But still the global-heating life-style basically went on. After some reductions in personal emissions, many people felt stuck and did not know what more to do. Stating in May, some people, typically youth, took the plunge and renounced school and jobs permanently, to start working the land in collectives to grow local food or to restore nature by daylighting creeks. The hope was that a radical shift in life-style, if widely adopted, could save the climate, in part by undermining the corporate paradigm of endless growth and consumerism.

Some who joined these informal collectives and budding communities were handy with skills such as gardening, bike repair and bike-cart assembly from scrap materials. For those without special skills, volunteering for child-care, cooking, mending clothes, or creating barter fairs, came easy. Skill-sharing workshops became popular, in part because people realized that almost all the shoes, for example, purchased today were from China. Cobblers in the U.S. were almost extinct.

It was another day of helplessness at our Middle School when more children than usual came into the office having asthma attacks. Diesel-soot tinged breezes had again invaded the school yard and classrooms.

We were being hit from an additional direction, and it was related to the air-quality situation: the newspapers and even Fox News had another depressing story on the disappearance of entire glaciers. Climate change was out of control, while efforts to deal with it were so much talk. The emotions rising in many of us included fear, rage and disgust.

But this day onward was to mark a clear response and see constructive emotions come into play, by more people than anyone would have supposed. One child was to spark a sea change in the mood and aspirations of millions of people who had been complacent and lacking in hope.

Before I go on with my story, let me explain that because I’m still employed by the school district as a teacher’s aid, this narrative is being held back for a short time. I can’t give my name, or the place I work, even though few would suspect me of helping to guide a very disobedient campaign of civil disobedience -- when I appear to be such a strait-laced little woman. As soon as this background can be released, you will be reading about how we turned society on its ear back in 2008 and gave the U.S. a better name before the family of nations.

If we all treat one another with the best principles of human relationships, it is analogous to complying with Nature’s biophysical principles by taking responsibility for our own behavior. In other words, if I want to become acquainted with you, it is incumbent on me to determine how I must treat you in order to allow, even encourage, you to reciprocate in kind. Thus, for me to receive the best service, it is my responsibility to initiate a good relationship with the person serving me. Likewise, to have an adequate supply of quality resources in the form of ecoogical services from Nature to run our cities, we must take care of the land in a way that perpetuates the natural capital we require for a quality life. Here, the bottom line is that, by treating one another—as well as the land—with respect, we are uniting the two disparate entities into a single, self-reinforcing feedback loop of complementary services that can be perpetuated through time.

* * *

The corporation, it turns out, is an invention of the British Crown through the creation of the East India Company by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, which, being the original, transnational corporation, set today’s precedence for big businesses. The East India Company, "found India rich and left it poor," says author Nick Robin. The corporate structure of the East India Company was deemed necessary to allow the British to exploit their colonies in such a way that the owner of the enterprise was, for the first time, separated from responsibility for how the enterprise behaved.

This conscious separation of personal responsibility from the act of looting is not surprising because "looting" is, theoretically as least, considered immoral in Christian circles. The corporation is thus a "legal fiction," that lets the investors who own the business avoid personal responsibility whenever the business dealings are unethical or even blatantly illegal, despite the fact that such unscrupulous behavior profits them enormously.

In discussing how I think fear subverted the sharing, caring way of life that most hunting-gathering societies enjoyed (replacing it gradually, insidiously with a life ruled progressively by acquisition, competition, subjugation, and fear itself), it is important to remember that mine is -- at very best -- a grossly simplistic notion of what might have happened, beginning with the development of language.

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