“Carol began wondering if she would ever escape Atlanta. Amid her daily drudgery, she followed one guiding principle, which kept her connected to the real world beneath the concrete and beyond the city limits; search for the source. Food didn’t come from a grocery store. Water didn’t come from a faucet. Ultimately, everything came from nature.
Even the seemingly mundane items in her everyday city life were derived from the natural world. Each morning, she woke up to an alarm clock, which used quartz crystals–highly compressed sand–to keep time. She brushed her teeth with toothpaste made with the same seaweed that sheltered sea turtle hatchlings. She sat on a toilet made of heated clay and wiped with toilet paper made from trees. She got dressed in clothes woven from sheep-sheared wool and drove to work in a jeep made mostly out of iron–which came from the guts of exploding stars. She filled it with oil made from dead plants and animals decaying on the ocean floor for five hundred million years. After work, she went for a hike in boots comprised of dried cow skin and the milky sap of a rubber tree and, afterward, drank river water from a glass formed by lightning striking beach sand. At the end of a long day, she rested her head on a pillow made of feathers stripped from geese.
She was no different than the caveman in her total reliance on nature. Money enabled her to hire middlemen to mine and refine natural resources for her, but it also distanced her from the source of her sustenance.
‘For most of human history, we lived in direct contact with nature. Now we get resources from companies who extract them from nature for us,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘We’ve added a money economy between us and nature.'”
A Burd in Flight 