feet reflected his dedication to the cause. At the other end of his ever-so-lean-from-walking body (he refused to mix his dignity with that of carbon-emitting machines, regularly walking the thirty miles from his home in Bolinas to San Francisco), his mind was devoting its considerable assets to the miserable state of the planet. In her book Whatever Happened to Ecology? Stephanie Mills calls him the “grand-daddy of all the bare-knuckles critics of environmentalism,” clearly a 1980s moniker from when climate change, ozone depletion, rising seas, dying species, contaminated cities, and ruined ecosystems were not as evident as they are today and even the left-wing intellectuals at The Nation thought ecology a bogus concern. Stephanie also calls Ponderosa “a barefoot mendicant chanter and general thorn in the side of people of lesser mettle … a guy destined to make us all deeply uncomfortable in our insufficiency of action.”
This soleless/soulful pioneer lived so intensely in the Here-and-Now that he seemed a man without a past. But in the world of material existence and calculated linear time, Keith Lampe was born in 1932 to Harriet and William Lampe in Wayne, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three siblings, and he grew up during the Depression. In his early career, he was both an officer in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and a Paris-based reporter for Randolph Hearst’s right-wing International News Service. Upon hearing about the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964 in Mississippi, though, he chucked his formally sanctioned career, headed back to the States, and got himself hired by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as press agent. Then, in 1966, just as the Vietnam War was being launched, he burned his discharge papers and medals on national TV and awoke from his previous life to find himself on stage in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, shoeless with his unkempt beard waving in the ocean wind, speaking to throngs of stoned hippies about cosmic consciousness, leading group meditations, and performing improvisational music with drums, lutes, synthesizer, and belly-dancing women.
Pine around 1970 at Marx Meadow in Golden Gate Park. Photo credit and courtesy of James Stark.
The All Species phenomenon took off! Ceremonialist Chris Wells jumped in and took the event all over the U.S., to Mexico and Sweden. Here, a gathering dedicated to Turtle Island, the name given to North America by many Native peoples. Earth Day 1992, Kansas City, Missouri. Photo credit: Ed Kendrick. Courtesy of Marty Kraft and All Species Project.
Ponderosa was among the first to articulate the importance of an extremely radical philosophy and politics called bioregionalism. In his weekly mimeographed publication Earth Read Out he spouted its underlying wisdom: for two million years we humans lived in ecological terrains defined by the extent of local watershed and cohesion of flora and fauna, developing cultures as reflections of the natural world around/within us. Take, for instance, the obvious differences between traditional Inuit lifeways and those of the Plains Indians, between the world of Pacific Islanders and that of the Aymara in the altiplano. The unfortunate lunge toward expansive survival tactics that has led to imperialism and finally to economic globalization also created what became the archetypal battle between warring, technological nation-states and in-place, nature-based cultures. According to Ponderosa, if we are to survive, it is to this latter state of existence that we must return. Bioregionalism stands among the various options for breaking down empires and resuscitating archetypal human existence.
As one manifestation of making such a homecoming, Ponderosa—along with his wife Olive Tree—invented the All-Species Day Parade as a dynamic way to build community and consciousness. The first took place in 1978 in San Francisco. Stephanie Mills showed up as a Monarch butterfly. Marc Kasky was there too, dressed as his animal totem, the otter. The eco group Friends of the River arrived with some twenty members dressed as the Tuolumne and Stanislaus Rivers. Fantastic! Scoop Nisker appeared as a primate ancestor, bioregionalists Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft as forest creatures. Ponderosa came covered in tree bark, twigs, and brush chaotically twisting this way and that.
Another manifestation of Ponderosa’s dedication to a return to safe, satisfying, and sustainable living was his stellar political action record:
* In 1965, as a former Army officer during the Korean War, co-founded Veterans and Reservists to End the War in Vietnam;
* 1966, along with other veterans, set fire to discharge papers, service medals, and campaign ribbons on national TV;
* 1966, New York City: protest against Dow Chemical for what he called the company’s “obscene manufacture of napalm”;
* 1967, Army Induction Center, New York City: during Stop the Draft Week protests, two separate arrests;
* 1968, Hudson River, New York City: civil disobedience to delay the departure of a Navy destroyer to Vietnam;
* 1968, Senate Gallery, Washington, D.C.: arrested for dumping anti-war leaflets on elected officials from balcony above;
* 1968, Pentagon March, Washington, D.C.: arrested with Jerry Rubin, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Abbie Hoffman, and Stew Albert;
* 1987, World Bank headquarters, New York City: demonstration against funding for a superhighway slated to pass through the endangered Amazon rainforest;
* 2000, White House Rotunda, Washington, D.C.: protest in favor of campaign finance reform—along with climate change activist Bill McKibben, political activist Granny D, etc.
Needless to say, Ponderosa traveled to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Democratic Party Convention that had given the cold shoulder to the popular anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in favor of Old Party machine cog Hubert Humphrey. Here, amid fervent protestors and rampaging police forces, Ponderosa learned that New York City’s finest had compiled a dossier detailing his activities on the East Coast and had sent it to their Chicago colleagues. In its forty pages Ponderosa was described as “an especially dangerous leader.” The report argued that he advised activists to disobey laws, while he—in typical hippie/yippie fashion—claimed that he had only encouraged people to “Do Your Own Thing.”
In 1968 Keith, wife Judy, and daughter Issa made the cross-continental move to Berkeley. Here, perhaps more than ever, amid the glories of the blooming counter culture, he morphed into the activist who would walk the streets barefoot, rename himself “Ponderosa Pine” and—with growing ecological awareness—position his body between “a truck carrying redwood corpses from a nearby tree-slaughter site” and eternity. As humorist Paul Krasner describes the transition: “Hippies became freaks. Negros became blacks. Girls became women. Richard Alpert became Baba Ram Das. High Romney became Wavy Gravy, and his wife became Jahanarah. Yippie organizer Keith Lampe became Ponderosa Pine, and his girlfriend became Olive Tree.”
Insisting always on the purity of ideas and actions, Ponderosa fell into the occasional but regular bout of self-righteousness. Or as Stephanie Mills defined that particular stance, making others feel “deeply uncomfortable in their insufficiency of action.” To boot, his tone in pointing out said insufficiency was “cranky” and “cantankerous.” That’s the way Charlene Spretnak put it when she waded into a controversy with “Mr. Pine” that did nothing but let loose said qualities. In May of 1987 she wrote him a letter attempting to inculcate compassion after he had publicly trashed environmentalist David Brower and historian/bioregionalist Kirkpatrick Sale. His complaint was that they (and now Charlene) were mere armchair ecologists/regionalists—“slapstick satirists”—hiding behind foundation grants and typewriters rather than placing their bodies in front of trucks hauling the freshly murdered carcasses of our brothers and sisters, the trees.
Ponderosa published Charlene’s correspondence in his newsletter Deep Bioregional Action-Examiner and offered up a cranky, cantankerous epistle in response. It included such declarations as “You behave as though you think I suggested that David slaughter an indeterminate number of trees to occupy my postal box with junk mail playing on people’s fears to suck maximal money from them.” In answer to Charlene’s contention that his personal put-downs of fellow activists were violent tactics, he wrote: “The violence of your tactics is that you’ve