Walking my dog Samson down my alley twice a day, I am able to keep a close watch on what goes on back there. Not only can one create the most beautiful collages from Found Objects, such as old bark from palm trees and the discarded wrappers of Japanese chopsticks, but one can also police Earth Criminals, some of the most dangerous individuals in the world.

For example, yesterday I found not only a baby's plastic diaper lying on top of my organic clippings to be picked up by the City of Hollywood, shredded and recycled as mulch, but the diaper appeared to have been used! Carefully removing it with a recycled grocery store bag, I placed it on the doorstep of an old garden apartment which faces my alley and from which I had several times heard a baby's cry.

Realizing there are not too many of us noble, dedicated, sincere people left in the world, I tried to calm down and get a good grip on myself. Outrage contained, I continued on my mission down the alley. Ah, all seemed in order, except for one soda can which I put in the blue recycle bin. I was able to sleep that night knowing that that aluminum can would be back on the store shelves in 3 months. My sense of well-being, however, was short lived.

The next day what appeared to be the very same used diaper appeared again, exactly on top of my organic clippings along with my old recycled grocery bag. I had had quite enough and knocked on the door of the same alley garden apartment. A young TwentySomething appeared and I did notice that he stood around 80 feet tall. Lowering my voice somewhat, I asked, "Do you have any idea how long it takes plastic to break down in the soil? Do you realize this is the only Earth we have? Do you realize the pile over there on my perfectly manicured lawn is organic matter only and meant to be shredded and returned to the earth as mulch?" He swore that some other person, with some other baby, must have driven down this same alley and pitched it out of the window. I agreed that this, no doubt, is what must have happened. I knew my words would stay in his mind, so it was not necessary for me to force the issue further. I congratulated myself on graciously allowing him a way out of the encounter. I sniffed self-righteously and went home to admire my Early Girl tomatoes, which were beginning to become a little rosy. My alley neighbor would have gotten a lot worse from my grandparents.

My feeling of reverence for not just the earth, but for simple things of quality, must certainly have come from my old European grandparents who reared me. I thought of them as Earth Heroes, a title I had privately coined for spiritual and delicate souls sensitive to their environment. Good grief, Nana and I even visited horse stalls to collect manure, and actually sifted the manure through a screen to use as fertilizer for our seedlings. No bags of chemicals for us: just everything had to pure and natural. I thought this was normal; I still do.

When I was about to graduate my Midwest high school, my very German grandmother patiently explained to me that if I just studied my typing for a while, some man would come along and marry me and his friends would become mine. With this news I immediately left town. My very French grandfather had told me pirate stories of him growing up on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. This seemed a far superior idea than typing, so off I went without a backward glance.

San Francisco and I were made for each other: I even liked the soft fog swirling around me every morning and stopped shivering after about six months. I found an old cottage in the hills of Marin County with a quarter-inch view of the Golden Gate Bridge and hired Hud, an aging handyman. Hud did not remotely resemble Paul Newman, but he did help me clear away the rocky hillside to prepare my garden and compost pile.

Today, my "cottage" is a three million dollar property, but I was able to rent it then, "as is", for the enormous sum of $350. The clever businessperson I thought I was, rented out the downstairs apartment for $150, and I was then able to scrape by with my $200 monthly rent. I loved a natural environment and it certainly was. The hill leading up to my cottage was filled with weeds and wildflowers with not a lawn in sight. Deer still came down from the higher elevations to munch the pink blooms from scraggly, long-left-unattended rose bushes, and that was fine with me. Hud wanted to put up wire to keep them out, but of course I said no. I could see his forehead wrinkling up as his mind slowly tried to sort this out and could almost hear him thinking, "Oh no, not another one of those "hippies." To myself I said, Well, he will never understand us Earth Heroes. Earth Heroes, like my spiritual grandparents, are those people who realize that not only is this the only Earth we have, but it also is not intelligent to disturb the ecological balance of nature. Hud did help me, however, and now with my cottage in order, I thought I might be ready to go back to school.

I immediately enrolled at San Francisco State with primarily botany and landscaping classes, and discovered that I was not alone. Everyone there was an Earth Hero just like me. I toured my classmates' gardens that year in the City and down the old coast road lined with Metasequoias, the enormous, ancient Dawn Redwoods, to Stinson Beach and nervously discovered that their flower of choice was cannabis, but complimented them on the beauty of it anyway. My favorite book was The Greening of America, by Charles Reich, a professor of law at Yale University who wrote about the rebirth of human values and our "revolutionary" generation. We San Franciscans let our hair grow natural and long or big and frizzy. Patrick, my fulltime gardener friend and part-time lover, resembled a tall gangly sunflower swaying his big yellow head in the sun, and Angela Davis, pounding on her podium at UC Berkeley was always angry. It was hard to concentrate on anything but her proud, electric Afro hair and her stormy face, and that also indicated one of our beliefs: a natural state of being.

We recycled everything, wore hiking boots everywhere and self-righteously considered ourselves "golden." Lipstick tubes and underwear were considered disgraceful and unnatural. Buck knives were looped through our belts, because after all, you never could tell when you needed to take a snip of some plant to bring home and root. We protested loudly almost everything having to do with consumerism and waste and plastics. We sent bodies to stop the destruction of Rain Forests when we barely knew what they were, or the truly enormous effect their demise would have on the world. Certainly, we didn't know by name what Global Warming was then, or maybe we did instinctively. We collected leaves from Eucalyptus trees to put in our dog's bed to keep fleas away. The thought of using Styrofoam, which takes 20 years to break down in the soil, was abhorrent to us. I don't think we ever put anything but cloth diapers on the children. Sorting these thoughts through my memory, I determined I was still not resigned to living in my alley neighbor's world of casual disregard. I decided to see what e mails I had for the morning and hopefully find more Earth Heroes on the web. Perhaps I could just see what old friends were doing.

Switching on my Dell PC, I went to Bill Graham Presents' website to discover that while I and the world lost my neighbor, a great humanitarian and dear friend in a helicopter crash, his organization is contributing not just to the Shakespeare Festivals up and down the coast of Northern California, but to Fresh Start Farms, an organic farm commune which houses homeless adults and sells organic produce to restaurants. Good going, Bill, I say to myself, are you and Janis and Stephen and Gerry Garcia watching from Rock Heaven? I recalled the fun we had with our Radish Growing Contest.

I always won with the biggest radish, although Bill's weren't bad. They had to be not just big but not bitter as well. Everyone in Sweetwater, a local pub in Mill Valley came to watch us -- or maybe slip Bill a tape of their latest music -- but no one thought it was unusual to bring giant radishes with soil still on their roots to a public place. We each carefully got out our bags of radishes and lined them up on the old ship hatch tables. After determining the length and width and the most perfectly formed radish, we dunked them in water or wine to clean off the soil and passed them around for everyone to eat. It was hard to believe sitting in Sweetwater with Bill and so many other Earth Heroes that we were called hippie "freaks", although none of us ever minded that. But how could such an altruistic, golden collective mentality die? How did we get from the 60s to the millennium with such a disregard for natural glorious things? If only my alley neighbor could have joined us at Sweetwater.

Sighing to myself tonight, I wonder how in the world can I ever describe all these things that were and still are so important to my alley neighbor? How can I ever make him realize that he will teach his tiny baby to discard all that is beautiful and embrace all that is plastic junk? I wonder does he know what dullness will result if he doesn't give his child just old boxes with which to play and show him or her how to plant giant bean seeds in the earth. Won't this delight any child when fat ole' bean seeds sprout their silly leaves to reach for the sun? Frustrated, I think I'd also like to give him a copy of my favorite book, but it doesn't have that many pictures in it.

Well, I see that I will have to keep a close vigilance on him and also think more what I myself am doing for the earth. I have to be very careful: it's my Job. Tomorrow, I will disguise myself so no one gets upset about hippie freaks roaming the alley. I'll even put some millennium lipstick on - I still can't bring myself to put much underwear on - and take Samson for his morning walk. After all, I am the Earth Police, yet another title I make up, and queen of just one small alley.