Excerpt: The Rain Maker Project

It all started at Berkley. A group of them decided that the only way to make a real difference was to organize, so organize they did. The three of them, Woody, Jeff and Drew, sat down and wrote a mission statement.

The mission of EcologyPeople is to bring awareness of our natural environment and its importance to the whole world to the general population through peaceful methods and education.

It was simple and straight-forward and they lived it over their last two years of college. They each graduated in 1978 determined to keep moving forward, to keep things peaceful and open the whole world’s eyes to the dangers facing the environment.

Each of them had his own pet subject. Jeff loved forests and spent all his spare time climbing redwoods in Oregon. When he occasionally saved up a little money, he traveled to central America to see the rainforests there and came back with stories of canopies stretching across vast areas and treetops that echoed with the voices of animals and flowers in ever color imaginable. The flowers were Drew’s passion; he had a garden box in his apartment that had more variety and color than some at the botanical gardens and he prided himself on his pesticide free vegetables that grew in large pots on his tiny porch. Woody, on the other hand, preferred animals. He loved seeing anything in the wild, from squirrels on the campus to eagles soaring overhead. He took road trips to the national parks just to try and catch glimpses of bears and deer and such things. He also brought home anything and everything that might need rescuing from the streets—every stray in his neighborhood at one time or another passed through his house. He loved animals of all shapes and size.

Thirty years later, Woody found himself shivering in the cold of a late fall in central Alaska. He huddled by a pipeline, careful not to touch it, gripping his radio in his gloved hand and waiting for an answer. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use the pack of C4 stashed in his backpack, but desperate times called for desperate measures. He peered at the landscape, unable to make out much beyond the pipe that faded into the white haze not too far from where he crouched. Flurries blew around him and stuck to his gloves and coat, as if to remind him that it was just as cold as he suspected. His fingers had long ago lost much sensation beyond the burning feeling that cold always gave him and he let his mind wander to California and the beaches and the warm sun on his shoulders. His breath curled in front of him and blew away with the rest of the cold air and he tried to shake away the warm weather thoughts.

Suddenly his radio crackled and he started. The sound stopped, but a large shape loomed quickly into view. Woody’s eyes widened as a caribou’s snuffling nose came within several inches of him. Its antlers were still velvet and its hooves crunched through the snow. He wondered how he didn’t hear its approach, how it caught him so by surprise. As he reached his gloved hand slowly toward it, his radio crackled again and this time a voice came over it.

“The answer’s no,” it said through the static. “Let her rip!”

Woody didn’t reply right away. The sound of the radio startled the deer and it went tearing away, tail up, as the voice spoke. He sighed heavily and slumped to the ground. After a moment, he took the radio and pushed down on the call button.

“I’m coming back.” His voice broke and he forced himself to stand, stumbling away from the pipeline.

“So it’s done?” the other voice asked.

“I’ll be there soon.”

“Well, hurry. A storm’s blowing in from the east and we want to be well clear of here so no one can prove it was us.”

Woody did not answer. He just kept stumbling toward the snowmobile and hoping Laura wouldn’t ask too many questions. His feet felt numb but he knew it hadn’t been long enough to get frostbite. His heart felt a little numb as well; how could it have come to this? He and Jeff and Drew always swore to stay peaceful and non-violent.

“What am I doing?” he thought.

As he walked, his mind drifted back a decade or so. During the late eighties
EcologyPeople grew by leaps and bounds. Suddenly the environment was “cool” and people wanted to save the whales and the rainforest and the coral reefs and everything else. Cashing in on this trend was not hard, and soon the three friends had more money and resources than they knew how to handle. The idea of donating their extra funds to another good cause was Woody’s; he felt that if they had good fortune, it would be good for their karma to pull along another struggling group that could make a difference for the better. Soon EcologyPeople funded six other non-profit organizations, setting up grants and endowments for groups to plant trees, rescue stranded sea turtles, and go to political rallies with their signs and petitions.

By then, none of The EP Guys, as they called themselves in college, attended any of the events; too much time went into producing literature for the events and doing paperwork and training local organizers. Woody still gave speeches at Berkley from time to time, but rarely spent much time outside of the office.

Then came the election cycle of 1994 and EcologyPeople found itself at a crossroads. The Guys were in a meeting with their lead organizers who were about to split into delegations to head to the Republican and Democrat National Conventions, in Houston and New York City respectively. They also intended to send small groups to several of the states key to the House and Senate elections because the Republicans had been campaigning hard and were likely to win the House in a landslide. Woody remembered Jeff leaning across the table to look him in the eye, his jaw set and his hair ruffled along the scalp from running his hands back over his head.

“Woody, I think we’re going to have to pick a candidate. Probably several.” Jeff looked quite serious.

“Isn’t that the point of an election?” Woody asked, laughing. “We’ve all got to pick candidates to vote for this fall, don’t we? All two hundred fifty million of us.” He grinned at Drew, who was carefully avoiding eye contact. Woody turned slowly back to Jeff. “What’s going on, guys?”

“I think the time has come for EcologyPeople to move into the national eye.” Jeff put his palms flat on the table and looked Woody right in the eye. “We’re going to start shifting some of our funding to candidates that support our causes.”

“Well, that sounds interesting,” Woody answered slowly, choosing his words with care. “But won’t we be in their debt then? I mean, won’t we have to have some kind of, well, understanding with them?”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Drew said. “You keep on making your speeches and finding new volunteers and let us take care of the politics.”

“But shouldn’t we, I don’t know, vote on it first?” Woody felt that the decision had already been made without him and the thought made him uneasy.

“I said, don’t worry about it.” Drew finally looked at him, his expression hard.

Woody left that meeting feeling empty, his stomach in knots. He drove home slowly, ignoring the dogs’ welcome home barks as he parked in the driveway and made his way inside. His wife, Beth, called to him from the kitchen, but he didn’t answer. Jessica, their eleven year old daughter, turned from her spot in front of the television to look at him.

“Dad, are you gonna hurl?” She asked the question matter-of-factly.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” he said, slumping into his chair.

He looked around at their small house. One of their five dogs came and rested its chin on his knee and he stroked its head absently. His friends… well, his associates anyway, seemed to have made several decisions without consulting him lately. He had been so busy that he hardly noticed as EcologyPeople shifted from a small non-profit to a large organization. After several minutes sitting and staring blankly, he decided that he was most likely over reacting and that he should trust his friends and put the situation out of his mind. After all, hadn’t they been funding groups that furthered their own cause for years? What was the difference really? He took a deep breath and put a smile on his face and walked into the kitchen to kiss Beth on the cheek, a few of the dogs trailing behind him.

The election cycle did put the Republicans in charge of the House but with a Democrat in the White House Woody figured things would stay pretty balanced. He kept himself busy at the office and out of the office, speaking at various events around the state and coming home almost every night to his family’s home just outside of San Francisco. One night, however, he worked later than usual and was at his desk when the phone in the main room rang. He set down his cup of coffee and the papers in his hand on the current research on sea turtle populations and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” he asked.

“Hey, Jeff. This is John. I wanted to remind you that we’re having a conference tomorrow. Now I don’t want any of your protestors out there for this one. It’ll give us bad press, and we wouldn’t want bad press, now would we? Just remember our deal.”

“What—” Woody started, but the line went dead. He held the phone for a few moments then gently set it back on the cradle. He walked slowly back to his desk and sat heavily in his chair, the research and coffee all but forgotten.