(This is the first of a two-part feature.)

I would love to be able to write:

"These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

I cannot. Tyranny, like hell, may not be conquered at all. At least not by us as we are. We have had the life sucked out of us-gigantic blood-swollen ticks sucking at our hearts and heads. The statue with the big torch has burned us to ashes. We can no longer love nor feel nor even want nor hate. We will have to sink back into the clay again in order to form ourselves as men. That is how I will begin. Clay first, then men.

"Les choses etant ce qu'elles sont, les hommes sont ce qu'ils font."

The second floor of the Harvard CRIMSON. A young, liberal member of the Harvard Corporation is sitting on a broken, green leather chair, stuffing falling out all over. A dozen reporters watch eagerly with notebooks.

"Are you against the war?" I ask.

"Of course I am."

"What are you doing to end it?" Pause. "Why, nothing."

"The most revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exported classes: animals, trees, water, air, and grass."

Most of us are human racists. We think that the world was made for us. Some even think that we made the world (and therefore we can destroy it). Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden because they thought that it was all theirs. God was the first ecological revolutionary.

Roxanne O'Connell reports that 10,000 pelican chicks won't be born this year because pelican eggs are collapsing and killing the embryos. The mothers ingested DDT which upset their calcium metabolism. That caused them to lay thin-shelled eggs that could not support their weight. Pelican eggs collapsed in the rookeries all the way from Anacapa to Mexico. The pelican, the osprey, the cormorant, the petrel, the seagull, the American Bald Eagle and the peregrine falcon: all of their eggs are collapsing, the shells are too thin. No new generations are being born.

Near Lake Arrowhead, about ten per cent of the Ponderosa pines, about 1,300,000 trees, have died from the L.A. smog. Ponderosa pines reign over the Western forests. They're often two hundred feet all, with ten-inch-long needles. They are the oldest trees with the longest roots. In a sense, they hold the forest together. After a forest fire, grass begins to grow, which is soon replaced by bushes, like mountain mahogany and thimbleberry. Fast growing poplar trees shade out the bushes, like quaking aspens. After about a hundred years, the coniferous forest again dominates the area. Ponderosas are the ones that hold the soil to the land.

From the Old Mole: On the banks of the Mississippi below St. Louis, there are signs warning picnickers not to eat their lunch on or near the banks. The spray from the river contains typhoid, colitis, hepatitis, diarrhea, anthrax, salmonella, tuberculosis, and polio. It is an open sewer. If you place a fish in a container of river water, it will die in sixty seconds. Dilute the water a hundred times with clear water, and the fish will die in twenty-four hours.

The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has five categories for judging natural water resources. If a river is Grade "A," it is clean enough to drink. Grade "E" is an open sewer.