led to imperialism and finally to economic globalization also created what became the archetypal battle between warring, technological nation-states and in-place, nature-based cultures. According to Ponderosa, if we are to survive, it is to this latter state of existence that we must return. Bioregionalism stands among the various options for breaking down empires and resuscitating archetypal human existence.
As one manifestation of making such a homecoming, Ponderosa—along with his wife Olive Tree—invented the All-Species Day Parade as a dynamic way to build community and consciousness. The first took place in 1978 in San Francisco. Stephanie Mills showed up as a Monarch butterfly. Marc Kasky was there too, dressed as his animal totem, the otter. The eco group Friends of the River arrived with some twenty members dressed as the Tuolumne and Stanislaus Rivers. Fantastic! Scoop Nisker appeared as a primate ancestor, bioregionalists Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft as forest creatures. Ponderosa came covered in tree bark, twigs, and brush chaotically twisting this way and that.
Another manifestation of Ponderosa’s dedication to a return to safe, satisfying, and sustainable living was his stellar political action record:
* In 1965, as a former Army officer during the Korean War, co-founded Veterans and Reservists to End the War in Vietnam;
* 1966, along with other veterans, set fire to discharge papers, service medals, and campaign ribbons on national TV;
* 1966, New York City: protest against Dow Chemical for what he called the company’s “obscene manufacture of napalm”;
* 1967, Army Induction Center, New York City: during Stop the Draft Week protests, two separate arrests;
* 1968, Hudson River, New York City: civil disobedience to delay the departure of a Navy destroyer to Vietnam;
* 1968, Senate Gallery, Washington, D.C.: arrested for dumping anti-war leaflets on elected officials from balcony above;
* 1968, Pentagon March, Washington, D.C.: arrested with Jerry Rubin, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Abbie Hoffman, and Stew Albert;
* 1987, World Bank headquarters, New York City: demonstration against funding for a superhighway slated to pass through the endangered Amazon rainforest;
* 2000, White House Rotunda, Washington, D.C.: protest in favor of campaign finance reform—along with climate change activist Bill McKibben, political activist Granny D, etc.
Needless to say, Ponderosa traveled to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Democratic Party Convention that had given the cold shoulder to the popular anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in favor of Old Party machine cog Hubert Humphrey. Here, amid fervent protestors and rampaging police forces, Ponderosa learned that New York City’s finest had compiled a dossier detailing his activities on the East Coast and had sent it to their Chicago colleagues. In its forty pages Ponderosa was described as “an especially dangerous leader.” The report argued that he advised activists to disobey laws, while he—in typical hippie/yippie fashion—claimed that he had only encouraged people to “Do Your Own Thing.”
In 1968 Keith, wife Judy, and daughter Issa made the cross-continental move to Berkeley. Here, perhaps more than ever, amid the glories of the blooming counter culture, he morphed into the activist who would walk the streets barefoot, rename himself “Ponderosa Pine” and—with growing ecological awareness—position his body between “a truck carrying redwood corpses from a nearby tree-slaughter site” and eternity. As humorist Paul Krasner describes the transition: “Hippies became freaks. Negros became blacks. Girls became women. Richard Alpert became Baba Ram Das. High Romney became Wavy Gravy, and his wife became Jahanarah. Yippie organizer Keith Lampe became Ponderosa Pine, and his girlfriend became Olive Tree.”
Insisting always on the purity of ideas and actions, Ponderosa fell into the occasional but regular bout of self-righteousness. Or as Stephanie Mills defined that particular stance, making others feel “deeply uncomfortable in their insufficiency of action.” To boot, his tone in pointing out said insufficiency was “cranky” and “cantankerous.” That’s the way Charlene Spretnak put it when she waded into a controversy with “Mr. Pine” that did nothing but let loose said qualities. In May of 1987 she wrote him a letter attempting to inculcate compassion after he had publicly trashed environmentalist David Brower and historian/bioregionalist Kirkpatrick Sale. His complaint was that they (and now Charlene) were mere armchair ecologists/regionalists—“slapstick satirists”—hiding behind foundation grants and typewriters rather than placing their bodies in front of trucks hauling the freshly murdered carcasses of our brothers and sisters, the trees.
Ponderosa published Charlene’s correspondence in his newsletter Deep Bioregional Action-Examiner and offered up a cranky, cantankerous epistle in response. It included such declarations as “You behave as though you think I suggested that David slaughter an indeterminate number of trees to occupy my postal box with junk mail playing on people’s fears to suck maximal money from them.” In answer to Charlene’s contention that his personal put-downs of fellow activists were violent tactics, he wrote: “The violence of your tactics is that you’ve left a long trail of blood behind you by bringing out one two three four! books already …” Respected feminist Charlene Spretnak had just come out with Green Politics: The Global Promise (1984), co-written with physicist Fritjof Capra, the first book about the progressive, neither-left-nor-right Green Party of Germany. He continued his tirade, “I’ve heard the wide-awake screams of our sisters as the saw rips through their ankles and they tumble to oblivion, Charlene, and I can assure you that you’re leading a very violent life.”
Plus, the kicker: “I’m grateful to have a copy of that cute photo of us taken at that party in Berkeley. The particular ‘party-dress’ you’re wearing makes you look the demure, ingenuous girl-next-door who has just returned from her junior-year-abroad with a rather good term paper all about environmental politics in Germany.”
Nearing retirement in the late 1980s, Ponderosa moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where the tropical climate suited him better than that of Bolinas’ Pacific coastline and dollars from his Social Security pension went farther towards survival than they would have inside the U.S. I hear tell that his journey to Asia and subsequent return visits heralded the first time since 1968 that he had actually donned a pair of shoes. As the twenty-first century unfolded—particularly after the 2001 Twin Towers attacks and the ensuing Shoe Bomber incident—shoelessness would make passing through airport control faster, but the airlines displayed zero tolerance for the likes of he who now had been reborn and was calling himself Ro-Non-So-Ye. Ro-Non responded to regulations by donning a pair of flip-flops for these transcontinental flights and used the same technique right through his subsequent and final move to the mountains of southern Ecuador.
Here he established the “Double Helix Office in the Global South White House” and relaunched the environmental reporting he had begun so many years before. The former Earth Read Out and Deep Bioregional Action-Examiner were remade as A Day in the Life; its daily accounts—often megabyte-sized, on topics as far afield as the Ebola epidemic, human rights violations, non-ecological education, and climate engineering—were penned, as always, in his emblematic cranky-cantankerous-comedic-flamboyant rant style. Combining the panoramic vista of an informed elder with his bent toward transcendental music and cosmic consciousness, Ro-Non also became something of an eco guru to the extranjero community in Ecuador.
But he was not well. Ever since the 1970s when popular thanologist Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross challenged the social taboo against conscious, visible death and dying, we have come to understand that communication about impending death makes its inevitable arrival not any less agonizing or unfathomable—but still somehow easier to bear. Ro-Non gave a great gift to all the folks who loved him when he penned and posted this epistle, sober and yet ever characteristic of the man’s originality:
October
