LIVING IN HARMONY WITH THE EARTH

by Gordon Solberg (PeaceAware.com)

I have combined and updated some of my 1999 essays. I am promoting a radically basic way of life here that won’t work for most people at the present time. But it can work very well for those who are attuned to it. The only way to avoid total environmental catastrophe is to change the dominant socio-economic system. Since most people are not willing to change voluntarily, a major depression is the most likely agent of change, at which time this way of life will suddenly make a LOT of sense.

FUTURE TRENDS

Although it is impossible to predict the future in detail, I think we can map out some general trends, and they aren’t pretty. Here are some safe bets: overpopulation will get much worse, the destruction of the biosphere will become even more extreme, the rich will continue to get richer at the expense of everyone else, the government will continue to have a severe case of “rot at the top” (and will continue to wage war on the Earth, the economy, and the middle class), decadence will increase as society as we knew it continues to degenerate, and the worship of wealth, technology, and power will remain the de facto religion of the American mass culture.

This sounds like a grim scenario, but I think it’s necessary to face up to reality if we seriously expect to do anything about it. There are positive trends occurring as well -- the ongoing empowerment of women is an outstanding example -- and hopefully these positive changes will have a cumulative, and transforming, effect.

For the present time, “full speed ahead and damn the consequences” remains the unspoken policy of the global ruling class. It remains to be seen if we can sufficiently change the destructive momentum of our species in time to avert the ecological catastrophes that await us if we don’t.

MODERN AMERICA

The typical American lifestyle is amazingly out-of-balance compared to how the rest of the world lives. The lifestyle of an upscale American family is an excellent example of consumerism gone berserk. If you add together all the money they have invested in infrastructure (house(s), cars, electronic equipment, appliances, etc.), add to this the amount of energy they use each year, and add to this the amount of money they spend for all living expenses, including entertainment and travel, what you end up with is the equivalent on an entire Third World village! This helps to put the upscale, Earth-destroying American lifestyle into a more realistic perspective.

In the same way that degenerative diseases (cancer, heart disease, arthritis) are caused by eating too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans are suffering from a spiritual disorder caused by living in an overabundant, super-high-speed, hyper-materialistic, radically individualistic culture that has tragically lost its way. There is simply too much of everything -- too much stuff, too much change, too much information (most of it trivial and/or lies), and it’s all happening much too fast. (We were designed for a much slower pace of life.) People complain that their lives are out of control; they are so caught up in the helter-skelter of modern life that they have lost touch with who they really are or would really like to be.

However, there are many people who are saying, “enough!” and are actively reclaiming their lives from the rampant mass hypnotism which has so powerfully infected mainstream culture. Trying to live in harmony with the Earth is so far out of the cultural “norm” that it’s easy to feel isolated. Which is a shame, because this is such an excellent way of life.

AN INTERESTING ERA

This is an interesting era in which to live. Back in the 70s, during the original “back to the land” movement, Americans were confronted with “stagflation” and two separate oil crises. People became fearful, and many went “back to the land” to avoid the “crash” we thought was imminent. (This is what I thought, too.) Then, along came the 80s and 90s, and a new era of artificially-induced “prosperity,” stimulated by unprecedented federal deficits and tax giveaways for the wealthy. Fear became passé, and large numbers of the “back to the landers” returned to a mainstream way of life. The lesson to be learned here is that a movement based on fear doesn’t have much staying power.

At first glance, the present era seems totally different from the 70s, but fundamentally nothing has changed but the details. The mainstream economy still rules. It has always been an unstable house of cards, predicated on the twin illusions of unlimited resources and infinite growth, and is based upon exploitation. It exploits not only Earth’s resources and natural systems, but it also exploits the “common people” (that’s you and me), who find it very difficult to defend ourselves from economic forces beyond our control. The Global Exploitation Economy takes what it wants without giving anything back, and eventually a day of reckoning will surely come.

What we see today is not a multitude of people “going back to the land” out of fear, like we saw in the 70s. (Most people these days are not going to do anything radically innovative like changing their lifestyle.) What I am promoting here is aimed at a smaller number of discerning people who choose a simpler way of life out of choice, not out of fear. This is a much more positive and long-lasting approach than the “fear orientation” of the 70s.

A SIMPLER WAY

Many people are choosing a simpler way of life not only for the economic benefits, but because it gives us the opportunity to have more control over the cultural blitz that continually assaults us (if we let it). By living more simply, we have more time to devote to our families, friends, and inner lives. We learn surprising things that mainstream America seems to have forgotten. For example, hard physical labor is not to be feared -- it keeps us strong and healthy -- and in fact, can be downright enjoyable.

As the years go by, I am very grateful for this simple lifestyle. I’m especially grateful for having the opportunity to devote so much of my time to things I really love, such as my family, my bees, my garden, my orchard, mist on the river at dawn, writing articles like this... the list is endless. It’s these positive aspects of life that I want to concentrate on.

I want to present a positive vision of a better way of life -- I call it forward to the land, because what we are really doing here is pioneering a totally new way of living, even though it has many ancient characteristics.

I want to take a holistic attitude towards life. For example, I’m interested not only in the “nuts and bolts” physical process of building a house, but in what we do after we build our dream homes. Do we plant gardens? Do we form drumming groups? Do we serve on the Volunteer Fire Department? Does building a natural home mean that we go on to live a natural lifestyle, and if so, what does this entail? I see homebuilding as a means to an end -- the end being the creation of a truly sustainable civilization in which we live, at long last, in harmony with the Earth and each other.

AN ANCIENT WAY OF LIFE

Sometimes when I’m feeling contemplative, this natural lifestyle (where birth and death are always close at hand) reminds me very much of Ecclesiastes. There is a depth, a gravity to that Book that I appreciate. It reminds me of real life. Consider some examples: The generations pass; the Earth abides. The wind blows to the north, and then to the south. The sun rises, and the sun sets. The rivers run to the sea and yet the sea is not filled. Our spirits are restless -- the eye is not satisfied with seeing, and the ear is not filled with hearing. The wise man has eyes to see, but the fool walks in darkness. Vainly we chase the wind. It is good to enjoy our food, our drink, and our work. We come from dust and return to dust. God has put eternity in our hearts. Life is a never-ending and fundamentally incomprehensible spiral of birth, death, love, hate, marriage, divorce, planting, harvesting, killing, healing, dancing, mourning, laughing, weeping, embracing, not embracing, casting away stones, gathering stones together.

There is a continuity, a connectedness, in all of that which stands in stark contrast to the superficiality of a mass culture in which our main task, other than to accumulate as much “stuff” as possible, is to remain thoroughly entertained at all times. It’s no wonder that so many people are feeling an unsatisfied soul hunger these days. I find strength in living what is in many ways an ancient way of life. I partake of age-old rituals -- I plant the seed, and it sprouts, grows, bears fruit, and feeds my family and myself. People have done this for millennia, and there is a rightness to it that I want to share here.

Hopefully, I will be able to at least point the way to this older, deeper, mode of being. I do not claim to have any “answers.” But I do have a lot of interesting information to share, and it will be an interesting read if you like this kind of stuff.

WE NEED A WAY OUT

There are people who say that American society has fragmented into many subcultures, and that there is no longer anything that can be called a “mainstream.” But we need to remember that these cultural differences are mainly at an intangible level. When it comes to the physical and financial infrastructure, the mainstream Monolith remains all-powerful (though very vulnerable to a technological, economic, or environmental “meltdown”). Despite their differences, the vast majority of Americans drive the same cars, buy gasoline at the same gas stations, buy their houses from the same developers, buy their groceries from the same supermarkets, buy their electricity from the same energy monopolies, shop in the same shopping malls, borrow money from the same banks, and work for the same corporations (until they get laid off).

This is a key reason why the environmental and sustainability movements remain so insignificant compared to where they need to be -- we are, all of us, far more compromised than we would ever like to admit. Our integrity level is far less than optimal. Getting out from under the Global Exploitation Economy is one of the most difficult tasks that we will ever face. It’s like Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby -- the more we struggle to escape, the stickier we get. We are so enmeshed within an Earth-destroying way of life, and everything is so tightly linked to everything else, that sometimes it’s difficult to even conceive of finding a way out.

Fortunately, there is a way out. It’s a slow process that requires a lot of grit and determination, but achieving a truly sustainable way of life is possible. We can do this individually, in the typical American manner, but it’s a lot easier (and a lot more fun) if we can do it with other people.

Here’s a statement by Tree Bressen in the Fall 1998 issue of Communities that I strongly resonate with: “Certainly I salute those who work in isolation or in the belly of the beast -- there is a place for all of us. However, I believe my place at this time is to join with a critical mass of others to create a genuinely alternative culture, which can make possible futures we haven’t even conceived yet.”

There are many excellent people working within the mainstream, and I deeply appreciate the good work they are doing. But this is an age of specialization, and my specialty is non-mainstream. I have always been drawn in exactly the opposite direction from the mainstream, and the older I get, the faster and farther in the opposite direction I want to go. I am always gratified to link up with other people who are on the same path.

A THEORY OF COMMUNITY

I have always believed that a truly natural lifestyle would include a strong element of community. We evolved as clan creatures, and we have a basic need for closeness and sharing with “our group.”

Self-reliance is all well and good, and is the first step to living a responsible life within the present social milieu. But once we’ve achieved self-reliance, then what? Do we sit in our isolated eco-castles, guarding our emergency food supplies with our assault rifles, or what? (This is a caricature, I know, but you get the point.) Whenever I hear people say, “Head for the hills and take plenty of ammunition!” I shake my head in wonderment that people can so totally miss the point of human existence.

When talking about community, it’s easy to become unrealistically idealistic. Since most of us were indoctrinated when young into a belief system that exalts “independence” above almost all else, we’ve got to work within this reality that has been imposed upon us. According to Communities magazine, most new communities fail their first year. I think this is because people who don’t know each other very well try to do too much, too soon. A more gradual approach might work better.

What I would like to promote could be called “realistic idealism” -- to be as idealistic as possible, but to always remember that we’re playing with a stacked deck. To be an American is to be mistrustful. It takes time -- and in some cases, a long time -- for people to earn each others’ trust.
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I have always wondered: wouldn’t it be fabulous if all the cool “sustainably and spiritually oriented” people I know could live within easy commuting distance of each other? Ideally, close enough so that they could bicycle to each other’s houses, and wouldn’t have to depend on automobiles for their everyday interactions. These would all be people of good will (with their faults, to be sure), but also with the aspiration to live lightly upon the Earth, and to spend a larger amount of time interacting with each other rather than sitting isolated in front of television or computer screens. This would be about as close to anarchy as you could get and still call it “community.” Some people call this “intentional neighborhood.” Yet I think that this kind of community, to the extent that the participants were committed to their ideals, could be a significant improvement over what the mainstream now offers.

The key element -- having people who share a similar philosophy in proximity to each other -- would allow a sense of community to grow slowly and organically over the years, as people interacted with each other -- borrowing tools, having potlucks and drummings, sharing gardening lore and excess veggies, watching each others’ kids, spontaneously dropping in on each other. Each individual event might not seem like all that big a deal, but the cumulative reality these events create could be profoundly different from the alienated mainstream culture.

Alienation is a funny thing. It doesn’t mean that people are coldly indifferent to each other. To the contrary, most Americans are friendly enough (at least here in the Southwest), but it’s usually in a superficial, noncommittal way. In an alienated culture, most relationships don’t mean anything -- there is little continuity through time, limited opportunities for relationships to develop and grow, and, sadly, no expectation that most relationships -- even those of the highest quality -- will be anything but temporary.

I saw this happen several times when Laura first went back to the university -- she would meet other women who she deeply connected with, but it was like the proverbial ships passing in the night: The context simply wasn’t there for exploring these promising relationships.

Of course, in most cases, people don’t want to have a deeper relationship with each other. Arm’s length is just fine, thank you! The advantage of the kind of “anarchic community” that I’m describing is that people aren’t forced into an artificial closeness with each other. Since they would be living in the same vicinity, it would be easy to seek each other out if the chemistry was there. Both socializing and solitude would be optional.

(I am not categorically rejecting a more tightly-organized community. At this point in time I am open to anything. But I think that realistically speaking, a looser organization -- such as people buying a big piece of land and dividing it among themselves -- might be more likely to succeed.)

It’s important for a community to be the right size. Ideally, it would be large enough to keep the energies mixing and flowing in a healthy way, but small enough so that everybody could have at least a nodding acquaintance with everybody else (the maximum size would be somewhere in the low hundreds, I would guess). Too large a group becomes too impersonal, but a group that’s too small runs the risk of becoming ingrown and stale.

Location is also an important factor. Large cities usually have creative, overlapping “scenes” -- a music scene, an arts scene, a spiritual scene, a sustainability scene, etc. A person often belongs to several scenes at the same time. But large cities are so big that the impact of these pockets of creativity is diluted by the sheer immensity and impermanence of the overall social environment. People get together temporarily for various events, and then go their separate ways. This seems to work fine for millions of people, but the type of community I’m talking about would have far more stability, continuity, and contact with nature, and this would imply living in the country, or perhaps in or near a small town.

CRESTONE

The Crestone, Colorado area is one spot I know of where this type of community seems to be developing.

Located on the lower slopes of the 14,000-foot Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado, an area approximately 6 miles long and 2 miles wide was subdivided in 1971 into hundreds of half-acres lots, and promoted as a retirement community. It’s a spectacular location, with rugged peaks towering to the east, and a sweeping 100-mile vista across the San Luis Valley to the west. But the isolated location, 8000-foot elevation (greenhouses are required to grow tomatoes during the summer), and cold winters tended to keep a lid on the “retirement bonanza” the developers had hoped for.

(Although Laura and I were drawn to Crestone and its inhabitants, we decided not to move there. The climate is too cold and harsh, and the town is too isolated for most people (including us) to make a living. But it is still a valuable real-life example of what is possible.)

Beginning in 1979, some visionaries who owned a large amount of real estate in the area decided to start donating parcels of land to religious organizations who would be willing to locate there. Crestone began to take on a more spiritual flavor. As the years went by, more and more people with a spiritual orientation were drawn to the Crestone area, and increasingly, as time went on, they built solar heated, Earth-friendly homes out of alternative materials like strawbale and papercrete. It’s a natural building wonderland.

The last I heard, there are about 800 people living there, and a large proportion of them have a “sustainable/spiritual” worldview. There are about a dozen spiritual centers located there -- Zen Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhist, Hindu, Roman Catholic, and a number of lesser-known organizations. There are enough people in the Crestone area to support a diverse business community -- stores of all sorts, restaurants, bed and breakfasts, healers of every description.

Lots are still very reasonable -- a typical price is $3000 for a half-acre -- and there is concern that Crestone’s pristine natural setting will be destroyed by too many people moving in.

My purpose for writing at such length about Crestone is not to be a Crestone booster but to point out that here is one locale where “community” of the type I am talking about seems to be developing. Of importance in Crestone is the interplay between the organized spiritual enclaves and the less-organized majority of individualistic people who live there. I think the area has the potential for some astounding developments -- if, for example, they decided to stop supporting archaic infrastructure investments from an earlier era (such as the golf course) and decided instead to get their community water system off the grid.

But there’s also something else, that hits me hard: Why aren’t there dozens of Crestone equivalents scattered all around the country? To be sure, there are comparative hotbeds of sustainable activity, like northern NM, northern CA/southern OR, or the whole state of Vermont. But I don’t know of anyplace else that has so many of this type of people concentrated in such a small area, with enough physical isolation so that their efforts aren’t diluted back into the mainstream.

SILVER CITY

At the present time I’m intrigued by Silver City, NM. This is a small, isolated, university town located in southwestern New Mexico. The Gila Wilderness is nearby. At 6000 feet, it’s high enough to be a bit cooler than the surrounding desert during the summer, but not too cold during the winter. It has a relatively high rainfall for this area, without the endless rains of some climates. It has a strong arts scene and a well-developed progressive/alternative community, including that all-important food co-op. The main disadvantage is high land prices. But large parcels, some including water, can be obtained for $1000 per acre, which is about as cheap as it’s going to get.

BONDING WITH THE LAND

A month ago, Laura, Neil and I were taking one of our favorite drives, between Nutt and Hillsboro. For sustainability and lifestyle reasons, we do a lot less driving than we used to, so there’s always a thrill and a feeling of expansiveness whenever we do hit the road. As we were driving along, I felt connected to the entire area, because I have made this drive so many times, during every season of the year, over a period of thirty years.

It was the prickly poppies that did it. Seeing those poppies triggered feelings that took me right back to 30 years ago, when I first made their acquaintance. It caused me to wonder: Feelings? Is the essence of life contained in something so evanescent as feelings? From the point of view of the beholder, it probably is. Most of us will agree philosophically that there is very much an objective reality, very hard and sometimes unbearably real. But as living creatures, what is really important to us is our subjective reactions to external events. Those prickly poppies are my friends. They give continuity to my life. They connect me to a vanished time, and they also remind me that they’ll still be there long after I’m gone.

When my wife of that era, Judy, and I moved to our first homestead in the Missouri Ozarks in 1970, I worked very hard at reprogramming my mind -- calculus, differential equations, “university intellectual knowledge” of all kinds went out; trees, forest, garden, wind, snow, rain, silence (lots of silence), went in. That first year, we lived on $500 (in 1970 dollars). We didn’t have clocks. We hunted and fished, raised goats and rabbits for slaughter, had a big garden. We read the Euell Gibbons books and learned to forage for wild foods and herbs. We took long walks in the woods. We read dozens of books from the local library, as well as Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalog. We expanded our minds. It was a fascinating lifestyle experiment. At an age when most of my contemporaries were locking themselves into their careers, I was burning my bridges as fast as I could.

When we moved back to our beloved New Mexico desert in 1973, my perceptions had changed. Before, when looking at the desert vegetation, I knew a few of the more obvious plants, like mesquite and creosote bush, but the rest of the plants were essentially a formless background mass. After I returned, every plant stood out in vivid detail. Such a zap it was to have literally every blade of grass saying (figuratively, of course), “Here I am!”

We climbed the highest hill next to our land and I felt frustrated. Surrounding me in a 360° arc was a bewildering jumble of hills, mountains, valleys and plains extending clear to the horizon. Many mountains were already familiar to me -- the Organs, the Robledos, the Doña Anas, the Black Range. But so many were strangers, and I wanted to know them all personally. How could I even begin?

We began by buying all the topographic maps for the surrounding area, and learning the names of all the mountains that have names. The mountains that didn’t have names, we named ourselves -- Pyramid Peak, Lonely Mountain, Grape Mountain (because we once ate grapes at the top of it). We hiked all the country for miles around, for the joy of being back in the desert, and from sheer youthful exuberance (we were in our 20s at the time, with lots of spare time and plenty of energy to burn). We would climb every mountain we could, and from each new vantage point, we would see our familiar territory from a new angle, plus there would always be new mountains to learn. Before long, we had learned every mountain in our area. We became “trackers of mountains.” Some people learn every nuance of animal tracks, but our specialty was mountains. In our travels we learned every mountain range to Tucson and beyond to the west, to Santa Fe to the north, and to the Great Plains to the east. (To the south was Mexico, and we never ventured any farther than Ciudad Juarez.)

We also made it a project to learn all the plants -- trees, shrubs, herbs, cactus, wildflowers. This is when I made my first acquaintance with the prickly poppies in 1973. Driving along the higher- elevation grassland areas on a cool, moist, cloudy day towards the end of rainy season, we saw hundreds of tall plants, covered with vivid white flowers, growing on the shoulder of the highway. A quick scan through our plant books revealed them to be prickly poppies, and I have associated them with that magical drive ever since.

Sometime I want to say more about developing a personal relationship, a private mythology, with the surrounding landscape. Every nook and cranny has a story to tell, and we can become part of that story.
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THE POWER OF ASPIRATION AND STRIVING

We’ve built our dream home, now what? We have a splendid orchard and garden, now what? We have our loving soulmate and family, now what? We have our supportive community, now what? We have our fulfilling creative outlets, now what? We have our walk with God, now what? There seem to be no laurels to rest upon in this world. Life seems to be an endless series of “now whats.”

Lately I’ve been noticing a theme. A friend recently said, “We’ve got the ‘how to’ aspect of life down pat, but we still barely know how to get along with each other, or how to live sustainably.” Barbara Kerr shared a similar thought in Earth Quarterly: “[What we need to regain] are ways of looking at life, ways of thinking about being.” It’s relatively easy to collect a bunch of lifestyle elements together -- house, garden, solar energy system, etc. -- but it’s the work of a lifetime to create a life that really works, that really feeds the soul (and not just my soul, but your soul, as well). And I will confess to bumbling along as best I can, just like everybody else. But it’s this constant striving for something that doesn’t yet exist that fascinates me most. What, after all, can be more creative, and more challenging, than creating a new culture?

This article, along with many others, is an expression of a new culture that is slowly arising in the midst of the decadent Babylon that so much of modern America has devolved into. (Fortunately, manure is an excellent sprouting medium for seeds, as we all know.)

A statement that appeared in Earth Quarterly really stuck with me: “Through commercials, sex, and violence on t.v.,... mass media’s intent is on stealing the soul of the human race.” The mass media, I fear, have done a splendid job of “stealing the human soul.” Many of us would like to “steal the soul” right back. We can all help to do this by being alternative sources of inspiration, by expressing a new mythology that feeds peoples’ souls like the old mythology no longer can.

What we are presently going through is a cultural transformation every bit as big as (if not bigger than) the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But since we’re living through this transformation on a day-to-day basis, we barely notice the tidal wave that has been carrying us along for at least the past 30 years. It is clear that the old mythology has reached a point of terminal decay.

“Mythology” doesn’t mean tall tales and legends. Most people today would probably use the word “paradigm” instead of “mythology.” But I like “mythology” because it’s more poetic. As Joseph Campbell pointed out, mythology is communication with power about the belief systems that give meaning to our lives. A powerful mythology can ignite the creative fire that transforms civilizations.

The traditional mythology which the mass media have so effectively spread across the globe simply doesn’t work for millions of us any more, and even worse, is laying waste our entire planet. Fortunately, there are many of us who have spent our entire lives searching for a saner, more sustainable way of life, and out of this search is arising a new mythology, a new way of being.

Joseph Campbell makes some interesting points about mythology in one of his best books, Creative Mythology:

“In what I am calling ‘creative mythology’... the individual has... an experience of his own... which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the value and force of living myth -- for those... who receive and respond to it of themselves, with recognition, uncoerced. Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion... The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization. A mythological canon is an organization of symbols, ineffable in import, by which the energies of aspiration are evoked and gathered toward a focus. The message leaps from heart to heart by way of the brain.”

When I recently read this quotation from Joseph Campbell for the first time in many years, I became more clear about our mission, those of us who resonate to the new mythology. This mission, using Campbell’s terminology, is “evoking the energies of aspiration and gathering them to a focus,” using our brains (and the brains of anybody else who cares to participate) to put out a message that “leaps from heart to heart.” [I would call all this, in my simple way, “inspiring other people”]. But what I really picked up from Campbell’s quotation was, “not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.”

Authority (which, in our day and age, translates into the Almighty Dollar and all the limitations it imposes) can seem so overwhelmingly powerful. How strange to think that mere aspiration is stronger! (Which is stronger: the rock, or the water that erodes it over the eons?)

Apathy is so easy. Aspiration, and the striving it leads to, can be very frustrating. But it’s by striving that we become stronger. It’s like any other muscle: the more we use it, the stronger it gets. When we fail, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start striving all over again. Maybe that’s the answer to my question of “now what?” at the beginning of this section -- striving, striving, and more striving. Striving is definitely something to aspire to.

TOPSY-TURVY WORLD

One last observation. It’s a topsy-turvy world when Earth-destroying radicals pass themselves off as “conservatives,” while people who promote a much more conservative use of Earth’s resources are branded as “eco radicals.” But that’s what propaganda is all about -- you put your own “spin” on the situation, and maybe other people will agree with you. Welcome to the propaganda wars.

ENOUGH FOR NOW

It’s time to wrap this up. I will probably be posting more material soon. More of my essays are available on the PeaceAware website: http://peaceaware.com/documents/essays/gordon_essays.htm .

There are a lot of my stories, poems, and essays (and some of Laura’s essays) on our website, www.zianet.com/earth .

We have started a Sustainable Lifestyles Group in the Las Cruces, NM area. I am sending out a weekly update. To subscribe, just send me an email at earth@zianet.com .

Gordon Solberg
May 5, 2003
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