ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author relates some of her own personal history as well as her own answers to the need for a new story, a new ethic, a new economy, new policies, and new spiritualities. The task of moving objects other than by human lifting, pushing, and pulling is an age-old problem. The five simple machines of the Greeks (the lever, the pulley, the wheel, the inclined plane, and the wedge) were force-maximizing devices, but needed to be powered by human or animal labor. They include ecological methods that incorporate the wisdom of indigenous peoples and new forms of ecological management and restoration ecology that give back what is taken from the land. The chapters in After the Death of Nature have helped me to rethink the ideas and assumptions on which the author's intellectual work has been based.
