Loggers, Witches, and the Death of a Navajo Eco-Warrior : Angered by the Rape of His Beloved Forest, Leroy Jackson Began Asking Questions About the Management of a Navajo Sawmill.

1. MURDER?--When the New Mexico State Police finally found Leroy Jackson, his 5-foot, 8-inch frame was scrunched onto the narrow, 3 1/2-foot-long jump seat in the back of his white Dodge utility van. A blanket covered his entire body, even his face. Blood that had seeped from his nose stained the pillow under his head and the seat beneath it. But for his shoes, he was fully dressed, wearing gray pants and a gray sweat shirt from a 10-K race he had recently run. His body was disfigured from days of decomposition.

Jackson, a Navajo environmental activist who made his living trading in Indian rugs and jewelry, was last seen alive in Taos on Friday, Oct. 1, at dusk. The next day he was supposed to meet his wife, Adella Begaye, at a fair in Shiprock, about three hours away, but he never arrived. Jackson often spent days on the road, so Begaye tried not to panic. But on Tuesday, Oct. 5, Jackson missed a long-scheduled flight to Washington, D.C, where he was to protest a recent attempt by local Bureau of Indian Affairs officials to exempt the Navajo reservation from an impending federal decision to list the Mexican spotted owl as an endangered species. The owl was going to be Jackson’s trump. With it he would save the reservation’s shrinking yellow pine forest. Begaye knew that there was no way Jackson would have willingly missed the trip. She called the police.

On Oct. 9, a civilian air patrol spotted the van on Highway 64, a remote mountain road. The state police dispatched Officer Ted Ulibarri, who found the white van parked at a rest stop about 50 miles due west of Taos. It was locked and its windows, all of which were intact, were covered by curtains, drawn from the inside. A quick check of the license plates told him whom he had found.

In Albuquerque, Patricia McFeeley, an 18-year veteran of the state’s Office of the Medical Investigator, found no signs of trauma, no marks indicating blows of any kind, no stab wounds, gunshots or needle pricks on Jackson’s body. She did find traces of marijuana, a small dose of Valium and, finally, the apparent cause of death: an overdose of the synthetic narcotic methadone. Their theory: Jackson suffered from migraine headaches. A friend or acquaintance had given him some methadone to take as an experimental remedy. About 25 minutes out of Taos on the night of Oct. 1, he felt the blinding pains. He took the drug. After about 20 minutes, as it entered his bloodstream, he became irresistibly sleepy. He fought the drowsiness long enough to find a rest stop, pull over, close the curtains, move to the back of the van, pull off his shoes and cover himself with the blanket. He never woke up.

Jackson’s friends and family are skeptical. Since 1990, Jackson had waged a concerted and successful campaign to protect the sacred forests of the Chuska Mountains against intense logging. He had raised uncomfortable questions about his people’s financial dependence on the exploitation of their dwindling natural resources. Where, he had asked, were the sizable profits really going? Although he urged Navajos to “Walk in Beauty,” the ancient way of living in harmony with the land, he did not hesitate to employ the white man’s methods--environmental impact statements, press conferences, demonstrations--to get his way. Eighty-two sawmill workers had been laid off as a result of his efforts. More jobs were at stake. There had been death threats. And, just as worrisome to the religious Navajos around Jackson, there had been signs of witchcraft directed against him, perhaps a punishment for employing the owl, an evil augury among his people. Controversy followed him, intensifying as he became a national figure in the environmental community. He appeared to be on the verge of a decisive victory. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, he was dead.

2. STUMPS AND SLASH--Jackson was a handsome man, with the sharp features of his fierce Athabascan ancestors. Although a full-blooded Navajo, he lived much of his life off the reservation. Born in Shiprock, he moved to Flagstaff when he was 7, then to Albuquerque and completed high school in California while living with his uncle in Downey. He spoke English better than his native tongue and had taken college-level mechanical engineering courses, although he never got his degree.

He met Adella Begaye while she was an undergraduate at the University of Utah and he was working construction. She liked him because, unlike many Navajos who had only lived on the reservation, “he was smart, in a street-wise sense.” He liked her, she remembers, “because I still knew the traditional ways.” They married in 1976 and during their first years together, they pursued their careers while living in Tucson and Salt Lake City. But after Begaye gave birth to their third child, the couple grew disillusioned with city life and decided that it was time to return to the reservation. Eventually she got a job with an Indian health center in Tsaile, Ariz., a village of 1,000 nestled in the Chuska Mountains, which span the upper Arizona-New Mexico border. “It was an untouched area,” Begaye recalls. “We still had pure water and pure air. Space. Solitude. We would go for long walks in the woods. Or he would run in the mountains. That was his contentment.”

Perhaps most important, Tsaile is near the Begaye family’s ancestral hogan, as the traditional Navajo dwelling is called. The Begaye property is a five-minute drive off the main road, at the end of a rough dirt track. The forest opens there into an immense clearing at the base of Tsaile Butte--a dramatic outcropping of red rock reminiscent of the mountain that obsessed Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Dusty blue-green sagebrush covers the ground. For four decades, Begaye’s mother has brought her sheep here in the summer. Jackson and his wife loved to sleep out under the stars in the quiet seclusion.

The human contribution to the landscape is modest: two pens, for sheep and cows, made of rough posts, an outdoor cooking area, and the hogan, constructed in the traditional manner--a hexagon about 15 feet in diameter, made from stacked logs, chinked with mud. The hogan is a place of meditation and family gathering. When Begaye and Jackson’s oldest child, Shelley, turned 14, the family held her coming-of-age ceremony, the Beauty Way, here. Here they chanted the Blessing Way, the most sacred Navajo ceremony, to help Begaye achieve spiritual equilibrium.

Blue paint marks appeared on the trees around the hogan in the fall of 1989. Begaye knew what that foretold: The trees had been selected by the tribe for cutting. She was unprepared, however, for the aftermath. When she returned to the hogan in the spring, “it looked like pictures of a war zone,” she says. As far as the eye could see, the loggers had left behind huge mounds of “slash,” the debris of bark, branches and limbs that results from cutting. The slash prevented sheep from grazing, created a fire hazard and blocked foot paths, a special problem for Begaye’s elderly mother, who tripped and broke her rib while trying to navigate the piles. Only stumps were left where there had been majestic yellow pines at least 200 years old--the trees the Navajo call “grandfather.” Begaye could hear the damage, too. “When you are up in the mountains that is the first thing you notice when you get up early--all these birds singing. And that disappeared.”

“This isn’t the way it is supposed to be,” Jackson told her. However untraditional a Navajo Jackson may have been in some respects, he valued the harmony with nature that defines so many of his people’s distinctive ways. Many Navajos still offer prayers to the trees when they feel upset, out of balance.

Jackson understood this relationship, though he did not fully share it. He decided to speak for these traditions, even if it meant relying on outsiders, even if it meant using the profane to protect the holy. “Trees are sacred offering places,” Jackson said in one of his last interviews. “This fight against the cutting is in defense of our beliefs and the beliefs of the elders.”

3. TIMBER--The Navajo reservation covers almost 17 million acres--an area roughly the size of West Virginia--in western New Mexico, eastern Arizona and a small part of southern Utah. It is a vast, semiarid tract, punctuated by deep canyons, monumental buttes and what experts consider a most improbable pine forest, something of a freak of nature for a region that gets so little rain. The ground below is rich in oil, uranium and coal. Administered as a beneficial trust by the U.S. government, the land provides what little there is of a Navajo economy. Like many another Third World country, the Navajo Nation’s chief local source of income is the sale of its natural resources. This year the tribe’s budget is $250 million. Payments mandated under treaties with the federal government account for $158 million, but of the $92.4 million that the Navajos generate themselves, $80 million comes from natural resources revenues.

The Navajo Nation is poor by U.S. standards. Average per capita income is $4,106. Half the Navajos have no running water and one-third have no electricity. Almost 75% have no phone. By the most conservative estimates, the unemployment rate of the 200,000-person Navajo Nation is 35%. And yet the Navajo birth rate is almost three times that of the rest of the United States. The reservation’s boundaries are fixed, so with each new baby the pressure grows to extract yet more wealth from the land.

The Navajo forests have been logged since 1880, at an average annual yield of about 13 million board-feet (one mature ponderosa pine is about 400 board-feet). In 1958, the BIA and the tribe created Navajo Forest Products Industries, a sawmill that would use the reservation forest to employ Indians and to turn a profit. When the sawmill went into operation, demand for logs skyrocketed. Until last year, the company logged, on average, just under 40 million board-feet a year.

Though run as an independent business, it is owned by the tribe, which also dictates how much wood will be cut and selects the trees. It hires loggers and processes the felled trees into industrial grade lumber, mostly for door and window frames, and into pulp for paper mills. Often described as a model Indian development project, the company had 640 employees at its peak in 1978, its most profitable year, and was the single largest private employer on the reservation. That year, it provided $4,248,000 in payments to the tribe.

General manager Ed Richards argues that the forest is healthier from this pruning. With his smooth brown skin, silver hair and powder-blue Polo windbreaker, Richards looks somehow out of place at the mill. He is half Navajo, but the other Indians refer to him as belanga, which is Navajo for white. “There are more trees now than before NFPI started cutting,” he insists. “That’s because the big trees formed an upper canopy and blocked out a lot of the light. We take out those big trees, and at first it looks horrible, but you come back in three years and all these little guys are sprouting up.”

Richards isn’t the only who argues that cutting down old trees is good for the forest and the Navajo. Peter MacDonald, then the chairman of the tribe, sued the BIA in 1983 for mismanagement of tribal resources, arguing that the BIA had let perfectly salable timber grow old and rot. In 1986, the U.S. Claims Court agreed, awarding the tribe $925,000 in compensation. The forest, it would seem, was being under-harvested.

Jackson never bought the official line. He believed that the forestry company was sacrificing the health of the forest for profit. Alarmed by estimates that only about 5% of the old-growth ponderosa pines, the grandfather trees, were left, Jackson asked Lane Krahl, an independent forestry consultant, to inspect the land. Krahl was then under contract with the Forest Trust, a Santa Fe-based group that provides technical support to environmental activists. He calls what he saw in the Chuskas “the most intensive logging in the Southwest.”

“The company’s goal was timber maximization, profit,” says Krahl. “They were actually doing their job well. It was just that there were no forests in their minds, only trees. And not trees, timber.”

Sam Hitt, a close ally of Jackson who works with Forest Guardians, another Santa Fe environmental advocacy group, says, “Old-growth trees are an integral part of the forest’s regeneration system. They stand for several years after they die and are home to owls and birds. Then after they fall to the ground, they are home to another set of creatures, seed and fungus carriers, that are integral to the forest perpetuating itself. . . . If the tribe keeps logging like this, they will kill the forest. In the years ahead, there will be nothing left but biological desert”

4. STAKES--After NFPI logged the Begaye property in 1990, Jackson joined Dine (Navajo for “the people”) Citizens Against Ruining our Environment, a nascent, loosely organized environmental umbrella group. Under their banner, he almost single-handedly led a successful anti-logging campaign. He worked 60- to 80-hour weeks, operating from his cluttered kitchen, his fax/telephone sharing scarce counter space with ceramic canisters shaped like chili peppers. He spoke--in terse, staccato sentences interrupted by long pauses--at countless conferences and local meetings. He built a network of hundreds of allies. He organized a run for Earth Day. He educated himself in the jargon of forestry: basal area, commercial forest base, stumpage, slash.

Until 1992, Dine CARE made only a slight impact. The Tribal Council met with its members rarely, paying only lip service to their urgent appeals. But in May of that year, Dine CARE filed an administrative appeal with the BIA to prevent the tribe from making its next timber sale, compartment 34 of Ugly Valley/Whiskey Creek, without an environmental impact statement. Eventually, the BIA rejected the appeal. But for nearly three months, a BIA administrative stay kept the loggers at bay.

Suddenly, appreciating the vulnerability of its logging operation, the tribe moved to address these new legal and environmental concerns. President Peterson Zah met with Dine CARE. He appointed a task force with members of the Navajo Forestry Department, NFPI and Dine CARE. The tribe scaled back by half the amount of logging to be done in Whiskey Creek, from 36 million to 18 million board-feet. Further, when the tribe prepared its next timber sale at Tohnitsa, it anticipated Dine CARE’s reaction and announced that it would not log in the most sensitive areas of the ecosystem. “They had made so many changes in (the conditions of) that sale,” says Krahl, “that I said we could no longer go to court and argue this wasn’t sustainable forestry.” Most importantly, the tribe delayed publication of a long-overdue 10-year forestry plan, possibly out of fear that it wouldn’t hold up to a challenge in federal court. The tribe is still waiting to see whether the BIA will pay for the environmental impact statement, which can cost as much as $500,000.

Jackson soon drew the wrath of NFPI, which “had led the loggers to believe that they could keep cutting like this forever,” Begaye says. “When we showed that they couldn’t, they made Leroy a scapegoat.” During the summer of 1992, while Dine CARE was holding up the Whiskey Creek timber sale, the company warned that layoffs were imminent. The loggers held angry protests outside the mill. One sign read: “Leroy Jackson Keep Your Hands Off Our Jobs . . . Or Else.” At another rally, an Associated Press reporter said, the loggers hanged Jackson in effigy.

Jackson was far from indifferent to the loggers’ plight. “Leroy was personally affected by this issue,” Hitt says. “The jobs weighed heavily on his conscience.” Friends say he was always thinking up alternative businesses, such as a furniture factory, to create new jobs for displaced workers. He urged the task force to use timber profits for retraining.

And he tried to explain his cause to the loggers. Just weeks after Richards announced that the mill would have to lay off 82 workers, Jackson invited 25 loggers to his hogan in Tsaile. Some began to understand, even sympathize.

Although logger anger still ran high, local wisdom holds that the perpetrator of so sophisticated a murder must have had more at stake than a low-wage job. In investigating the tribe’s logging practices, Jackson had discovered that NFPI was in debt, by perhaps as much as $8 million. Richards acknowledges that the company is in debt, but for only $2.8 million. He says the debt developed when the logging operations were interrupted by the environmentalists. James Carter, the BIA forester who must approve the company’s logging plans, suggests that the real cause of the debt, whatever its size, is merely mismanagement.

But Jackson suspected more--and pressed for an audit of the company. He had no proof of corruption, but that would be a natural assumption in light of the high-profile crimes that had recently marred Navajo affairs. In 1989, then tribal Chairman Peter MacDonald was convicted of taking tens of thousands of dollars in bribes from contractors in return for rights to mine and drill on the reservation. After MacDonald was deposed, Leonard Haskie was appointed interim president. This past July, Haskie was indicted by a federal grand jury in Phoenix for accepting bribes worth almost $40,000 from two lumber companies.

At Jackson’s prodding, the tribe agreed to investigate NFPI. A month after Jackson’s death, the tribal comptroller issued a preliminary report on the financial operations of the mill. The tribe decided that a full audit was warranted. The audit is now under way, but it is uncertain when it will be completed.

But the implications of Jackson’s work extended well beyond NFPI. Informed observers believed that oil and coal interests would be Jackson’s next target. His continued success would certainly have come at the expense of natural resources extraction.

Alex Thal, director of the Southwestern Center for Resource Analysis at Western New Mexico University and a resource consultant to the Navajo, explains: “What is happening on the reservation in terms of issues like timber, grazing and water rights is a microcosm of the Southwest. But the struggle is fiercer here because the land use is so intense. The Navajo use every inch of their land. But the precious areas have increasingly become of concern to the urban Navajos. This burgeoning environmental movement is really going to change how resources are managed.”

5. MISSING PIECES--The case for Jackson’s having been murdered hinges on a few pieces of inexplicable evidence. The testimony of Dr. David Lang, for example. Lang lived across the street from Jackson and Begaye in Tsaile and was part of the search party formed to look for Jackson. He was assigned the stretch of Highway 64 between Tierra Amarilla and Taos. At 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 6, a brilliantly clear day, he passed the rest stop where Jackson’s van was found four days later.

To Lang, coming from the west on this nearly deserted road, a white van among the copper autumn leaves and evergreens should have stood out like a neon sign--not least of all because he was looking for it. But Lang, who remembers the rest stop and can describe it down to the A-frames and the dirt road, didn’t see the van. If the van wasn’t there Wednesday, where was it? And if Jackson had died on the previous Saturday, as the police believe, how did his van get to mile marker 94 eight days later? “It is a puzzle that keeps me awake at night,” Lang says.

Police have a witness, an ophthalmologist, who says he saw a white van at the rest stop on that Saturday. Police gave credence to the ophthalmologist because he could recall the precise location of the van.

There are other troubling details. The police found only one set of car keys on Jackson, although Begaye insists that her husband carried a second set with him. What’s more, she says, the position in which he was found was very much out of character. He didn’t like to sleep scrunched up, and when he napped on the road, he always did it in the front seat. She also maintains that he never would have pulled the blanket over his own face.

Finally, there is the problem of the methadone. Sal Damiani is the chief administrator for the 23 clinics of Beth Israel Medical Center’s methadone program in New York City. Methadone, he explains, is used primarily to treat heroin addicts and federal regulations require clinics to dispense the liquid medication in carefully labeled single-dosage vials. The methadone that presumably killed Jackson was found not in a vial, but in a prescription pill bottle in a dashboard compartment of his van. There were no fingerprints on the bottle, not even Jackson’s. The only thing the torn prescription label revealed was that the bottle had originally contained an antihistamine for allergies. There was no information about patient, doctor or pharmacy. Had the methadone been in its original vial, the police would have been able to trace it to the clinic that supplied it and, thus, to its intended recipient. In short, there remains no physical evidence that would have provided leads to the source of the methadone.

The police theorize that an acquaintance gave Jackson the methadone. But according to Damiani, patients are given a thorough orientation before undergoing treatment with methadone because the drug can be toxic. It is unlikely, therefore, that a methadone user would have given Jackson more than a single dose without realizing the danger involved. A friend offering it as an experimental remedy for his migraines would certainly have warned him of the risks. Would Jackson, traveling on a lonely road at night, have gambled with his life by gulping a dangerous, unknown quantity?

On this question of character, his friends and family say absolutely not; Jackson, they contend, didn’t even smoke pot. The marijuana found in his body might contradict them, but McFeeley, the medical examiner, confirms that Jackson was no drug abuser: The trace amount of pot in his body, she says, suggests non-habitual use. Moreover, Jackson had comfortably used the same combination of drugs, Valium and Tylenol 3, to relieve his migraines for years.

Could someone else have put methadone in Jackson’s food or drink, unknown to him, while he was in Taos, as friends speculate? Perhaps. Methadone’s taste, while slightly bitter, is easily disguised in a strong drink. Clinics use Tang, but in coffee or beer it would be undetectable. The investigation is now focusing on who gave Jackson the methadone.

A final puzzle about the methadone points to another hypothesis for Jackson’s death, one embraced by the more religious Navajo among his followers. Damiani says that if a person with no tolerance for the drug were to ingest a lethal amount, the reaction could be violent. “He probably would have been nauseous and thrown up,” he says. But the police saw no signs of a violent reaction. Medical examiner McFeeley admits that the methadone levels in Jackson’s body were barely above the threshold of toxicity. She explains that it is the only potentially lethal drug she turned up. Some Navajo suspect a cause that no belanga doctor could discover.

6. WITCHES--After her husband’s death, Begaye had a vision in which she saw Navajos and white men conspiring to kill him. The white men were paying the Navajos for their magic. She maintains that this is how she learned that antizi, witchcraft, was responsible for his death. There had been other signs. Begaye’s mother saw a coyote--an omen, like the owl that became the emblem of Jackson’s movement--before his disappearance. Lightning had appeared over the house. And Jackson’s migraines had been coming more frequently in recent months. A medicine man, sensing some sort of sorcery, had prescribed a prayer. But Jackson had not found the time for the traditional remedy.

Witchcraft may seem an improbable MO for a murder. But it is an integral part of Navajo lore, and is still thought to have followers within the tribe. They are thought to cast spells by giving their victims a poison powder made from choice parts of corpses like whorls of fingertips or by shooting them with tiny beads made of human bone. By taking a victim’s saliva or feces or hair to a burial site and praying over it, witches are said to be able to induce long, painful illnesses. Some are skinwalkers, who can change themselves into were-animals, taking the form of giant wolves or coyotes and running at blazing speed across the moonlit desert plains.

Skinwalkers can also be mere humans who dress themselves with animal heads and skins and perform ceremonial rituals. Capt. John Schaaf, of the Gallup City Police Department, has encountered these spectral beings on his frequent visits to the reservation. “I’ve seen ‘em at night, naked, wearing nothing but turquoise beads and an animal skin,” he says. “It’ll make the hair on the back of your head stand up.”

If that skeptic of the supernatural, Lt. Joe Leaphorn, the protagonist of Tony Hiller-man’s detective novels, were real, his boss would be Edison Begay, chief of the Navajo Department of Law Enforcement. Begay has no time for the baffling homicides that plague Leaphorn, though. He worries more about problems imported from the inner cities, like gang warfare and drugs. Nevertheless, he offers me this story.

Last summer, his mother brought her sheep to their grazing ground about 50 miles northeast of the Navajo capital of Window Rock, Ariz. She woke up one morning to find 10 of them dead. Their necks were broken, their entrails were spread upon the ground and their anuses and testes had been cut out and carried off. Around the pen, she found the tracks of a giant wolf. End of story. “So was it a were-animal or a skinwalker?” I ask finally. “I dunno. Maybe,” the chief of police says.

More traditional Navajos do not readily talk about witchcraft. It is hard to know if Begaye is being completely forthright about her suspicions. Believers have been taught that if they speak knowledgeably of witchcraft, others will suspect them of practicing it or, worse, that the malevolent beings might take revenge on them. Begaye turns off my tape recorder when she speaks of it, and her words are cryptic. I interpret her roughly to mean: There are evil forces in the world and people who know how to manipulate them to perform wicked deeds.

7. TRADITIONS--There are 30 miles of rutted, dirt road on the way to the south rim of Canyon de Chelly, a vast gorge in the center of the reservation. Here, hidden amid the scrub brush and the ramshackle dwellings of his patients, medicine man Alfred Yazzie is performing a nine-day healing ceremony called the Night Way. The ceremonial hogan is in a dusty clearing surrounded by old, run-down pickup trucks. Fragrant cedar logs burn slowly outside. Inside, Yazzie makes sacred sand-paintings. No belanga allowed.

When the medicine man finally emerges, his appearance is something of a surprise: pressed jeans, a crisp plaid shirt and close-cropped hair. Yazzie, a former police chief who graduated from the FBI Academy, didn’t know Jackson personally, but he had heard of the activist and approved of his protests. He describes Jackson as a champion of “the old people, whose rights were being trampled and who thought they could do nothing about it. He stood up for them.”

Yazzie explains that the Chuska Mountains are the male deity of the Navajo. For many ceremonies, herbs must be gathered from these mountains and mixed with herbs from the female deity, Black Mesa. Herbs from the Chuskas are also used to make special medicines for men. “Sometimes, NFPI comes through and bulldozes everything and the people who gather herbs are angry, but they have no voice with the Tribal Council,” Yazzie says. Jackson “tried to be their voice.”

“Navajos need to go back to more traditional ways, to Walk in Beauty,” he tells me sadly. “To live in harmony with the surroundings, you don’t bulldoze a mountain or kill a tree for nothing.”

Behind us, three women dressed in traditional garb bring trays of food and six-packs of Mountain Dew into the hogan. It is time for lunch. I am invited to a communal kitchen and offered thick Navajo fry bread and a bowl of oily mutton broth filled with crunchy wild corn. The floor is dirt, and I eat with plastic utensils, a radio playing in the background. The young woman serving me wears a Chicago Bulls “Threepeat” T-shirt.

Even here, in the most remote corner of the reservation, the outside world is omnipresent. It is Yazzie’s nemesis, the taunting, successful rival of a lost way of life. Leroy Jackson’s spirit hovers here, too, regretting the poverty, fearing the change.

It seems now that there will probably never be a conclusive explanation for Jackson’s death. In three short years of activism he accomplished much--reducing by half the amount of timber taken from the forests and raising questions of sustainability that will not soon go away. His death has brought national attention to his life’s cause and solidified his supporters, who have pledged to pursue his work. If nothing else, environmental groups like Hitt’s Forest Guardians are continuing the legal battles precipitated by the activist, pressing to force the tribe to treat the spotted owl as an endangered species.

But Jackson’s death can only be described as a tragedy. And not just because he died in his prime, leaving behind three children, or because the future of the Chuska forest is far from assured. The sad truth is that he was winning the battle, but losing the war. In a half century, it is possible that no one on the Navajo Reservation will Walk in Beauty. Living in harmony with the land means giving up too much. And, then, when the Navajo no longer offer prayers to the trees, what purpose will the forest serve? As Jackson had warned other Navajos, “I have seen the stores in Oakland where they buy tapes of rain in the forest. Do we want to be like that?”