As Hominy has a place in my own development as a Friend, I also recognized the presence of the peyote church that also served the Hominy Osage community in 1999. After serving in three FUM congregations as a pastor, I was impressed with IAYM (C) and was a regular attender at Whittier Friends Meeting prior to my move to Oregon. I never got the impression of exclucivity from that group of weighty Friends. Likewise, they were accepting of the disability that ended my career of pastoral service.

I often notice that you write that you are suspicious of this and that about the simple expressions of faith that some Friends have. I, too, shared that view until John Punshon asked me "who does it hurt?" It reminds me of the Okieism of "if'n it ain't broke don't fix it." I think that Quakerism operates best on Occum's Razor, intrigue and subtrifuge can be read into anything, but at its simplist Quaker worship is wonderful.

I wish to reassure you that I did not do the sort of driving you thought I did. Something, somewhere, gave you a false impression. I didn't "drive at a walking pace". After my ankles gave out, I walked as far as I could each morning, doubled back to the car, drove at the legal speed limit to my destination, then backtracked on foot as far as I could, and walked back forward to where I was spending that night.

It was still gas-consumptive, but not nearly as much so as the policy you thought I followed!

In normal life I do minimize driving.

Now, as to your "bounce back" expectations: I greatly appreciate, and admire, your willingness to cherish such positive views. But I think it is also worth bearing in mind that there have already been many one-way, irreversible changes in this planet's evolution.

For example, geological studies indicate that the atmosphere has been thinning steadily all through the planet's history; concentrations have never once "bounced back" to previous levels. Biological diversity has never returned to the level it was at before the very first wave of extinctions, way back in the Silurian. Reptilian life never "bounced back" from the damage wrought by the meteorite at the end of the Mesozoic. And so forth.

Much of what humans have done, and are doing right now, has a comparable look of utter permanence. For example, now that the American camels and giant American beavers, the dodos and moas and Carolina parakeets, are gone, extinct, all wiped out by human activity, it seems quite impossible to get them back. Even if humans could find the DNA to reconstruct them from, the habitat they lived in has been as destroyed as they themselves have been.

Once humans have finished wiping out the amphibians, which we are well on the way to doing, there is no source from which they could reasonably be expected to return to existence, short of a miracle comparable to making the sun stand still.

At present we are seeing possibly irreversible changes in the tropical rainforests, particularly the Amazon: human deforestation is causing a drying that makes it increasingly difficult for trees to return to the cleared areas, or even to continue to flourish in the surrounding still-forested areas. The drying is also leading to mammoth lightning-triggered fires in the still-forested areas, which is further accelerating the deforestation and may in the end ensure that forests cannot return.

Since the Sun is getting progressively hotter as it ages, if human activities trigger a "Venus effect" (that is, tip the balance to a condition in which high greenhouse gas concentrations make it so hot that plant life cannot survive in large enough quantities to take the carbon back out of the atmosphere), that effect will almost certainly be rendered irreversible by solar dynamics. Twenty years ago the transition to a "Venus effect" was considered so unlikely as to not be worth serious consideration; today, with global warming triggering huge releases of methane from the permafrost, and killing off vast stretches of boreal forest, both of which changes are accelerating global warming, the "Venus effect" isn't looking so unlikely after all.

This planet, when humans first appeared, was wonderfully habitable and teemed with countless species. It is already degraded far below that state by human hunting, agriculture and industry. It is looking increasingly probable that what humans are doing now will wind up being irreversible in so many crucial ways that it will never return anywhere near that state.

I think self-honesty should compel us to realize that humanity's ecological sins may in the end prove impossible to undo. But for Jews and Christians, this should not be too great a surprise. After all, one of the foundational tenets of our religious tradition is (in the words of our eighteenth-century Friend Joseph Phipps) that "sin once committed cannot be undone".

Peace - Carole Beaubien Gregory

I am laboring to change that situation, not only here on my web-journal site but also in the speeches I give and the workshops I lead all around the country. And there are others who are laboring to do this, too. And we're gaining ground. But it's definitely a big, slow project.

I personally would say that whether or not you are a Friend has nothing to do with this situation. It is determined by whether Christ's words in John 15:1-17 describe you or not. The crux of the teaching is John 15:12,14,17 — "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. ... You are my Friends if you do whatsoever I command you. ... I give you the commands I do, (in order) that you love one another."

What's in question, vis-à-vis the Society of Friends, is less a matter of whether you are a Friend, than of whether the Society is the right place for you as a Friend.

I can tell you right now that the Society will always disappoint, because of the fallen character of the world. If you look for satisfaction to the Society, you will always find something that lets you down. (Even Jesus was let down by the Society, as in its cluelessness at the Last Supper, or as when Peter denied him three times before cock-crow.) Things are just the same now as they always have been.

On the other hand, I know of no other religious body that has so many of the elements of a complete Christianity in place, and so few institutionalized hindrances to doing what Christ wants of us. The first Friends did a wonderful job of laying the groundwork, and the hard inner core of our Society, in the years since then, has done a wonderful job of developing that groundwork further.

And yet the bottom line is not whether the Society is the place with the greatest potential, any more than it is whether you are truly a Friend. The bottom line is whether this is the place where the Spirit, the Paraklete, is calling you, personally, to take your stand, roll up your sleeves, unfurl your flag and buckle down to work. And only you know the answer to that question.

I hope we can continue this conversation somehow, Allison!

The seas' phytoplankton are responsible for about 50% of the planet's recycling of carbon dioxide into free oxygen. And if the oceans become so poisoned that there are no more fish, the phytoplankton will be poisoned too. Thus I suspect, and fear, that if/when things get to the point that there are no more fish, we'll be committed to a future in which the atmosphere is so CO2-laden that there can't be children, either.

Let us pray that things do not get to that point.

This is exactly the attitude that I am perceiving among all Friends.

What I would like, because I'm feeling confused, is that if this is truly what all Friends believe, then they should have integrity and just come out and say it. And then I will know once and for all whether I am or am not a Friend.