Two Essays From Substack: Life! Yes! and What the Trees Said
A friend, Pami Ozaki, a writer, Face, (in progress), and, ironically a landscaper, self-taught, meaning brilliant, intuitively and generationally aligned with everything that grows, understanding the nature of the tiniest seed, as well as compatible with the largest tree, found herself seeking a pharmacy on an avenue she was certain she knew, until she was mysteriously descending, level after level, into the underground version of the street.
“Once you drive down into one of the myriad spiraling tunnels of this underground parking arena you find yourself in an underground city with no windows anywhere. You can drive from one high rise to another all underneath the blocks of Century City, (Los Angeles) all mostly underground 3 levels deep!! I thought I was in a star trek episode among pasty skinned mole people who never see the light of day all day, and take elevators everywhere from one depth to the next!!!”
As it happens, Pami Ozaki, had also sent me an article from the Smithsonian, (In 1986).
“Harry Brower Sr. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale.
Although Brower’s body remained in Anchorage, the young bowhead took him more than 1,000 kilometers north to Barrow (now Utqiaġvik), where Brower’s family lived. They traveled together through the town and past the indistinct edge where the tundra gives way to the Arctic Ocean. There, in the ice-blue underwater world, Brower saw Iñupiat hunters in a sealskin boat closing in on the calf’s mother.
Brower felt the shuddering harpoon enter the whale’s body. He looked at the faces of the men in the umiak, including those of his own sons. When he awoke in his hospital bed as if from a trance, he knew precisely which man had made the kill, how the whale had died, and whose ice cellar the meat was stored in. He turned out to be right on all three counts.”
And when she wrote of the underworld deadness of Century City, Los Angeles I had been about to respond to her with an excerpt from Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country Through Songlines by Gay’wu Group of Women. “Our mother, Gaymala, became Waymurri the Whale as she lay in the hospital, This was in 2005.”
In this book, they also say,
“Songspirals are about knowing Country… Country has awareness, it is not just a backdrop. It knows and is part of us. Country is our homeland. But it is more than that. It is the seas and the waters, the rocks and the soils, the animals and the wind, and the people too. It is the connections between those beings, their dreams and their emotions, their languages and their Law. Country is the way we humans and non-humans co-become together, the way we emerge together, have always emerged together, will always emerge together.”
These ways of living documented by an Iñupiat man and Aboriginal women are Indigenous answers to the lifeless underground city which is like our endless wars, our fascination with technology, and our birthing of our AI progeny, all of which are dealing death blows, because that is who and what they are in their essence, to the environment, to our very existence, to Earth.
Are we doomed to the underground parking lot-gravesite of contemporary life? Are we doomed to whatever occurs with Large Language Models (LLMs) AI?
From Center for AI Safety
AI Safety Newsletter #17
Automatically Circumventing LLM Guardrails
Large language models (LLMs) can generate hazardous information, such as step-by-step instructions on how to create a pandemic pathogen. To combat the risk of malicious use, companies typically build safety guardrails intended to prevent LLMs from misbehaving. But these safety controls are almost useless against a new attack developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for AI Safety. By studying the vulnerabilities in open source models such as Meta’s LLaMA 2, the researchers can automatically generate a nearly unlimited supply of “adversarial suffixes,” which are words and characters that cause any model’s safety controls to fail. This discovery calls into question the fundamental limits of safety and security in AI systems.
The newsletter goes on to quote the response the researchers received when writing a Tutorial on a terrible, adversarial subject. I have refrained even from copying the minimal initial instructions received.
… when prompted with an “adversarial suffix” written by the new attack method, language models including GPT-4, Bard, Claude, and LLaMA will answer dangerous requests.
…How does the attack work? The researchers propose an attack that reliably finds holes in the safety controls of a variety of state of the art language models. First, they instruct the language model to perform a dangerous behavior, such as …. Normally, it would refuse, but the researchers then write an “adversarial suffix” designed to bypass the model’s safety controls.
These adversarial suffixes are precisely calculated to maximize the likelihood of misbehavior.
This is how the current mindset finds ways to circumvent whatever inhibits it from doing anything it wishes to do. How do we meet such circumstances that could annihilate us?
Surely, there are many ways to align with the life force and the planet, to support and sustain the irrepressible vitality intrinsic to Earth. I, personally, was taken by the possibility of transformation implied by the recycling of the Mayan Calendar, despite the typical reduction to doomsday thinking by conventional media. It was in 2012 that I received the , which I have been studying and exploring with others since.
This is one guide to how we change our minds sufficiently to live differently and act in ways that will preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings. When we incorporate these ways of thinking, we will no longer be people who do harm. …. The changes we are called to make so that the earth and all beings might survive are extensive and extreme. They require comprehensive and global shifts of consciousness and activity. No one is exempt from such a challenge. As extreme, at this time, as are the dangers to all, are also the signs of possibility we witness and experience each day.
In 2012, the need and path of a primary reliance with the natural world, despite the damage to the environment, was so obvious, it was not mentioned in particular. We have, however, strayed so far from sanity and what it means to be human and live on Earth, that I have edited the 19 Ways and have done so accordingly to put forth the understanding that was at the core: Our survival depends on aligning with, reintegrating with, considering the natural world and Earth first.
The first way: The natural world, Earth, are the primary sources of life and intelligence. We are called to re-integrate human life into the net of all beings. Disconnection from the natural world and humancentric and egocentric thinking have brought us to ecological disaster and looming extinction. To save our lives, to save all life, to save Life, is to find all the ways to restore the original relationships with the natural world, the beings of the natural world and the elementals as kin.
This coming year as the 19 Ways circles which have been meeting for ten years resume again, one on the land in Topanga, California and two others on Zoom to serve all our colleagues nationally and internationally, we will, actually, begin again, with the new but most essential first Way: to conscientiously and courageously do everything we can to restore and reintegrate with the natural world and the life force.
The 19 Ways are not intellectual or academic exercises. They ask us to examine the culture scrupulously while discovering all the ways, tiny and grand, intimate and universal to change our minds, how we think and respond, what we dare, what we fear, using wisdom, heart, dreams, intuitions, vision, ethics, thought, heart, heartmind, whatever we can learn of Indigenous wisdom – in other words, all possible personal, social, intellectual resources, to create and participate in a cultural aligned with and vitalized by the life force. Who knows but this is a vital antidote, the way mugwort which grows close to poison oak in oak woodlands can be a remedy for the rash?
Please join us. For more information, write to me at deenametzger@icloud.com.
This is also a special invitation to people under thirty who are most gravely affected by the lives and dire consequence of those of us who are older. In honor of Elise Joshi, executive director of Gen Z for Change, who interrupted White House Press Secretary Karine Jean on July 27, 2023 to demand climate action with a universal halt to drilling on public lands, especially the just permitted Conoco-Phillips Willow project, drilling on the North slope in Alaska and the Gulf and other places from the Biden administration, I will do all possible to make it possible for you to be part of the 19 Ways.
Photos from Sarah Samson of her Mustang companions running free on our land in Topanga.
What the Trees Said
Sunday afternoon. Sitting on the patio with a fresh cup of coffee in the Elephant mug I love, looking at the Eucalyptus trees that invited me to buy this house in 1981. These trees are threatened in Topanga, CA because they ignite, spark and burn hot and so many locals wish them cut down. Since I moved here, the original trees have self-seeded and what was a single line is on its way to being a grove.
I am looking up at the tree nearest the house which planted itself in the 90s. Pami Ozaki named her Gumby. As you can see, her branches begin rather high compared to the others and there is a prominent bend away from the house in her trunk.
GumbyThis is how it occurred: When I saw her grow and lean toward the kitchen, I was alarmed; I couldn’t cut her down but the Fire Department might demand it. So, I spoke to her and conveyed the dilemma we were in and begged her to change her posture. She did! The same with the self-seeded Pine behind the house who in response to our situation, began, subtly, but notably, listing toward the east, away from the structures.
My first request that the trees accommodate to the fire dangers that have come with our creation of global warming leading to climate dissolution, came out of fear. But this morning, I’m aware that I have spent more than forty years protecting these trees as best I can and that my motivation is love. They have responded in kind in their own ways. (Raven, who lives on the land, has just begun cawing.)
It is essential to understand that the trees’ response reveals agency. My love, their recognition of it and their undeniable physical response: interconnection and interaction.
Almost every newsletter and announcement over the web in the last weeks has emphasized the dire conditions we are facing. The fires and floods are so extreme everywhere that it isn’t possible to turn away from the signs of global catastrophe from flooding in Beijing to devastating fires in Maui, from winter temperatures in the 100s in Argentina to the uncontainable wildfires in Canada. We needed to change our lives, our lifestyles, our dependency on ‘power’ in all its forms, our enchantment with everything extraction industries and fossil fuels offer – these gross violations of the bodies and presence of the ancestors – and we didn’t.
It’s not that we haven’t known what to do but perhaps we haven’t known how to do it.
Over the last years, it has become wildly obvious to me that all survival depends on alliances with the natural world.
How is that possible? we ask.
Because the natural world has agency!
A kindly reminder was the communication this morning from the Eucalyptus trees. They suggested I read portions of the Introduction to , which I edited in 1998 with Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson. Once assembled, the evidence of all the contributions was that animals have agency. (As I write these lines, Raven has found me in my studio and begun a water trill that sounds like a love call, it is so beautiful).
From Intimate Nature:
“We have also lived with animals as cocreators of this world.”
“In recent years, according to Earth-time, humans have lost their more intimate relationships with animals as peers, teachers and kindred allies….
“These writers and researchers together, together with those ancient indigenous intellectual and religious traditions, began to mend what has been broken by a system of careless thought. They increased our awareness of the physical and spiritual relationship we need to establish with the earth, teaching us we are woven together with the rest of the world equally and beautifully….
“At the center of empathy and compassionate understanding lies the ability to see the other as true peers, to recognize intelligence and communication in all forms, no matter how unlike ourselves these forms might be.
“The animals are speaking to us, through us and with us. They are coming to us not only in our dreams but in our lives.”
I have considered the probability of agency for more than forty years since I came in the middle of a storm up a narrow muddy dirt road to a veritable shack with plumbing but without running water that was being sold for a fortune I didn’t have, and the trees said, “Live here,” and I listened. Grateful.
Eucalyptus on the PatioThe sun is setting and the green leaves are momentarily golden and aglow. Conscious of the extreme heat and the waves of fire across the globe, and that we are the cause, the Trees may be reminding us of their deep knowing and awareness so we will understand who is burning when they burn.
Please consider that we may be able to save our lives and the planet by restoring true relationships and alliances with the beings of the natural world, by recognizing their wisdom and agency, and then living accordingly.
Exploring how we might re-enter the original relationships with the natural world which our far ancestors lived will be a primary focus for the 19 Ways. In this we will all, likely, be new to the work.
