Dedication

     This book is dedicated to the Venerable Mahamankadawata Piyarathana, leader of the voiceless, faceless people of Eppawala, whose depth of understanding of the ancient dry zone forest gardens and water and soil conservation ecosystems of Rajarata, puts to shame the sum total of orthodox learning of all the reductionist scholars, who have contributed each his precious two cents worth of conventional wisdom, for or against the infamous proposal to mine the phosphate rock deposit to exhaustion in 30 years; to Madha Patkar and other sisters and brothers of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, in Madhya Pradesh, and the National Alliance of Peoples' Movements, in India, who are engaged in similar life and death struggles against the WTO and multinational corporations; and to Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter L. Lovins, authors of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, for their sympathetic understanding of what the Eppawala struggle is all about.