Like the beginning of the Pilgrim’s Crusade of 1095, my endeavor against the Nature Conservancy was conceived in naivetéé. It began with an article in the local paper, entitled, "EnergySolutions Gives The Nature Conservancy $200,000 for Boulder Watersheds Project". I knew only that EnergySolutions was a nuclear waste dumping company, and that The Nature Conservancy was an environmental group.

The dissonance created by this pairing got my attention. There had to be more going on, I thought, for such strange bedfellows to partner up

So I did my homework. At first, the more I dug, the more convinced I became that I would uncover a massive conspiracy. Although I had never been engaged in public activism, I was not shy about voicing my concerns. I called the Salt Lake Tribune, as well as other media outlets (including The Zephyr). I circulated a petition in support of a Town resolution asking The Nature Conservancy to give back the 200,000 dollars to EnergySolutions. I asked to be put on the Town Council agenda to present my case before the Council.

I also continued to gather information. As the date of the Council Meeting grew closer, my initial "take’’ of the situation changed. At first I thought that the exchange of funds between TNC and EnergySolutions had been a fluke, an error in judgment on the part of overzealous fundraisers. The reality was quite different. The Nature Conservancy is so completely controlled by corporate interests that to ask them to return EnergySolutions’ money was like asking a fish to stop drinking water. I discovered that on a relative scale of environmental dastardliness, EnergySolutions was fairly benign. From Big Oil (Every major US Oil Company contributes to TNC, and TNC has been conspicuously silent on such issues as ANWAR), to mining concerns like Rio Tinto and PhelpsDodge/MacMoRan Corp, (the largest mining companies in the world) to chemical producers like Dow (which owns Union Carbide), and Monsanto, The Nature Conservancy has gravitated to what could be described as the very worst environmental despoilers on the planet.

When I saw this, I knew that it would be impossible to get The Nature Conservancy to give the money back. But maybe I could still embarrass them through a Town resolution. Then I discovered that Steve Creamer, the CEO of EnergySolutions, had close ties to Boulder. One town council member had worked for him. With two others avowed Nature Conservancy supporters, that was three out of five against me. I had no hope of getting my resolution passed.

I moved on to Plan B. In the meantime, an article about my efforts appeared on the front page of the Tribune. The headline read, "Dirty Money or Green Donor?" I found the article to be surprisingly generous towards my position. However, it enraged members of the Boulder community with ties to The Nature Conservancy. The atmosphere became so poisonous that it began to have an effect on my personal life. So this is what it’s like to be an activist, I thought. What to do? I had come too far; I had to see this thing through.

The two days before the Town Meeting took on a surreal quality. I had shifted the focus of my presentation away from asking The Nature Conservancy to return EnergySolutions’ money. Instead I worked on proving the corporate nature of TNC, and asked why TNC was so interested in Boulder’s irrigation water. I checked facts, made sure my sources were documented, and agonized over all the details. Meanwhile, attempts were made to marginalize me. I was described as someone "bitter" because I could not afford to buy property in Boulder, and this sour grapes theory was offered as the real reason behind my outspoken opinions. I was accused of being a mean-spirited wrecker with a malicious desire to derail efforts to upgrade the library and provide hospice care for the community.

I was stunned by the attacks, but I reminded myself that I should have as expected as much in politics. I didn’’t take it personally, and at the same time, I decided to make some gesture to demonstrate that such attacks were unfounded.

The night of the meeting arrived. The Council ground through the agenda, and finally, my turn came. I presented a check to the director of the Community Alliance to show I was not opposed to humanitarian projects in Boulder. Then I launched into my talk. When I finished, I received a great round of applause from the townspeople crowding the chamber.

Next, the representative of The Nature Conservancy spoke. She said the "Boulder Watersheds Project" had been misnamed, and it really should have been named the "Boulder Farm Preservation Project". She said TNC had no interest in Boulder’’s irrigation water. Local Nature Conservancy supporters stood up and said they also had a desire for Boulder to remain agricultural, that they all supported a community-based, grassroots approach to town planning, and that they were against any thought of reallocating irrigation water.

I responded by saying I was glad my suspicions were unfounded, and that I was willing to work with anyone to preserve Boulder’s agricultural lifestyle. All of the tension and animosity of the preceding days vanished, and we all seemed to be pulling in the same direction.

Thus my first foray into politics somehow ended on a positive note. However, this sort of thing is never really over. One of the more ironic consequences of my campaign was that I had given some people ideas about how to develop their property! Supporters of my efforts spoke seriously about whether a golf-course/housing development in Boulder was economically feasible. If it was, they wanted to build one!

A friend of mine and I went for a camping trip in the far reaches of the San Rafael Swell. There, fifty miles of torturous dirt track from the nearest blacktop, we took stock of what had happened over the course of the past month, and I realized what I was dealing with. It wasn’t a stark contrast between Good and Evil, or between the Big Corporations and the Little Guy. If there was any conflict at all, it was between different ways of experiencing reality.

Like most Americans, I had been trained to perceive the world through certain cultural filters. I had gone on, in my early adulthood, to pursue the level of material prosperity that I had been told would somehow solve all my problems. I worked hard to acquire skills that would enable me to attain that goal, and I was well on my way when a series of incidents occurred that wrenched me out of that paradigm and into one that replaced the goal of material gain with one of inner peace and personal freedom. I discovered that the less I had, the more serene and free I became. When I observed that the mad chase for material wealth was unsustainable from an ecological point of view, that added another, more practical reason to my pursuit of "How Little Do I Need?" At one point, I determined to live for one year without money. It was harder than I thought (not in the sense of hardship, but because it is almost impossible not to acquire money- it’s almost as easy as breathing!). However, I came close enough to know that I didn’t need money, or the system created around it, to survive comfortably and with a certain style.

Another series of life experiences brought me back into the cash economy, but my fundamental paradigm had not shifted. I didn’t believe in the dominant material worldview, and yet somehow, I had forgotten that I saw things differently than others did.

Thus, my consternation when I saw that The Nature Conservancy accepted money from environmental destroyers. It had taken me a long time, but I had learned how to live within my means, within a balance. If at some point, my manner of living began to take too much effort to sustain, my strategy was to decrease my living requirements until a balance was achieved. The idea of borrowing money and then slaving nine-to-five to pay it back, buying something new just because everyone else had one, or even spending a minute worrying about what people thought of my lifestyle choices was utterly foreign to me. Why should I work so hard as a virtual slave for all of that shiny stuff when I could learn to make something that worked just as well, or fix a broken one for free? Why should I pay rent or a mortgage (which literally means "a promise to the death"), when I could live on the land for free? Why should I pay taxes to support the world’s largest death machine when I could be a free person with no overlord by working for myself and slipping between the cracks of the cash-free economy?

I lived in a different reality, one where the basic presumptions and the logical conclusions were so foreign that the actions of others were as incomprehensible to me as mine were to them. But I had forgotten that there was such a difference, and the fault therefore was mine when I began to make value judgments in a public forum. Just because I could see that collaboration between environmentalists and corporations was wrong didn’t mean others saw it that way. In effect, I had accused others of living the wrong reality, and if I had prejudicial terms for the denizens of that world; "Death-kultur-klones", "Consumers", "Babylonians", then they had theirs for me; "Dirty bush-hippie", "Irresponsible Bum"," Drifter".

It’s incredibly hard to separate someone from her preferred reality. It takes generations of oppression, and heavy-handed tactics like genocide, the kidnapping of children, who are then sent to re-education camps (boarding schools), the suppression of mother tongues, etc. If those are the tactics a dominant culture has to use in order to change a worldview, what chance did I have to change anyone by speaking out at a town meeting? As my fiancéée kept telling me, "Loch, people just think you’re a crank."

But……what if I was right……at least on an ecological level? Well, then events would prove it over time. By living within my means, and reducing how much resource I needed, no one could dispute the fact that my living had a smaller impact on the planetary system. And if everyone reduced, well, then the aggregate human impact would obviously be reduced.

But if the philosophy of resource command defined the world of those around me, and if the answer to an unsustainable lifestyle was to increase one’’s consumption in an effort to maintain the status quo, then one’s impact on the natural system would be magnified in quantum terms. If everyone lived by such a philosophy, then the unsustainability is so patently obvious that it would require some serious self-delusion to ignore the lemming-cliff yawning in front of the human experience.

All tools of the modern world; money, credit, compound interest, capital, the legal system, armies, hierarchies, corporations, technology, institutional pedagogy, are designed to increase humankind’s ability to apply leverage for the ever-increasing command and exploitation of resources. In today’s global economy, everyone is enmeshed in the web created by these tools. The pressure to live by the logic of the mercantile economy is so intense that no one can escape it, at least on a day-to-day level.

This dominant paradigm has become so entrenched that it exists as a self-perpetuating system. How does one live in any manner that is tied to the land, managing some kind of balance? I had a long conversation with a rancher who had been forced to sell his grazing permits, and who now contemplated the economic weapons of those who might want his irrigation water. "It’’s the big squeeze," he said. "The trouble is, at some point you realize that if you don’t sell out, they’’ll just take it all anyway……it’s an offer you can’t refuse."

For almost everyone on the planet, to live within this system means that one has no choice but to live in a manner that is inherently unsustainable. The very concept of money is based on the principle of resource exploitation. You have to get the gold from somewhere! Profit, on the fundamental level, represents all I have taken beyond my own needs. Wealth can be defined similarly, as that excess stored away beyond the amount I can expect to use in the foreseeable future.

I have seen a bumper sticker that reads, "What isn’t grown has to be mined." Usually the people who sport such sayings are supporters of extractive industries, but it really is the truth of all existence on earth. Computers and information and stock markets don’t "create" wealth. They merely manipulate it for the purposes of greater extraction and exploitation. Humans grow from the earth. Thus, like corn or cows or copper, they are a resource to be exploited, not because the exploiters are evil, but because the exploiters have no choice. The system we created and which we make real through our belief in it makes exploiters out of us all.

So, as I looked out over the frozen wave of the San Rafael, arrested in mid-crash upon the vast expanse of desert a thousand feet below, I knew the problem wasn’t The Nature Conservancy, or corporations, or greedy developers, or any other "other" group at all.

The only way to survive in this system is to gain control of more resources than one needs, and more than the next guy. It’s called "profits" or "market share" or "global reach" or "world power." It filters all the way down to me, when I say I won’t work for ten dollars an hour, but I will for thirteen. In my year without money, I worked hard every day for nothing, but now that I live in the cash economy, I find I am unable to do so. The developer who comes to Boulder and builds a private golf community and lodge has no choice. He is required to take advantage of every opportunity to increase his footprint upon the environmental fabric of the planet, or else he will get swallowed up by the very unsustainability he has created, and which snaps at his heels, no matter how fast he runs.

Every problem the world faces is the result of a paradigm that argues that the solution is more of the same. Poor people have more children in order to escape the poverty caused by overpopulation. Carbon exchange trades work only because new carbon belching power plants are being built every day. Ethanol fuel is impossible without a fossil fuel input greater per unit than the ethanol produced. The Nature Conservancy exists only because people need to fool themselves that saving half of something is better than saving all of it. And I think, ultimately, most people would save all of Boulder, or any other beautiful place if they could, but we all run desperately in the midst of a stampeding herd, and it’s all we can do to keep up in an effort to avoid being crushed underfoot. In this reality, saving half is the best anyone can do.

I cannot think of anything that will cause a critical mass of the earth’s population to voluntarily revert to a world-view that places an emphasis on balance and the choice to cut back when necessary to regain balance. My own experience reminds me that I didn’t shift my reality without the help of extremely painful and catastrophic life events. As long as the current state of affairs remains, I expect to watch Boulder become developed. There are so few places left to exploit that it is impossible for Boulder to escape notice. If the current players don’t take advantage of what is a golden opportunity for profit, then someone bigger, wealthier, and more powerful will arrive to take their place. Given the global system, I can see why these people are in favor of saving half and developing half. At least this way, they can make their profit with what approximates a clear conscience, since it is impossible to conceive of survival outside of profit-making.

What little I know of history tells me that there is no way to change anyone’s reality, much less that of an entire global population. All such change must come from within, individual by individual. I find myself looking forward to the cataclysms predicted by everyone from the Virgin Mary to Joseph Smith to Al Gore. Such uncontrollable changes in the outer world might be humankind’s only hope for helping us change our inner worlds. This may be what it takes to show us that we can find happiness in balance, and that "a little bit less" is more satisfying than "a little bit more".

Loch Wade lives ‘with a little bit less’ in Boulder, Utah.