop up Lehman’s share of the market, so that Goldman, among the prime perpetrators of excess that led to the crash, now grows even bigger, presumably to go on to further excesses.

What must be understood is that this bailing out of bigness is nothing new. It happened, for example, with Chrysler in 1979—$4 billion was allocated by Congress so the company could continue making stupid decisions and crappy cars—and with Long Term Capital Management in 1998, after the hedge fund invested too much money in too much risk, which is just the model of profligacy required for a company to achieve the coveted status of “too big to fail.” The difference in the recent bailout is only its size, stretching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, saddling generations of Americans with government debt larger than any single generation past had to contend with.

There is no learning curve, only the upward sweep of profits and size and government intervention. Bailing out bigness masterfully incentivizes bigness, because to be big is apparently the ultimate indemnity against the rigors of the marketplace, i.e., against the real world in which you and I are supposed to muck around for a living. And the bigger the losses among the giants, the better—how else can one threaten the “system” and demand a bailout and grow still bigger? The small community and state banks in boring places like North Dakota are holding course just fine in the throes of the “crisis”—they were humble and frugal—as are many smaller banks that operate nationally. But the necessary consequence of bailing out losers like AIG and Goldman Sachs and the other giants is that the small guys, who were modestly surviving, lose business to the subsidized goliaths. The bailouts in their scale have one other big incentivizing consequence: they reframe the mistakes of the private sector as social catastrophes, which makes us all vulnerable by encouraging the socialization of foolishness and greed that would better remain the burden of boardroom executives. The private enterprise economy is revolutionized in the most cynical and ironic fashion, so that unfairness bears down like a jackboot on the small man, while it’s socialism for the rich, the big, the abusive, the powerful, the ones doing the stomping. “Marx, in his innocent, and now obsolete, way thought it would be the workers who would force the pace of socialism,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith way back in the comparative innocence of 1985. “He must be looking with surprise at the way, in our time, it is the bankers and the big industrialists who lead the march, carry the flag.” And lo, swollen with government money, while the world economy immolated throughout the summer and fall of 2009, Goldman Sachs posted its largest profits ever.

In 1834, Roger B. Taney, who would become chief justice of the Supreme Court, warned about the supersized hostage-taking capacity of big concentrations in business. Listening to the bailout justifications throughout 2009, one could appreciate the fatefulness in Taney’s message. The big interests, he observed, “may now demand the possession of the public money . . . and if these objects are yielded to them from apprehensions of their power, or from the suffering which rapid curtailments on their part are inflicting on the community, what may they next not require? Will submission render such a corporation more forbearing in its course?” Ask Goldman Sachs.

The Founding Fathers were concerned about the problem from day one, though they described the influence and power of bigness in terms of “factions,” those groups of citizens—and now, more problematically, in a way the founders did not foresee, those groups of fake citizens known as corporations—“who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison’s solution in the Federalist Papers was to allow a multiplicity of interests that, ideally, would balance each other out, so that no one interest could hold sway. In other words, competition for power among factions—that itself could only function in a decentralized system—was key to keeping all factions free.

The principles of representative democracy and the principles of free-market economics were able to coexist in the small-scale schematic of eighteenth-century America. But the bigness complexes of today require that we sacrifice one or the other. We can refuse to bail out the big companies while letting the economy falter—dragging into penury no small number of Americans—and fail in our oath to caretake the interests of the people. Or we can sacrifice free-market principles and fund the bailouts and let corporate obesity run riot till it crashes power-drunk into another wall—and it will, it always does. “The irony,” says James Brock, “is that we have established a reverse economic Darwinism, where we ensure the survival of the fattest, not the fittest, the biggest, not the best.”

THE 9/11 ATTACKS presented one of those classic moments when bigness failed spectacularly. The $75-billion-and-counting “central intelligence” apparatus, this lumbering giantist peanut-butter bureaucracy, was outsmarted by a dispersed, small-scale, “small-cell” operation of nineteen men armed with box cutters and bad English and funded by a Saudi exile languishing in the mountains of Afghanistan. I got on the phone recently with a sociologist at Yale University named Charles Perrow, who a few years ago wrote a book called The Next Catastrophe, in which he singles out Islamist terrorist networks for their adaptive dexterity, their adroitness in adversity, and for the schooling they offer in the vulnerability of being too big, which is to say too centralized. Terrorist networks “are very reliable,” says Perrow. “They can live largely off the land, can remain dormant for years with no maintenance costs and few costs from unused invested capital, and individual cells are expendable. There are multiple ties between cells, providing redundancy, and taking out any one cell does not endanger the network.”

Islamist terrorists operate, to their credit, Perrow says, by virtue of the same “resiliencies” and “decentralizations” that characterize small-firm networks, those systems of disparate though interrelated companies that most economists would associate with low economic development—because of their smallness—but that in fact do very well while spreading the wealth. Looking at small-firm networks, where each firm had twenty or fewer employees, Perrow found “efficiency, resiliency, reliability, innovativeness and positive social outcomes” in Japan, Taiwan, Italy, across Northern Europe, and, not least, in the Silicon Valley of the United States. Dependency, the chief factor in Perrow’s understanding of how catastrophes past and future can envelop whole societies, was what small-firm networks cut out of the equation. “Dependencies are low because there are multiple sources of suppliers, producers, customers, and distributors,” he writes. “Wealth is decentralized, since it is spread over many units, and thus the economic power of individuals or single units is kept in check while the power of the network is enhanced.”

It echoes what the founders were thinking, though presently such thoughts are considered wholly un-American. The American way in business and government and infrastructure is to systematically increase dependencies and call it “efficiency.” Perrow singles out three areas of dangerous concentration: in energy, in populations, and in economic/political power. In energy, there is not simply the fact that U.S. refining capacity agglomerates just where hurricanes like to hit, but that industrial storage and toxic processing facilities sit one atop the other, some of them prone to explosion, such as the ruptured oil storage tanks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s not just cities too big for the floodplains in which they sprawl, but the fact that they are supplied by electricity grids too centralized and increasingly prone to blackouts like the one that surprised much of the American Northeast in 2003, resultant from a single broken link in the grid. It’s not just that the grids are centralized and so tightly coupled, but that they became this way because energy companies, growing into oligopoloid monoliths, captured and undermined the centralized regulatory agencies of government. In Perrow’s analysis, it all interlinks, cross-pollinates, conduces to perpetuate ever-increasing bigness. The bigger and more complex and more total our systems and institutions become, Perrow is saying, the weaker and more vulnerable they really are.

Anybody who’s been on a camping trip with too many friends can understand Perrow’s thinking. Small groups of people prove to be more cohesive, effective, creative in getting things done. In the 1970s, the English management expert and business scholar Charles Handy put the ideal group size in work environments at “between five and seven” for “best participation, for highest all-round involvement.” Alexander Paul Hare, author of the classic Creativity in Small Groups, showed that groups sized between four and seven were most successful at problem solving, largely because small groups, as Hare observed, are more democratic: egalitarian, mutualist, co-operative, inclusive. Hundreds of studies in factories and workplaces confirm that workers divided into small groups enjoy lower absenteeism, less sickness, higher productivity, greater social interaction, higher morale—most likely because the conditions allow them to engage what is best in being human, to share the meaning and fruits of their labor.

This might have something to do with the evolution of the human brain over the hundred thousand years that man survived by hunting and gathering in small tribes. Cognitive neuroscience suggests that the regions of the brain controlling emotion are hard-wired for a small-group dynamic, that the frontal cortex itself is severely limited in the amount of information it can synthesize on a large scale. Indeed, these same researchers of group dynamics show that a disturbing thing happens as groups expand. Large groups develop quickly into a committee structure, with an executive or leadership that directs and often dominates the decision-making process. Power, in other words, is centralized, hierarchies are built, authority is increasingly top-down, consent is gently coerced or it arrives by default, as members of the group simply stop participating—not speaking, or initiating, or deciding, or acting, their invisibility growing in proportion as the group grows in size. In short, the experience of most members of the big group could accurately be described as one of alienation, powerlessness, meaninglessness.

Needless to say, in our very modern world of enormous institutions, we are daily confronted with this alienating experience, not merely in corporations, banks, automakers—to whom we say, “Yes, too big to fail, and nothing to be done about it!”—but in our most prestigious universities, our proudest labor unions, our staunchest advocates for environmental action and civil rights, our best hospitals, our gigantic corporate organic farms, not to mention the multi-trillion-dollar machine of a welfare government—the social safety nets, the regulatory functions, the housing and healthcare authorities, and all its octopus arms that reach into the lives of citizens. In such environments, people, as Paul Goodman once put it, are reduced to personnel, certainly if they don’t secure a place at the top of the heap or near it, which most do not; they become functionaries, bureaucrats, organizers for the organization, jugglers of abstractions. Goodman, a self-described anarchist, observed in 1963 that “no matter how benevolent the goals, the style of execution is dehumanizing. So long as people are transformed into personnel—management-personnel, labor-personnel, professional-personnel,” and to this Goodman goes on to add sales-personnel, consumer-personnel, client-personnel, voting-personnel, to which we might as well add military-personnel, security-personnel, police-personnel, killing-personnel—“we cannot expect the organization to be internally humanized by their persons, for there are no persons.”

IT WAS E. F. SCHUMACHER WHO, in the 1950s, as the chief economist at the British National Coal Board, came to the quite reasonable—at the time unthinkable—conclusion that energy supply, the coal that England so ravenously was burning up, could not satisfy an ideology of unlimited growth. It was, Schumacher concluded, a suicide pact with Planet Earth. What Schumacher offered instead in the book that made him famous, Small Is Beautiful, is the common-sensical idea that man is small, therefore should think small—that is, think along the lines of human scale.

When in 1955 Schumacher was invited by the government of Burma as an advisor on economic development, he understood at once that the rote econometrics of the West had little to offer the Burmese. Schumacher fell in love with the country, the people, the culture, and it was Buddhism that most impressed him, Buddhism in practice in the little villages, the Buddhism of the Middle Path. The experience was transformative, inspiring him to gestate the notion of a “Buddhist economics,” an “economics as if people mattered.” Instead of demanding that his hosts modernize, he urged the Burmese to hold fast to the middle path, employing energy-light, human-scale technology—what he called “democratic or people’s technology”—to develop the economy on the organic scale of the village. Instead of industrial irrigation super-projects, there would be drip-irrigation and foot-operated treadle pumps (which have worked in Burma to this day). Instead of breakneck urbanization and huge capital investments and centralized planning, the Burmese would do better to decentralize as much as possible, he said, to keep decision-making local for the local production of food and handicrafts to be locally consumed.

Mahatma Gandhi’s development plans for India were much along the same lines. “If we feel the need of machines,” said Gandhi, “we certainly will have them. Every machine that helps every individual has a place, but there should be no place for machines [that] turn the masses into mere machine minders.” What in the intervening years has been the alternative? In China, great leaps forward have poisoned the rivers and the lakes and the fields and the coastal beds, displacing huge populations, concentrating them in the filth of cities as machine minders, impoverishing every rank of traditional society while enriching a very few, for whom tradition is nothing more than an attachment to the nonmaterial.

Of course, among the economists for whom growth was the unquestioned ideology—growth for its own sake, the ideology of the cancer cell—Schumacher was considered a crazy old man, a godforsaken crank. And to that he was said to have replied that a crank is small, safe, cheap, comprehensible, nonviolent, and efficient, a perfect tool of intermediate technology.

Let us be cranks then, though the consensus conspires against us—against the very notion that the small-scale and low-tech may hold the means to a workable future. We can start by downsizing the monster corporations. The antitrust law is there, waiting, a fist in our pockets. Let’s have a third party in politics that might dare to confront bigness—hell, let’s have a second party, given that Republicans and Democrats are at odds only in the perfumes they wear. Let’s have ten or twenty parties. Let’s encourage local production with local labor within easy commuting distances; pay a living wage; restructure land-use patterns to provide easy access to work; grow most of our food close to where it will be consumed. Let’s dream small.

Of course, bigness may still be needed to provide certain goods and services, but the most realistic future for humankind lies in a determined return to the human scale. The transformation will no doubt be costly in the short term, that is, less profitable for Big Ag and Big Oil and Big Coal and all the other bigness complexes, but it will produce vast benefits to social health in the long run. And how shall we quantify that kind of quality? Not in the usual gibberish of national product—the original definition of gross meaning “repellently fat”—or exports and imports, or capital-output ratios, or capitalization, not with the metrics of the idiot savants in the finance industry, who produce nothing one can hold in the hand, nothing of real value in a human-scale economy. Instead of depending on slave labor abroad, we can have jobs at home for the things we need, not the things we are told to want. Instead of processed food, we can have fresh food. Instead of faraway hierarchies, we can have local networks. Instead of militarism, cooperation. Instead of repression, innovation. Instead of homogenous, homegrown.

It goes against every urging in our recent history and our covetous training, and therefore it may only happen when some external force comes into play. Most likely that force will be the limits of Planet Earth, and our fitness will be determined, as it was with the dinosaurs, by our ability to adapt to the new conditions. Or not. We might do well to remember that the laws of nature are bigger than Goldman Sachs or the Big Three or the United States of America. Until then, we will continue to think of our systems as too big to fail, during which time we may end up presiding with a blithe mind over their failure—which, ultimately, will mean our failure.

Meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today. They were my kin.

There are understandable personal reasons for wanting to believe in the invincibility of an oppressive system. If you can convince yourself the system is invincible, there’s no reason to undertake the often arduous, sometimes dangerous, always necessary work of organizing, preparing to dismantle, and then actually dismantling this (or any) oppressive system. If you can convince yourself the system is invincible, you can, with fully salved conscience, make yourself and your own as comfortable as you can within the confines of the oppressive system while allowing this oppressive system to continue. There are certainly reasons that those in power want us to see them as invincible. Abusive systems, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the familial to the social and political and religious, work best when victims and bystanders police themselves. And one of the best ways to get victims and bystanders to police themselves is for them to internalize the notion that the abusers are invincible and then, even better, to get them to attempt to police anyone who threatens to break up the stable abuser/victim/bystander triad.

And meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today.

But those who believe in the invincibility of perpetrators and their systems are wrong. Systems of power are created by humans and can be stopped by humans. Those in power are never supernatural or immortal, and they can be brought down. People with a lot fewer resources collectively than any single reader of Orion have fought back against systems of domination, and won. There’s no reason the rest of us can’t do the same. But resistance starts by believing in it, not by talking yourself out if it. And certainly not by trying to talk others out of it.

History provides many examples of successful resistance, as do current events. The Irish nationalists, the abolitionists, the suffragettes—I could fill the rest of this column with examples. Recently, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has, through attacks on oil pipelines and the kidnapping of oil workers, disabled as much as 40 percent of the oil industry’s output from Nigeria, and some oil companies have even considered pulling out of the region. If those of us who are the primary beneficiaries of this global system of exploitation had 1 percent of their courage and commitment to the land and community, we could be equally effective if not more so. We have vastly more resources at our disposal and the best we can come up with is, what, compost piles? The world is being killed and many environmentalists still think that riding bikes is some sort of answer?

Some people maintain that resistance cannot accomplish anything unless we first change the underlying culture; changing culture, then, is where the real work must lie. Setting aside the fact that sometimes people, organizations, and institutions are just wrong and need to be stopped—the Nazis come to mind, as does the KKK at its peak of power, the robber barons, and so on—the more important point is that resistance and working for cultural change are in no way mutually exclusive, but rather are deeply complementary, which makes the complaints of the lifestylists all the more nonsensical. I’m not trying to stop them from saving seeds or handmaking scythes; I’m merely saying that those activities are insufficient to stop this culture from killing the planet.

Yes, there absolutely needs to be the creation of a new culture with new values (or, really, tens of thousands of cultures, each emerging from its own landbase, including the re-emergence of extant indigenous cultures). But the people involved in that cultural creation must see themselves as part of a resistance movement that supports and encourages action against the forces that are dismembering our planet, or, at least, that doesn’t actively discourage organized resistance whenever the subject is raised. Otherwise that nice, new culture is simply a fantasy, unhooked from anything in the real, physical world, incapable of ever being effective, and, ultimately, a position of privilege. Maud Gonne, for instance, was intimately involved with the Gaelic Revival, promoting literature and language preservation. She also did prisoner support, worked with the Land League, and got arrested herself. She almost died on a hunger strike and won some basic rights for Irish prisoners in the process (and her son Seán MacBride eventually became chief of staff of the IRA, helped found Amnesty International, and in 1974 won the Nobel Peace Prize). It is insulting to her memory and to the memory of so many other brave people to state categorically that resistance doesn’t work. Of course it works. But people have to actually do it, and keep doing it for the long haul.

Why are even those who call themselves environmentalists not talking about what really needs to happen to save this planet? Burning fossil fuel, for example, has to stop. This isn’t negotiable. You cannot negotiate with physical reality. It doesn’t matter how or why this burning stops. It needs to stop. We need to stop it—need to stop doing it ourselves, and need to stop others, especially giant corporate others, from doing it too.

We need organized political resistance. Power needs to be named and then dismantled systematically. This requires joint action of whatever sort is deemed necessary. While the frontline actionists are taking apart systems of power and fighting to defend wild nature, the culture of resistance is providing loyalty and cooperation and material support, as well as building up alternate institutions—from means of bringing justice to economic systems to food supply chains to schools to new literary forms—that can take over as the system comes down. The template is not hard to understand. It will take its own culturally appropriate forms. The same actions have been undertaken by resistance movements everywhere—the Spanish anarchists, the American patriots. It’s not conceptually difficult.

But instead of supporting the necessity for action (and we’re not yet even talking about what forms that action should or could take), or at the very least not attempting to discourage action at every turn, so much of the environmental movement keeps insisting that only personal lifestyle change is possible. No other oppressed group in history has ever taken such a stand. Right now, a small group of half-starved, poverty-stricken people in Nigeria have brought the oil industry in that country to its knees. They remember what it is to love their land and their communities—perhaps because they are not drowning in privilege, but in the toxic sludge of oil extraction. Is that what it will take to get environmentalists in the U.S. to fight back?

MEND has said to the oil industry: “It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it.” There is more courage, integrity, intelligence, and pragmatism in that statement from MEND than in any statement I have ever read by any American environmentalist, including myself. We need to accept the fact that making this type of statement (and being prepared to act on it) might be necessary to preserve a living planet.

Some people may be willing to give up on life on this planet without resisting. I’m not one of them.

When the Soviet government officially incorporated the region into its empire in 1917, it began transforming the rivers into a web of irrigation canals that brought cotton production to the area on a massive scale. Such large quantities of water were diverted that the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest inland sea, began to disappear, leaving salt and dust storms in its place. When Moscow’s rule ended in 1991, five new Central Asian nations appeared: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. They are burdened with plunging economies, artificial borders, and a growing environmental crisis.

Despite the divisions that have emerged since the Soviet Union collapsed, the two rivers that run through the countries still bind them inextricably. Two thousand five hundred kilometers long, the Amu Darya is formed from the thousands of glacial mountain streams that feed the Panj and Vakhsh rivers in Tajikistan. It begins a longer, slower, flatter course between deserts downstream, where Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan come together. Stopped up at man-made dams and reservoirs along the way, it fractures into a maze of irrigation canals so that the river itself now vanishes well before reaching the Aral Sea.

The Syr Darya, which carries only half the water of its counterpart, is created from the Naryn and Kara Darya rivers in the mountains of the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan. Also dammed and diverted, it runs flat across central Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan, eventually draining into the tiny North Aral Sea, which is now separated from the dried South Aral by the Kokaral dike.

This is a place where the connection between the Earth and human life is at once plainly visible and complex, where the forward flow of time and progress are not a given. I have seen cotton harvested on pesticide-laden land be later burned in a ritual celebrating rebirth and spring. I have traveled along the Qaraqum Canal, which, running fourteen hundred kilometers through Turkmenistan, is the world’s longest; it has turned barren desert into a lush landscape of fishing and farming and beekeeping. 

As these rivers have splintered on natural and unnatural paths, so have empires and cultures. Tombs, caravansaries, consulates, coins, teapots, palaces, cell phones, tractors, Mercedes, prayer books, fortresses, factories, bones, gas rigs, and armor of the past all remain in varying states of decay and revival. Soviet missile heads become garden boxes in western Turkmenistan. In a local history museum in the former Aral port town of Moynaq, half the formaldehyde solution embalming Aral Sea fish has evaporated like the vanished sea itself. Here the cracks of history exist together with the present, and the present carries no more weight than the past.

In America’s mass consciousness, Central Asia has transformed from being part of a powerful communist Cold War enemy into a place where the threat of Islamic extremism is imminent—all within the short span of my adult lifetime. Amid the clutter of preformed judgments that surface during the course of this work, it is always a comfort to return to the rivers. No matter how many different names they have been given, or empires have ruled them, or canals have been made from them, I can still see the rivers. Traveling along them offers the closest thing to truth that I can find.

Pebbles from Canada, pebbles from Cleveland, pebbles from carriageways in Caledonia. Maybe the echoes of miners reverberate in my genes; maybe I share a That’s-Pretty-and-I-Want-It covetousness with thieves and princesses and bowerbirds. Maybe I hope someday I’ll finally overcome the fundamental truth of pebbles and find one that looks prettier dry than wet. Or maybe I’m just an introvert, a down-gazer, a bad conversationalist.

But every night as I wash another dish or fill another mug with water, my little hoard stares up at me with its thousand imperturbable faces.

Oh, him, the stones seem to whisper. He’ll be gone soon enough.

Take this nugget of quartz: milky, egg-shaped, the size of a breath mint. Quartz is hard, harder than all the common minerals, and on its journey from mountain to dust this pebble has reached the way station of my kitchen counter by passing through an almost unfathomable series of gauntlets. This little thing is a master of endurance: survivor, abider, traveler; inside it is folded a story of creation and time so large it threatens the imagination. 

Born as a crystalline vein inside some huge extrusion of granite, it probably rode a thrust fault into the light a few hundred million years ago, helped bulldoze up a mountain range, got pulverized by a glacier. Over a few millennia ice, weight, and lichen weathered the vein into boulders, the boulders into stones. Maybe this pebble was driven by a cloudburst into a great fan of other pebbles; maybe it was—after another ten thousand rainstorms—sucked back underground where it was compressed into conglomerate by heat and pressure, until it rose again, smaller and rounder, to be polished for a few more centuries in a creek bed before the creek disappeared and the sand swallowed it, incubated it, and hatched it years later into the gulch below my house.

Until last Tuesday, when it traveled into the whimsy of my frail attention. Into my pocket, onto the pile behind the sink. It sits there now and dares me to outlast it.

The lesson of rocks, of course, is not a lesson in permanence but rather the opposite. Change, that’s the only music a pebble (or person) can count on, and in the lifetimes of stones change comes in relentless concatenation on scales so large our brains aren’t quite evolved to understand them.

Over time the landscapes beyond our kitchen windows rise and fall as surely as ocean waves. The green and blue maps tacked to the walls of our children’s classrooms are merely snapshots, out-of-date the moment they were printed. Tomorrow Australia will have an observably different shape, North America will be farther from Europe, and the Pacific Ocean will be deeper. Mount Everest is getting taller, Polynesia is sinking, and any day now California might calve off from the rest of the United States and slide smoking into the ocean.

What’s California to a nugget of quartz? What’s a Tuesday, what are a few hours in a damp pocket, what are a couple of decades on a kitchen counter? Pompeii, Krakatoa, Paricutín; the vast basaltic plates on which our continents drift and our lives play out move at roughly the same speed as our fingernails grow, and that may not seem like much until one remembers 2004, Boxing Day, the event scientists now call the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, ten minutes in which the whole planet vibrated like a thumped watermelon and 230,000 people died. Civilization is a blink in the eye of a pebble, and pebbles are but heartbeats in the trillion-day lifetime of the Earth.

At three in the morning I creep to the kitchen sink. With trembling hands I fill my mug. The eyeless faces of my stones stare up at me. They say: Enjoy your drink, little man. They say: We stared up through rushing streams at the stars a thousand years before you were born.

Sometimes I wonder: If four and a half billion years ago an Archaean god suspended a time-lapse movie camera over the latitude and longitude at which I now stand, and could run the reel back to me at high speed, what would I see? Floods of molten basalt would cross the screen, cooling and hardening. Spasms of airborne ash would blot the view now and then. Oceans would seethe and evaporate. Galaxies of clams might appear, flapping their shells at the sun, then vanishing beneath successive sheets of mud. A cubic mile of ice would show up several times. Puddles would fill and drain away in a breath. Soils would build and be scraped away; stands of prehistoric trees would surge up toward the viewer and fall and rise again in succession. And all the while swarms of pebbles would dart to and fro like bees.

In this movie everything around me right now, water in my mouth, crickets shrieking in the yard—stones, refrigerator, house, heartache—would not stay put long enough to register in a single frame.

If these kitchen-counter pebbles had memories, if they could unpack their lithic histories and unroll them across the floor like scrolls, they’d show us flashes of heat in the crucible of the Earth, epochs of darkness, the heavens spitting snow, then rain, then light. On those scrolls would be wildernesses of silence so vast that to dwell within them for a fraction of their length would make us insane with terror and loneliness.

After I’m dead, someone will have to decide what to do with all the stones I’ve stockpiled. Pitch them over the backyard fence or dump them into a box or wall my carcass in with them. Eventually everything I know—my children, my friends, this language, these hills—will be something else.

Not much longer now, the pebbles whisper. Just a few more years. While electricity twinkles between the dendrites of my mind, insufficient against whatever erosions lie ahead.

Win bounds out, searching for her unconventional quarry, ready to herd. She spots a flock of about a dozen geese feeding on the well-manicured grass of Clove Lake Park in Staten Island. She crouches until her belly is almost on the ground, tucks her tail between her legs, and slinks toward the geese, fixing them with an intense glare.

The geese honk in alarm, first trotting across the lawn and then reluctantly spreading their wings and taking off. Win, her body still quaking, keeps up her fierce stare until the geese have disappeared.

Scaring off the ubiquitous Canada geese that see New York’s parks, cemeteries, and golf courses as a year-round salad bar is exactly the point. Joe Kohl is Win’s human co-worker at Geese Police, but he is the first to say that, when it comes to interacting with geese, his main function is driving Win from site to site. When he interviews potential employees, Kohl tells them, only half joking, “If the dogs had thumbs, we wouldn’t need you.”

The number of geese on the East Coast has nearly tripled in the past twenty years. Attempts to keep the birds and their copious feces off of lawns and away from airports have spawned an entire industry of companies with names such as Bird-B-Gone and Goose Busters. Indulging their inner frat boys, goose hazers have tried everything from lasers to fireworks. Geese Police claims to have pioneered the idea of using border collies, bred to herd sheep along the English-Scottish border, to scare off geese (a federally protected species) without ever touching them. Now the practice is so common that Geese Police lost New York’s Central Park as a client in a bidding war, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture employs a staff of goose-tormenting dogs.

But Win and I are both a little disappointed by the geese’s quick departure this afternoon. Win’s instinct is to gather them up and bring them to a human. I, on the other hand, was hoping the geese would land in the park’s lake so I could witness another border collie trick: kayaking.

Because geese often head to the middles of lakes to escape their predators, border collies have taken to the water in pursuit. They do their silent glowering from a kayak, leaving uneasy geese to wonder how the hell a wolf got so far out on the water. 

The geese in the park aren’t a problem today, but Kohl has arranged for me to see a kayaking dog, even if the outing is recreational. Win isn’t much of a kayaker, so another Geese Police duo joins us. As her crate is opened, Gail whines and shuffles before running toward the kayak. Joe Compton is the thumbs of the operation, and when he is situated in the boat, Gail effortlessly hops between his legs, facing the bow.

Compton paddles around the serene lake, green from the reflections of the lush trees that surround it. The scene is comically pastoral: a man and his dog, out enjoying the day. But though Gail looks relaxed, she is also alert. If a goose dared come close, she would drop her head, hunch her shoulders, and start the stare-down.

Project developers now figure it might be 120 gallons a year (winter temperatures in the Brooks Range village can drop to fifty degrees below zero), but that’s still a small fraction of the thousand gallons or more that existing homes typically burn.

An oil-revenue-fed housing boom in the 1970s and ‘80s brought modern housing to rural residents across Alaska. But the homes were built with little attention paid to lifestyle or energy use, and people in many communities now face a harsh predicament: existing homes are too expensive to heat and maintain, and new ones are too expensive to build.

Enter Jack Hébert and the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC). Over the last year and a half, staff at the Fairbanks-based nonprofit have worked with village residents to design a home that meets local needs, takes advantage of local resources, and is relatively cheap to build and operate. Residents signed on because of the village’s acute housing needs; CCHRC staff saw building in the remote village, nestled in a windy valley one hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, as a good challenge.

The final design blends traditional building techniques with modern materials. Like the traditional sod homes that inland Eskimos used for generations, the prototype home is built partially underground for protection from wind and cold and uses a chimneylike ventilation system. A staggered entryway helps keep cold air out. But the home also uses metal studs, soy-based spray insulation, and a spray-on plastic coating normally used for truck bed liners. “The old systems worked well,” Hébert says. “The old systems with good technology work extremely well.”

Thanks to a donation from the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, another nonprofit group, the home will be powered by the wind and sun. Refrigeration will come from the cold ground itself. The house is designed to fit on a single DC-6 cargo plane, and the goal is a three-week installation period. Ilisagvik College in Barrow is already training workers from surrounding villages to build the homes.

The house is expected to consume a small fraction of the heating fuel and electricity used in other homes, and it cost only $150,000 to build, shipping included. (Recent cost estimates for new construction in Anaktuvuk topped $750,000, according to CCHRC.)

With the first house barely finished, developers already have plans for more. The Tagiugmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority, which is sponsoring the Anaktuvuk project, is seeking funding to build forty more homes in Anaktuvuk and other villages using the same methods. And CHRC is already working to design another home for the coastal village of Point Lay.

Hébert hopes the new designs—and more generally the new approach—will change how people think about building in rural and urban Alaska alike. “All of us live just a few generations away from living in a sustainable way,” he said.

Meanwhile, Anaktuvuk Pass residents are anxious to see just how efficient the new home is. “For now,” Paneak said, “people are pretty excited.” When workers installed the sod roof, village elders came out to make sure they did it right.

The fingertips are a border checkpoint of the human body, and through them the self reaches out to touch the world. Fingertips are diviners, lovers, poets of the perhaps, emissaries of empathy. They are feelingful, exquisitely sensitive to metal, dough, moss, or splinter. They are also one of the body’s places of greatest idiosyncrasy: a fingerprint is the body’s signature. Fingertips are at once highly selved and highly sensitive: they articulate difference and they distinguish difference.

Forced to erase the sign of themselves, people scar, burn, stitch, and staple their fingertips at U.S. borders too, and indeed wherever people fear that their identification will be used against them, not because they are criminals but because they are refugees and victims of war, poverty, and neo-imperialism.

Border checkpoints bristle with state control, and this control now encroaches within nations. In Britain, already the world leader in surveillance, the state is now pushing for nationwide ID cards. Identification, tagging, and surveillance are used to intimidate those at the margins, the borders of society: refugees, whose individual stories of blood and horror give the lie to the glossy brochures of foreign policy; the insane with their flashes of specific mind-lightning; those who stand out, eccentrically, for their beliefs, who poke and provoke with the demeanor of a pitchfork in the cutlery drawer; young people at the borders of adulthood; protesters, with their multifold cries of “see it otherwise,” demanding political alterity. All are harassed with surveillance.

Truly individualistic societies would cherish all such border crossers, not punish them. But the dominant culture is a society of intolerant homogeneity that bolsters racism, ageism, and conformism. It supports monoism, destroying variety from biodiversity to linguistic diversity. Like the monoculture of Hollywood and the monocrops of agribusiness, the monopolitics of world powers erase the particular, searing away the idiomatic dialect of the self, symbolized so specifically by each person’s fingertips. Burning away the signature of individuality, at the borders of those very countries that most profess individualism, is a metaphor of terrible reproach. And it tells a deep truth, for ours is not an individualistic society. Rather, it is a hyper-privatized one.

The word private originally meant to be “deprived of public life,” and most people today are so deprived. A vote every few years does not constitute a political voice. Terms for public political life, like solidarity, trade unions, co-operatives, or collectives, are unwelcome in a world of hyper-privatization. Employees engaged in public protest find their jobs threatened. Citizens are also deprived of public life in nature, fobbed off with parks and that hyper-privatized patch of green, the fenced-in private garden. Entertainment, traditionally a very communal affair, is now hyper-privatized, the individual watching TV in a room alone, where the sequestered self is more vulnerable to advertising.

Similarly, the etymology of the word idiot, from ancient Greek, refers to a “purely private person”—one who takes no part in public life. In this hyper-privatized world, it is as if governments would prefer their subjects to remain idiots, disengaged from the state’s process but suffering its intrusions.

Humans need community and public life: we also need the secluded intimacy of privacy, and the latter is threatened by surveillance. Those in favor of surveillance argue that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” but this denies the very significance of privacy—a cache to shelter our tenderness and our name. Telling one’s name is a gift. Withholding it is a right.

Through the twin prongs of ID cards and surveillance, the borders of the private self are invaded. I am declaring, here, that I am a sovereign state. I do not want alien states to use biometrics to crawl into my eyes like flies. I do not want my identity captured by strangers. But I, who am deprived of the human right to freely roam in my own free land, find that the state can roam freely through the territories of my self, violating the integrity of my borders.

When the state crosses the borders into my private self, it is an ugly act. But border crossing the other way—the self reaching outward—is an act of beauty and transcendence. Art, spirituality, environmentalism, and movements for political justice agree, seeking transcendence from the confines of the single self, and it is no surprise that people from backgrounds of faith, activism, and art are those who most vehemently oppose ID cards.

The perennial philosophy of a universal oneness suggests a reaching out beyond the ego. So does the traditional posture of fingertips touched together in prayer to set free the spirit, winged for infinity. Movements for political reform take wide, unprivate ideals, the wisest art goes beyond the individual, and at the heart of environmentalism is the extension of the borders of responsibility to encompass lands, times, selves, and species beyond the individual.

The human psyche, then, seems to find benevolence in the self transcending its boundaries. By contrast, the psyche finds malevolence in those who invade those boundaries: in the myths and mores of many cultures, people are wary about giving names to strangers. Belief in the Evil Eye is virtually a human universal, embodying the malignity of surveillance. Staring is inherently predatory, and we, as other animals, hate being watched because it is a prelude to attack. Mass surveillance—modernity’s Evil Eye—is peculiarly nasty because of its cowardice; the watcher is hidden, unknowable and faceless.

Anyone can recognize a sense of guilt merely walking (innocently) through airport customs. Being trailed by a police car provokes a similar guilt, even when unfounded. Surveillance provokes a pervasive sense of guilt and entrapment and this fusion has a practical history in the invention in 1785 of the Panopticon, the surveillance device designed to watch prisoners without their knowledge. If plans for compulsory ID cards succeed in the UK, we will be carrying our own Panopticons with us, and the protest against these plans is muted. In the U.S., thankfully, there is tougher resistance to ID cards, but a modern Panopticon, the microchip tag within the body, is in use already by an Ohio company (CityWatcher.com) whose business is in providing governments with surveillance tools, and which has inserted microchips under the skin of some of its employees.

Surveillance creates conformity. Anyone queuing at border control attempts to look as “normal” as possible: like any animal under a predatory stare, humans try to fit in with the herd, not to stand out. The glare of surveillance is the opposite of the gaze of love, for under that gaze a person wants to be known, seen especially for themselves, flirting the peacock feathers of otherness, the distinguishing features of the soul. The law of evolution encourages individuation, and diversity is a signature of the vitality of nature. These laws of life agree with the law of love in nurturing true individuality, for the human heart cherishes “thisness,” the essential specificity of the beloved person.

“If you ask me why I loved him,” said the Renaissance French humanist Michel de Montaigne of his friend Étienne de La Boétie, “I can only say: because he was he, and I was I.” Delineating an exquisite uniqueness, it is as if their fingertips still touch, after all these centuries, and the fingertips of Montaigne’s mind, like all great artists, transcend the borders of self and time to touch minds today with the inalienable signature of love.

LAWLER: There are few people today who talk about science and spirituality in the same breath without criticizing one or the other. You are an exception.

KELLY: My larger agenda is to bridge the technological and the holy. These are not two words that most people normally associate with each other. It is going to be a long conversation to bring
them together.

LAWLER: Is this what you mean when you describe yourself as a “techno transcendentalist”?

KELLY: Right.

LAWLER: But can you really imagine Thoreau multitasking on a BlackBerry? How do you relate transcendentalism to technology?

KELLY: I don’t mean transcendentalist in a monkish or hermitlike way. I mean transcending in the sense of connecting to a state of awareness, of living, of being, that transcends our day-to-day life. It’s not a withdrawal, it’s an emergence. And tools can be used.

LAWLER: Or misused.

KELLY: There’s been a lot of chatter about information overload recently. It is true there’s something different about this [modern] environment in our day-to-day and minute-to-minute awareness. What it means and what we should do about it is really not so clear.

I acknowledge the fact that multitasking and BlackBerrys and iPods and Twitter can be distracting. But we don’t really have the option of ignoring it. The proliferation of devices is necessary to learn new things. And the cost of learning new things is an avalanche of fragmented information. We just have to learn how to live with it.

LAWLER: But don’t we get to choose?

KELLY: It’s not that we don’t have the option to remove ourselves. This phase of cultural evolution, in which we are growing and discovering, requires this tide of twenty-four-hour information. I think it’s necessary and good that there will always be an opt-out option. We want to encourage that diversity, but it will always be a niche. Barring some disaster, society is not going to become a world where everybody stays at home writing poems and reading one long book after another without interruption.

LAWLER: Where is the transcendentalism in this view?

KELLY: The roots of technology go deeper than just human culture. They weave and string all the way back to the Big Bang. Technology is an example—like life and intelligence—of an extropic system, a system that feeds off entropy to build order. And not just order, but self-amplifying order of exploding complexity and depth. Extropic systems create even more entropy in the process—that is, energy runs through the system at a faster and denser pace. This is the definition of self-sustaining systems like a living organism. There’s continuity from the beginning of the universe, which is expanding out and creating space to allow diversity to flourish.

What we have is a long-term trend of increasing diversity, complexity, and specialization—all characteristics of self-sustaining systems. That could be a galaxy or a sun or intelligence. The resulting density of power is technology. I use the term “the Technium.” A galaxy is a system composed of individual technologies, complex enough to have its own self-sustaining qualities including self-preservation. It is self-perpetuating and self-increasing. You could say that humans are the sexual organs of technology—that we are necessary for its survival. But it has its own inertia, urgency, tendencies, and bias.

LAWLER: Other than to reproduce, what is the purpose of these systems?

KELLY: These systems are evolving evolution. They are increasing degrees of freedom. And this is the theological part—we have the infinite game. The game is to extend the game, so that the game will keep going. The game is to keep changing the nature of change. And that infinite game is my view of holiness. You play the game not to win, but to continue to play to make room for all expressions of truth, good, and the beautiful. You are opening up the world to possibility. Every child born on Earth today has some particular mixture of genes and environment, of capability and intelligence to unleash. The game is about trying to educate that individual into a position where they can maximize their potential and possibility. And technology is the instrument.

LAWLER: You have spoken about what would have become of Beethoven if he’d been born before the invention of the piano . . .

KELLY: That helps me think about the people born today who may be missing some technology that would allow them to be their best. That’s what technology is in the larger sense—the discovery of potential and possibility.

LAWLER: But tools are not creativity.

KELLY: At a deep level, the act of discovery and the act of creation are identical. The steps that you would take to find something are exactly the same steps you’d take to make something. So you can say that Edison discovered the light bulb and Newton invented gravity.

LAWLER: Wendell Berry might say that is all well and good, but technology doesn’t change the essential nature of humanity. It doesn’t make us better people.

KELLY: I disagree with Wendell. We have created our humanity. And I think our humanity has been created by technology. Our humanity is defined by things we have invented. Like the alphabet. Our culture is one thing we’ve created. But I also think there has been an evolution of morality. Culture and cultural inventions are part of the Technium—they are technologies.

LAWLER: But the Ten Commandments were likely tribal rules passed on orally long before they were written down. It was just the medium that changed.

KELLY: Language is part of the Technium too. And language allowed us to structure laws and rules, our ideas of inherent fairness and sense of right and wrong. These are associated with society and culture and all that Wendell is concerned about. And they were developed over thousands of years. Our humanity is actually a result of the invention and the distribution and the enhancement and growth of the Technium.

LAWLER: Man the Toolmaker—it’s an old concept. Surely we are more than toolmakers.

KELLY: But I don’t think the Technium is only about humans. It’s a type of learning. It’s a type of expression. It’s a type of possibility.

The Technium works as an ecology. Just as evolution has a longterm direction as we look 4 billion years into the past, so technology increases complexity and diversity, with increasing power.

LAWLER: So technology is part of evolution or God—that which drives the universe?

KELLY: Exactly. Some people call this the Great Story. Roving preacher Michael Dowd talks at churches about this alternative creation story. It is about evolution through God, that which started from nothing, grew into particles that gained mass and complexity, and then clumped into molecules and then became dust and planets and so forth. And technology is the latest variety.

LAWLER: So the Technium is one of the ways in which the universe is getting to know itself? And by increasing complexity, the universe becomes more self-aware?

KELLY: Exactly. I think of God as the intelligence of mind that is increasing the complexity of the universe.

LAWLER: That makes me think about the way new ideas appear to spread almost simultaneously. Five thousand years ago humans suddenly began living in cities from Egypt to India. There was something in the air. Is this the Technium at work?

KELLY: Simultaneous invention is actually the norm for science. That’s why we have patents. I’m not talking about the supernatural. Inventions never happen in a vacuum. Every idea requires the support of four or five other ideas. There’s a necessary subset of other surrounding inventions that are required. As they appear, the new idea becomes more obvious. It’s an ecological growth. There are two kinds of changes that we see in nature. One is developmental and one is evolutionary. And the developmental changes are fairly predictable in a certain sense. We know what the pattern is and I can map your developmental trajectory very clearly. You go from fetus to child to adolescent. I may not know what kind of teenager you’re going to be, but I can say you’re going to be a teenager. A lot of what we see in culture right now is developmental, not evolutionary.

LAWLER: But we can’t say that about human culture—we don’t know where it is going.

KELLY: We don’t, but only because we’re ignorant. I’ve looked at the sequence of discoveries and inventions around the world to see whether they follow generally the same sequence, and it seems that they do. Certain things you discover first. The moment a planet decides to wire itself up, to connect everything to everything, is an inevitable developmental stage in civilization. It is a stage like puberty or metamorphosis—pick your biological analogy.

LAWLER: I’m struck by an analogy you make between nature and the Technium—that technology also needs pruning. You pull the weeds in your garden or you won’t get vegetables.

KELLY: This is husbandry. You are not your garden’s puppet master, pulling each leaf off the tree. You train it in a general direction. The work is still being done by the tree. We are tending the garden of technology, moving things around, noticing a plant coming up here that would do much better in the sun over there. Or it needs a little more fertilizer. You don’t control it.

The banning of genetically modified organisms in Europe is a typical response these days. GMO critics instead would like us to use fruit produced through genetic gambling, which is what natural breeding is. If genetic gambling came along now, it would never be permitted. It’s all mutation, all random. The point is we’ve never had control. We get the best results by doing a little bit of training and pruning and letting things unroll.

LAWLER: So where does evolution come in?

KELLY: It’s very hard to unravel what is evolutionary and what is developmental. My suggestion is that evolutionary change is unpredictable, while developmental change is not.

LAWLER: There is a lot of fear around the pace and impact of technology. It is all happening so quickly. Isn’t fear of weapons of mass destruction, genetic modification, and advances in nanotechnology prudent and reasonable?

KELLY: That’s a good question and I may not have a very good answer for it. There’s no single source of this fear—it can be as simple as discomfort with change. And for all our talk about the need for change, people resist it—particularly if we are comfortable in the moment. Change brings discomfort.

LAWLER: So how can we cope with the increasing pressure to change?

KELLY: We’re now in a new regime of information. For hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, the manner of change on an individual’s soul and life was very minimal. That fostered appreciation for continuity and enduring values, and that persisted even though new inventions came along. Those inventions diffused slowly and generally didn’t happen within a single life span. That changed with the coming of science, and with that came increasing prosperity and a dramatic rise in population in the last two hundred years. The pace of change within an individual lifetime accelerated. One consequence was the invention of science fiction, part of a large-scale investigation of the future. It became a survival tactic.

LAWLER: You have said that the next century marks the great identity crisis of our species.

KELLY: Wendell is probably right that we aren’t really wired very well to cope with this. But I have no problem thinking that human nature will change, that we will change human nature, that we will engineer human nature amid this rapid change. The nature of humanity has been changing all along, but until now very slowly. And as I was suggesting earlier, part of the nature of humanity is wrapped up in our own inventions—it is, in fact, our own invention. Each time we make an advance in artificial intelligence, we redefine who humans are. Each time there’s a discovery in science related to intelligence or even the animal world, we redefine who humans are. At one time we defined ourselves as the toolmakers. Now we find out that termites and birds use tools, so we’ve redefined what it is to be human.

LAWLER: Are we moving toward something that shuts out the past, or is there a place in which low-tech tradition and high-tech science can meet?

KELLY: We generally reinterpret our older selves, rather than discard them. Right now we’re very biological; we’re very meatbased animals. We have the benefit of a very highly evolved sensual body. So whatever improvements we make, I think very few people would really want to evolve out of their bodies, though they may want to better the body. We contain 4 billion years of evolution, and it’s not a matter of casting that off completely. It’s a matter of reinterpreting it and enhancing it.

LAWLER: Already people are talking about designing babies for specific traits. Technology often starts with the best of intentions—to ensure a healthy child—then deteriorates into thorny and even nightmarish scenarios. In India now, you can go to a clinic to ensure you have a boy rather than a girl. The long-term implications—lots of male teenagers and few females—are horrific.

KELLY: My suggestion is not to take the technology away, but to educate those making the choice. What we want is greater choice. And these choices are always bound up in politics. I don’t think technology is neutral. But the proper response to bad technology is not to stop it—to stop thinking—but to have a better idea.

LAWLER: You go so far as to say that it would be immoral for us to put prohibitions on technology. Are there any exceptions to that?

KELLY: I haven’t been able to find any. What we want to do is find the proper home for technology. Technologies are like children. They’re often asked to do things that they’re incapable of doing, don’t really want to do, are ill suited to do. We need to find the right place for technology. DDT is actually a very good insecticide for eliminating malaria—used judiciously around the house, it’s very effective and does not cause much harm. Spraying it on 25 zillion acres of cotton is terrible. So you find the right home for that technology.

LAWLER: You could argue Rachel Carson did that for DDT, but only after a long struggle. How do we create a conversation, a structure, for making such decisions?

KELLY: Conversation is the correct word. Our current default is to not proceed to the next step until you can prove no harm. That doesn’t work. You have to use inventions to evaluate them, to
see them in action. Their consequences in the very complicated world are impossible to simulate. You have to have constant vigilance, to re-evaluate constantly. If they don’t work out, you don’t prohibit them, you move on to something else better.

LAWLER: What if they discover that this Diet Coke I’ve been drinking will increase my chances for cancer? Are you saying it should not be banned?

KELLY: It should not be prohibited for several reasons. One is it may only cause cancer in people who have some subset of genes. It may not have an effect on other people. Before we prohibit it for everybody, we have to find out what’s going on. First we need your DNA, and then we need constant twenty-four-hour self-monitoring. This idea that every five years we go for a checkup, well then of course people are going to get cancer from drinking soda. Most people will be lucky if they have their blood tested once in their life. We need noninvasive, constant information about our bodies so that we can determine right away whether something we drink has an adverse effect. The proper response is not to ban something—the proper response is better technology. If there is something wrong with aspartame, modify it. Find a new home for it.

LAWLER: What if you have a company that has spent millions developing and producing the chemical, and they hire lobbyists to argue for its widest possible use? Look at the tobacco or alcohol industries. And scientists with a financial stake in the system have been used to justify wide use of toxins. You make a logical argument, but one that leaves out the reality of the marketplace. Where’s “the conversation”?

KELLY: We need a more sophisticated system. That is why we are locked in a binary pattern—it is either approved or prohibited. There is the option of education—to take an approach to life that is more scientific.

LAWLER: Does that mean that if enough people have access to the data on chemicals, and could understand it, they could pressure a company to make a different choice?

KELLY: I haven’t thought about this until this moment. Let’s say a study finds the substance causes cancer, that it is really bad. Then the question is, what changed since the time of approval? Maybe you have to drink it every day for five years, so it is an issue of dosage. So what is a better dosage? And you could decide to use a different dosage or use something else instead. And you could use the substance for something else that would not cause harm.

LAWLER: How do you factor in human complexity—the corporate executive who wants a profit, the researcher who is more concerned with creating than monitoring? Such motivations can overwhelm scientific logic. Look at tobacco smoking—you can say it’s a bad idea, but people do it.

KELLY: I’m not talking about just the market solving problems. I’m assuming there is government to regulate. What I am proposing is that you have more choices than approving or prohibiting. When you have more choices you can have a more sophisticated response. I think prohibiting tobacco is the wrong idea, because we’ll get the same result as with Prohibition. But obviously you don’t want people addicted to smoking. We need to find the right home for tobacco.

The market and science and education can provide more creative solutions. Consider marijuana. The medical use of it here in California is interesting, because we are trying to find the right home for it.

LAWLER: So do you support funding bacterial warfare, for example, since it expands our knowledge?

KELLY: No. I would prohibit technology that kills people, for sure.

LAWLER: But you are against prohibiting use of technology.

KELLY: So nuclear weapons are okay, but using nuclear weapons is not. Take the AIDS virus. It’s nasty, bad stuff, but we can use the mechanism of a virus infection for good. You hijack it and use it for gene therapy. The technology of viral infection is okay. There is a way we can redeem a virus to make it into something good—but not if you prohibit the research.

LAWLER: You are walking a fine line—prohibitions for certain areas, but no blanket prohibitions.

KELLY: I think funding new ways to kill people is not a good use of technology. The same discoveries, however, can be used for better purposes. I’m not actually a pacifist. I believe that there should be restraint, but not necessarily killing. Killing is a binary response we fall back on, but there are other options.

LAWLER: How do you reconcile faith with logic and reason?

KELLY: There’s always the question of how the universe began. Then you ask, what was before that? Either you believe that it goes on and on by itself or you believe that there’s some ultimate
being which caused it. Both of those views are logically unsatisfying. Either could be true, but not both. And neither is provable. You come down to faith. Faith for me is simply experiential. My faith is that God unleashed creation as a way to know himself, to express and fully manifest his fullness. Our job as creatures of this creation is to surprise God. We’re co-creators in a certain sense—we have a divine spark in us. We have the same attributes as the creator of the universe, which is that we can create something. We can make something out of nothing in our small world. God has bestowed sparks of his creativity in the right places so they will surprise him. He’s allowing us to make something from our free will that maybe he would not have thought of making.

LAWLER: So we’re instruments of the divine?

KELLY: Right. Going back to the infinite game, the goal is to keep the game going for the purpose of maximizing the potential of this creation. We create other beings and other worlds. In so doing, we eventually discover different views of God, of the universe. Our own minds are incapable of comprehending the universe as a whole; we’re just too small and limited. But we can create other worlds, and technology gives us a sure hand to do so.

LAWLER: That feels so ineffable, so unquantifiable.

KELLY: My experience with God is no different than my own experience of my own consciousness and reality. Descartes’ observation is that in the end, the only certainty we have that we exist is that we think. But if we look at consciousness, it evaporates when we attempt to translate it into bits. The nature of consciousness is still a total riddle.

LAWLER: Why is there such a lack of sophisticated conversation between religion on the one hand and science and technology on the other?

KELLY: The only place we see it is among the theologians of our day, the science fiction authors who tackle the big questions. Religions appeal to tradition, to people who are afraid of change. But at the same time the Catholic Church has proved remarkably adaptable over two thousand years. There is a blockheaded rejection of evolution among Christian evangelicals, which has been tremendously harmful. It has turned a religion that was at one time at the forefront of science into an antiscience stance. I have little glimmers that in another generation or two, this will change. When it comes to climate change, for example, there has been rapid change toward recognizing the problem.

LAWLER: You are leaving out the spate of books by scientists which dismiss and even mock religion.

KELLY: There are fundamentalist atheists, just as there are fundamentalist Christians. The real conversation will happen in the middle and not at the extremes.

LAWLER: But how do you kick-start a more mature debate?

KELLY: My view of technology as holy is a minority view. Right now, technology is either the devil, or, if it’s embraced, it’s called neutral. Nobody is saying that it’s divine. An alternative view is not going to sweep the country overnight. It will require people smarter and deeper than me to work it out. Right now I’m a church of one.

The dogs would start it. Their frenzied barks, their teeth gnashing against the glass of the back door, would draw my husband out of bed and into his jeans in a single motion. In the mudroom, he would stumble through a sea of writhing canines, pull on his boots with one hand and turn the knob with the other. Two aging Aussies and a half-blind border collie mix would spill out into the dark yard and charge toward the goat pen. They would make it halfway before stopping dead in their tracks and high-tailing it back to the porch. Herb would hear the screams then, the desperate cries for help. He would fumble in the doorway for the porch light, two-stepping with the returning dogs, and there, his sleep-riddled mind would already be drawing conclusions so swiftly it would feel, he would say later, like pure instinct.

And here I should point out that my husband, despite his profession, is a man who could have been born into the Paleolithic—the kind of guy who has built a life sustained by wildness more than any other element. After college, Herb left Michigan for the West and never looked back. On the other side of the Continental Divide he found the kind of unfettered topography that he needed—for he’s a man who is happiest when ambling over great stretches of soil or stone. He loves the basics, the way they ignite his senses: The procurement of food, shelter, warmth. The silky curves of women, skylines, rivers. Then there is his deeply held belief that he is a sort of Dr. Dolittle; and indeed, I have been witness to his extraordinary ability to communicate with animals. Domestic or untamed, creatures of all sorts seem to enter quickly into some kind of understanding with him.

It is this latter quality that explains why my husband’s guns have never been loaded—despite the fact that we have made our home in one of the more wild parts of the West, where black bears, mountain lions, bobcats, and elk are as common as livestock. Where large tracts of untrammeled public land still eclipse both alfalfa fields and subdivisions of “ranchettes.” Herb had stored in various places a .22 Smith & Wesson six-shooter, a 12-gauge shotgun, and three rifles in .22, .30-06, and 7 mm magnum calibers—an inheritance from his grandfather, who had been an avid hunter in both the Great Lakes region and in Africa. All but the .22s had lain in their cases since his grandfather had died nearly eleven years prior—and those two firearms had only been used to shoot beer cans off fence posts on the occasional Sunday afternoon. Looking back, I think we both took a certain pride—and a smug one at that—in having no need for guns in what is largely a gun-toting community of roughneck ranchers, folks who let loose bullets daily on coyotes and prairie dogs.

So it is mind-boggling that Herb would conclude as he did on that night. Call it a natural impulse, or call it one of the ill effects of living in a culture steeped in sensational news and violent movies, but his mind instantly crafted the assumption that the hair-raising cries coming across the dark yard were of human origin. Somehow, he decided—in our critter-laden, outback of a neighborhood that sits seven miles from a tiny, low-crime kind of town—that some heinous, unspeakable assault was being committed by one deranged human upon another. And as he charged away from the now-cowed dogs into the colorless void that lay beyond the porch light’s glare, his brain illuminated with one white, shining thought: This is what the world has come to. Standing empty-handed in the inkwell of night, he was ready to face squarely some malevolence in his own species.

Herb turned, detouring away from the pen and into an adjoining shed, where he flipped on the light and took quick inventory of several of his grandfather’s firearms. He then knelt to rummage for ammunition in a random collection of boxes. This took some doing—my husband is not the most organized of men. And in the process he failed to hear the intruder climb back over the imposingly tall fence that contained the goats and circle around the shed. It was only as he realized that the cartridges that matched these particular firearms were elsewhere that he heard the padding approach behind him. He stood and turned. On the threshold, only four feet away, stood a three-hundred pound black bear.

Our daughter, Ruby, and I were not there that night—and in hindsight, as well as in the spirit of thinking so fundamentally about things, I can’t decide if that was a good or a bad thing. Would our presence have changed in any way Herb’s course of action, or the bear’s? Would the dogs have been more aggressive? And what might I have done to alter the outcome? Through countless replays of the situation, Herb and I would be reminded that variables come in many hues, and each one has the potential to change the overall effect—the way Warhol’s varied silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe changed the essence of the subject simply by changing the colors. Of course we also have to consider that we can only see things through the lens we were born peering into—while other species are able to perceive things entirely invisible to the human eye.

The bear stalled on the threshold for a moment, and my husband stalled briefly too, before realizing he could not possibly summon a single word of conversation with what stood before him. For the first time in his life, Herb was tongue-tied. When he finally spoke (Yo, dude, unbelievably), the bear fixed his gaze on him and took a step forward. Fortunately, Herb had been training to bench-press 315 pounds in honor of his fortieth birthday, and so, rather than continuing the conversation, he lunged at the half-open door and heaved his body against it—effectively shoving the bear back outside. The bear stood there for a few minutes, then shuffled across the driveway and into the woods.

Not man, but beast. Of course. Herb’s mind quickly reconfigured to what should have been his first impression all along: big animal with teeth and claws has found easy food in what had been a rather unforgiving emergence from the winter den—the late frosts having nipped springtime staples such as young forbs and grasses. Meanwhile, our daughter’s pet goat, a white, bottle-fed Nubian named Dora the Explorer, was still screaming. And at last Herb recognized the wails as hers.

Curiously, the dogs remained on the porch, not uttering a sound. When Herb exited the shed and headed for the house, he made note of the quiet, for three dogs barking in unison has always been enough to keep wild animals at bay. He hadn’t even made it ten feet from the shed when the bear re-emerged from woods. Herb scrambled back inside and waited. When he opened the door a second time, the bear stepped out again and came right at him. The two repeated this pas de deux over the course of an hour. It was sometime during those sixty minutes that the goat ceased her cries.

PERHAPS THE REASON Herb failed to grasp the situation more quickly was the same reason our dogs were so quiet: they were stymied by the bear’s unlikely behavior, its seemingly sheer fearlessness, its clearly predatory intent—for these are not attributes we see in the wildlife on our mesa. Here, seated between the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks of the San Juan Mountains and the red canyons and rivers of the Colorado Plateau, there is still a great deal of food and space for humans and animals alike. Unlike their cousins trying to eke out a wild lifestyle within the slim margins of the nation’s national parks, and unlike those poor ursines who have had the misfortune of claiming turf near dense populations of humanity, our black bears have had the luxury of keeping almost exclusively to themselves.

There were explanations: Perhaps the bear was sick. Or maybe it was a juvenile orphaned before learning how to acquire food properly. But it’s also possible that this bear was part of an escalating and global trend—for some biologists say animals everywhere appear to be changing in new and unsettling ways. One recent study concluded that human impacts are forcing animals to evolve at a pace three hundred times faster than they would naturally. And there is evidence to support that the traits affected are not only size and reproductive capacities, but behavior too. David Baron, author of The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature, contends that some regional trends in cougar attacks are “upward and exponential.” Boulder, Colorado, is his prime example—where an environmentally minded populace has sought to live closer to nature by building homes on the “edge,” the transitional area between forest highlands and desert plains. A zone where deer feed. And where lions hunt. The equation has been disastrous for everyone. The deer overpopulated in backyards while the big cats began stalking, mauling—and sometimes killing—a relatively significant number of household pets and humans. Of course the offending cats were destroyed. But here’s the kicker: whenever a guilty lion was removed from an area, others quickly moved in—only to exhibit the same new tactics.

Add to this global scenario of changing behavior the ill effects of climate change. Barren-ground grizzlies, for example, have faced a diminished supply of coastal plain plants—a food source that is dwindling in a warming Arctic. Without this essential nutritional source, the bears have been forced to alter their foraging and feeding habits, and some have become malnourished in the process. One such grizzly recently killed and consumed two experienced Alaska bush backpackers who, in the opinion of the investigating officer, “did most everything right” in their efforts to deter bears from their camp.

Given this new context, it is probably inappropriate to say that such predator behavior is aberrant; rather, these animals are adapting fittingly to a drastically altered environment. There’s irony here: the more humans coif the natural world to our liking, the more we push out into the last wild places for recreation and real estate, the more we are finding ourselves back on the food chain—as a menu item. Herb and I are complicit in this twenty-first-century showdown between wildlife and people; the five-acre parcel we purchased for a home site had been a bull pasture until the rancher subdivided it to subsidize his retirement. The east half of the property is hemmed in by neighboring pastures of grass and alfalfa—a scene utterly bucolic, punctuated by the brays of livestock. The backside of the property is altogether different. A woodland of oak, pinyon, and juniper slopes down to a lush creek-bottom lined with cottonwoods, wild iris, and tall grasses. The draw carved by the creek begins high on the forested uplands to our south and serves as a natural corridor for wild ungulates that move between desert lowlands in winter and high mountain meadows in summer. The predators—black bear, mountain lion, bobcat, and coyote—all follow suit. Our eight-hundred-square-foot house sits smack dab on the dividing line of these two worlds—and depending on which way you turn when you walk out the door, the rules for how to behave, what to watch for, can be very different.

RUBY AND I RETURN home the day after the bear’s visit, and already Herb’s story has spread across the mesa like a runaway ditch fire. Like so many small towns in the West, we’re a mixed group here—a blend of traditional rural folk and transplants who have fled cities and suburbs alike. For weeks afterward, I am reminded of the dichotomy between the two camps; each time I am asked to recount the story on Herb’s behalf, I receive one of two pat responses.

The New West: Did he try and talk to the bear? Did he project peaceful energy?

The Old West: Hope he shot the son-of-a-bitch.

To each individual, I nod. Yes, he did try to communicate. And yes, he shot it.

The double affirmative isn’t duplicitous. In terms of philosophy and aesthetic sensibilities, it is easy to side with the New West’s romantic notions about preserving natural landscapes and living in and among wildlife. But the old-timers have a point. They largely blame the newcomers, who flock to places like Telluride (a resort town thirty-four miles to the east), where predominantly well-heeled, left-leaning residents supported the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s termination of the spring bear hunt. The town’s abundant PETA enthusiasts and Humane Society donors also applauded the prohibition of hounds for the remaining autumn hunt—deeming it a cruel example of unfair chase. In response, our enclave’s more traditional, rural crowd could be heard grumbling, Now them bears are thick as thieves . . .

It’s true that resort towns in the West tend to have the biggest bear problems. Garbage cans, greasy barbeques, and bowls of pet food get left out by individuals who tend to be rather naïve about wildlife. When the bear comes sniffing for easy extra calories (in late summer a black bear must consume 20,000 calories a day in order to survive winter hibernation), such folks snap pictures when they should be clanging pans or throwing rocks—actions which, with a healthy, unconditioned bear, are almost always enough to scare it off. For minor first offenses, wildlife officers will tranquilize a bear, punch an ID tag through its ear, and relocate the animal—to places with more open country, places like my neighborhood, where they become our problem (and perhaps this was the case with Herb’s visitor). But in severe cases, or repeat offenses, the bears are put down with a big-caliber bullet—executions that are all on the taxpayer’s dime.

Bear stories like Herb’s linger on our tongues, in our imaginations, like erotica. They are titillating precisely because they are the closest that most of us come to igniting the ancient physiological and psychological tinder of the predator-prey relationship that lies dormant in the human body. (Come get me, Mommy! I see the glowing embers in my daughter’s eyes, hear the quickening of her breath, when she asks me to chase her.) And perhaps this is why the cause to protect North America’s predators is so feverish; and why it is equaled in pitch only by the efforts to exterminate them. Each side is glaring, garish even, in its shriek of righteousness—and so it is with bears the way it is with everything else: we respond from a black-and-white paradigm, the potent dualities of us versus them resound with a faint, prehistoric echo. Instead of man against weather, or man against beast, though, it’s Republicans vs. Democrats, tree-huggers vs. wise-users, Buddhists vs. Bible thumpers. The appeal of such binary thinking is that we are able to name not only who we are, but also what we are not. We draw the dividing line like a firebreak, and it holds back the advancing enemy while we retreat to safer ground.

But I am the descendant of rural ranchers on one side and artists, scholars, mountaineers, and businessmen on the other. As a daughter of the American West—both the old version and the new—what I have felt about my homeland could easily be characterized as a form of cultural schizophrenia, a psychic swing between my frontier-busting forebears and my Patagonia-clad, Sierra Club card–carrying contemporaries. For many years, I chose a side—shoring up my persona by way of education (higher), occupation (both as a national park ranger and as a paid public lands advocate for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance), and recreation (bourgeois style, like rock climbing, river running, and skiing). And as I grew into this role, I grew apart from the other side of my family and their cowboy ways. I kept them at arm’s length with a subtle (so I thought) sense of superiority. Feeling right served as a shield for my own mind—which felt like it would shatter if I attempted a mental straddle between two worlds.

What I missed was this: hunting is a vital part of life for both sides of the family—whether it’s hooking rainbow trout to grill for a streamside Mother’s Day brunch, shooting antelope to complement the garden harvest feast at summer’s end, or plucking pheasants to roast alongside the Thanksgiving turkey. For such events my mother’s and my father’s sides still sometimes come together—the men combining efforts to bring home animal flesh, the women uniting in the kitchen to cook it. The universal acts of procuring and preparing our sustenance have always served as our species’ most common denominator—and among my kin, they have always made faint all other disparities.

BY CALLING THROUGH the shed window, Herb finally got our most geriatric dog, Jack, to come off the porch just far enough to distract the bear while he made a break for the house. For an old guy, the Aussie put on quite a show, and Herb finally got the head start he needed. He and all three dogs just squeaked inside the house; when they turned to look back through the glass, they saw the bear’s snout pressed up against it.

The creature pawed at the door, attempting entry. Herb dashed to the bedroom closet, grabbed from the top shelf the only gun kept in the house—the .22 revolver, complete with cartridges. Not that this particular gun could have done much harm—for a bear, a perfect shot would still be nothing more than a bee sting. But Herb was thinking more complexly by this point. There was no time to call for help from the neighbors, and the nearest law enforcement was, at best, twenty minutes away. Besides, he wanted to get to the goat. He was banking on the fact that if the impact of the shot didn’t scare off the bear, its report would.

Herb beckoned the two younger dogs, and together the three of them sneaked out the back entrance and crept up on the bear, which was still on the front porch, facing off with Jack through the glass door. Herb got as close as he could, and as the bear turned in his direction, he fired a round at the animal’s underbelly—the only place a low-caliber bullet could have any kind of impact. Before Herb could blink, the bear turned and disappeared into the dark of the woods, black devoured by black. Then he headed to the goat pen to retrieve Dora’s flayed body.

It wasn’t the best scenario; the bear was still alive. It could come back for its kill—or for Herb. Nevertheless, Herb was momentarily relieved. His strategy had been a serious gamble—for the animal could have turned on him just as quickly as it had fled into the woods. I can imagine my husband at that moment, contemplating all that was happening along with that which might have been: his jaw would have been set like a steel trap. And yet, the encounter would have resulted in bright eyes, flushed skin, and a larger-than-life grin—indications that an ancient, inner sense of vitality had been pricked.

Herb was adamant that we not tell Ruby, who was only three and a half at the time, what had happened to her goat. He begged me to speak euphemistically—to say that Dora got sick and passed on. But I knew our daughter would see that something was wrong. I thought it worse to lie to her, to undermine her intuitive perceptions by telling her that things were not what they seemed. Besides, to deny the bloody realities of animals eating animals—including our family’s consumption of meat—would only distance my daughter from her budding relationship with the natural world. I needed to believe Ruby could handle the fact that something had tried to eat her goat. Just as I was banking on the fact that she would be able to face on her dinner plate the elk I hoped to shoot in the fall, the chickens we had raised and would butcher, and be able to eat both with reverence, gratitude, and delight.

And so I tell her.

She cries.

And after her initial outburst of grief, her pale, tearstained face blooms red with fury: “I hate that bear, Mommy. Bears are bad, bad, bad.” I think then that maybe Herb had been right. Maybe this is too much for her. But it is too late to recant.

“We can be sad for Dora, sweetheart. And we can be sad for the bear too—because if he’s still alive, he will probably be destroyed.”

Yes, and yes again. I hold my breath and wait for some sort of resolution.

For the next two days, we find the bear’s tracks, punctuated with small splats of blood, encircling our fenceline. The local game warden surmises that the single, small round Herb put in the animal will probably fester in the gut—eventually killing it. On the third day, the bear returns in the middle of the night and digs up Dora’s body—which had been buried three feet deep beneath a big rock slab at the far edge of the property. And then we never see sign of him again.

For several weeks, Ruby acts out the drama of goat and bear with her toys, and each night at bedtime asks me to repeat the story of what happened. One night, she awakes in terror. Shaking, howling, she scrambles onto my lap and tells me she had dreamed that a bear was trying to kill her. I think of Carl Jung, who suggested that the image of the bear in the unconscious is a representation of one’s own potency. To run from a bear in your dreams is to flee from your own potential. To turn and face such an animal is to reckon with the Other—not just its beloved aspects but also that, perhaps especially that, which is wild, ravenous, even terrifying—and with the parts of our own wildness that we fear more with each passing generation, with each species’ extinction, with each acre of land razed.

I tell Ruby that if the bear comes again, she must stand her ground, ask it what it wants. I stroke her strawberry-blond curls as she falls back asleep. A few hours later, she wakes again, whimpering.

“Mommy, the bear came back, and when I asked him what he wanted, he said he was hungry. So I gave him a carrot.”

Ruby is no longer terrified, but tentative. She falls back into sleep, and I am still sitting next to her when she starts to giggle. Then she sits straight up, her eyes shining in the pewter moonshower falling through the window.

“Mommy, the bear came back, and this time he looked just like Winnie-the-Pooh!”

For a moment, I cringe at my daughter’s reduction of a wild creature to a cartoon character. But then I see that she has, on a deep level, bent the bear into something she can manage—and in this way she has digested her conflict with the animal and its deeds. Afterward, I notice in my daughter a deeper appreciation for the animals around her—she loves them more than ever. And yet: she now holds a realistic and healthy respect for those that have the potential to harm her.

I LEARN MORE SLOWLY than my daughter. The day after her dream a neighboring rancher stops by to inquire if we’ve seen the bear around. He whistles at the claw marks on the shed’s threshold and has a good laugh at Herb’s small pistol. But, as the new long-haired attorney on the mesa, my husband scores points for having a gun at all—and a few more for being willing to use it. And when, in order to prove his adequacy, he pulls out his 7 mm mag, the rifle his grandfather had used for killing Cape buffalo, he really gets a slap on the back. “Next time son, you drop that bastard dead in his tracks.”

Herb just shrugs and smiles. I, however, feel compelled to interject my belief that we don’t want to kill interloping bears—that we merely want to keep them at bay. The rancher cocks his frayed ball cap and juts his grizzled chin at me.

“Notice how the bear that paid your husband a visit thought nothing of your three dogs? That’s because you nature lovers thought you were doin’ right for the bears by making it illegal to hunt ‘em with hounds. Now you got bears strollin’ right by dogs, into backyards and barnyards, with no fear at all. ”

Facing my neighbor, I feel a powerful impulse to pull back. This is where civil convention dictates that I silently agree to disagree, that I make some remark about the weather. Later, I can air my opposition among like-minded people who will fan my flames of indignation. Emboldened by their passionate agreement, I’ll feel justified in penning letters to the editor, e-mails to the Division of Wildlife—any venue that is capable of presenting the issue in black and white, any venue that is impersonal enough to isolate my beliefs from my neighbor’s.

And yet. In Aspen, during a two-week period this past summer, a bear sauntered right through a fur salon, another broke into a house and attacked the owner, and another bit into a woman’s thigh while she lay sleeping on her deck. During the same time frame, a bear broke into a steel enclosure down the road from our house, killing five Shetland sheep and maiming two others—only to return in broad daylight for more. Three days after the offending bear was trapped and removed, another one moved in and killed three additional sheep. And in the nearby tourist town of Ouray, at least two more bears ate an elderly woman who, every evening for years—despite harsh reprimands from state and local officials—had watched from a fenced-in porch as bears came into her yard to feed on the dog chow she set out for them. The coroner’s report concluded that the woman had been dragged out of her makeshift observation cage and devoured by the very animals she fed.

Standing on my own bear-clawed threshold, I am caught in the spell of a familiar misanthropy, only this time I begin to sense how it stunts my understanding of the world. And suddenly I find myself willing to consider my neighbor’s perspective, to extend an open-mindedness toward his knowledge and experience that I haven’t even granted my own rural family members. It comes down to this: by retreating from that which we oppose, we render lifeless all opportunities for intimacy, and for community. To smile and step away is as fatal to possibility as is brandishing a finger of blame.

And so after a long, awkward silence I offer my neighbor a seat on the porch and a cold beer. Then I lean forward. I seek luminosity—the deep bruise of blue that hung on the fence alongside the man’s coyote hides, complemented by the soft rose of empathy that emanated as he knelt in my goat pen the summer before, showing me how to revive two kids half dead with scours. I was new to goatkeeping then. With my young animals, my neighbor was as tender and gentle as I’ve ever seen a man. And in eyeing these two tints of him at once, I find a newfound level of humility reflecting back.

“Tell me,” I say, haltingly, “how you would restore the equilibrium.”

“For starters,” he says, “git yourselves some outside working dogs—no more welfare critters. Then load one of them bigger guns you got there and for godssakes, keep it where you can use it.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” But perhaps it isn’t brains so much as courage—the courage to say yes, and yes again. At the very least, I am learning to bring into singular focus my double-edged essence. For if my preschool-age daughter can behold the whole of each animal, then surely the rest of us can embrace two seemingly opposing elements with every nuance, every context, every color in between.

We’ll need a language of delicacy to articulate such complex thoughts and feelings—one that can carry us across the muddy mire of moral, spiritual, political, and environmental ambiguities. And if we wield our words with heartfelt compassion and respect, it just might be enough to repair the psychic fissures we have suffered in this age of sharp divisions.

Now, I keep a loaded rifle within arm’s reach. We have two new dogs that roam our fenceline, day and night. And I find myself hoping that hounds will give chase during the next bear season. It’s not a contradiction to say all this—and then to say I am still rooting for the bears, for their rightful place on our mesa, and across the remaining wildlands in the West. Indeed, as my family prepares for the rigors of the autumn elk hunt in the Colorado high country, I am reminded that it is no small thing to inhabit our place on the carnivorous continuum—a place where we not only consume animals, but in turn consent to the possibility of being consumed. This place, an edge of sorts, awakens us to our biological inheritance, and we become viscerally, sensually invested in our surroundings and their ability to sustain us.

These adjustments to my view of the world have not made me a more typical westerner; nor have I become a more conventional environmentalist. But if our model of advocacy, no matter what the cause, requires that we stridently defend our territory without leaning across the fence to consider, wholeheartedly, another view, if we cannot embrace the Other in both its delightful and repelling pigments, then the world has little chance to be spared. For this is what it means to forge meaningful conduits between our existence and every other bit of biota. Swallowing the spectrum whole is to devour the exquisite breadth of life. After all, diversity is the strength of a people. Of an ecosystem.

The hunter and the hunted. The Old West and the New. The wild and the tame. We must be lithe enough to stretch between.