"The children lay out, laughing, on the jungle mattress" means: A: the children have special beds made from jungle wood. B: their pillows are made from leaves from the jungle. C: the children are laying on the ground, on top of jungle plants. D: the children usually sleep outside in the jungle.

What nature is telling you? 1 Let’s sit down here, all of us, on the open prairie, where we can’t see a highway or a fence, free from the debris of the city. Let’s have no blankets to sit on, but let our bodies converge with the earth, the surrounding trees and shrubs. Let’s have the vegetation for a mattress, experiencing its texture, its sharpness and its softness. Let us become like stones, plants, and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals. 2 This is my plea: Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. We feel it between us, as a presence presiding over the day. It is a good way to start thinking about nature and talking about it. To go further, we must rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives. 3 You have impaired our ability to experience nature in the good way, as part of it. Even here we are conscious that somewhere beyond the marsh and its cranes, somewhere out in those hills there are radar towers and highway overpasses. This land is so beautiful and strange that now some of you want to make it into a national park. You have not only contaminated the earth, the rocks, the minerals, all of which you call “dead” but which are very much alive; you have even changed the animals, which are part of us, changed them into vulgar zoological mutations, so no one can recognize them. 4 There is power in an antelope, so you let it graze within your fences. But what power do you see in a goat or sheep, prey animals with no defenses, creatures that hold still while you slaughter them? There was great power in a wolf, even in a fox. You have inverted nature and turned these noble animals into miniature lap dogs. Nature is bound by your ropes and whips and is obedient to your commands. You can’t do much with a cat, so you fix it, alter it, declaw it, and even cut its vocal cords so that you can experiment on it in a laboratory without being disturbed by its cries. 5 You have also made all types of wild birds into chickens – creatures with wings so impaired that they cannot fly. There are farms where you breed chickens for breast meat. Those birds are kept in low, repressive cages, forced to be hunched over all the time, which makes the breast muscles very big. One loud noise and the chickens go mad, killing themselves by flying against the walls of their cages. Having to spend all their lives stooped over makes an unnatural, crazy, no-good bird. It also makes unnatural, detached, no-good human beings. 6 That’s where you’ve fooled yourselves. You have not only altered, declawed, and deformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it concurrently to yourselves. You inject Botox, or use plastic surgery, synthetic make-up and countless drugs. You have filtered and remolded humans into executives sitting in boardrooms, into office workers, into time-clock punchers. Your homes are filled with families disconnected from one another but tied to one great entity, television. 7 “Watch the ashes, don’t smoke, you’ll stain the curtains. Watch the goldfish bowl. Don’t lean your head against the wallpaper; your hair may be greasy. Don’t spill liquor on that table: You’ll peel off its delicate finish. You should have wiped your boots; the floor was just cleaned. Don’t, don’t, don’t ...” That is absurd! We weren’t made to endure this type of repression. You live in prisons which you have built for yourselves, calling them “homes”, offices, factories. 8 Sometimes I think that even our pitiful small houses are better than your luxury mansions. Strolling a hundred feet to the outhouse on a clear wintry night, through mud or snow, that’s one small link with nature. Or in the summer, in the back country, taking your time, listening to the humming of the insects or the flapping of birds’ wings, the sun warming your bones through the nodding branches of trees; you don’t even have that pleasure of coexistence with nature anymore. 9 You subscribe to the belief that everything must be germ free. No smells! Not even the good, natural man and woman odors. Eradicate the smell from under your armpits, from your skin. Rub it out, and then spray some botanical odor on yourself, stuff you can spend a lot of money on, ten dollars an ounce, so you know this has to smell good. Why do you keep such a distance from your bodies’ functions, cavities and smells that you’ve alienated yourselves from the natural world, of which you are an integral part? 10 I think you are so afraid and intolerant of the world around you. You deplore the natural world; you don’t want to see, feel, smell, or hear it. The feelings of rain and snow on your face, being numbed by an icy wind and warmed back up by a smoking fire, coming out of a hot sweat bath and plunging into a cold stream, these things are the spice of life, but you don’t want them anymore. 11 You’re cage dwellers, living in boxes which shut out the hot humidity of the summer and the chill of winter, living inside a body that no longer has a scent. You’re hearing the noise from the hi-fi instead of listening to the sounds of nature. You’re watching actors on TV having a make-believe experience when you no longer experience anything for yourself. That’s your way. It’s no good.