It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins.

Is it too late to prevent us from self-destructing? No, for we have the capacity to design our own future, to take a lesson from living things around us and bring our values and actions in line with ecological necessity. But we must first realize that ecological and social and economic issues are all deeply intertwined. There can be no solution to one without a solution to the others.

Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction--to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious.

And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden, You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

We are in grave danger of losing forever not just millions of years of evolution on earth, but the eons of change that have produced man and his natural environment.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.