How Burger King Was Expelled from the Rainforests

I’ve had the good fortune of Aislinn signing up to camp at the village for 8 weeks and intern for me. She’s helping in whatever ways leave me more time to do the things that only I can do. This means that not only am I more productive but I also get to spend more time with family, garden, nature and exercise and other health maintenance. She reckons she’s getting a lot out of it too – win win! Next month Feya is taking her place. Please get in touch if you think you might want a shift and help move deep ecology into the main stream while enjoying the delights of the Narara Ecovillage.

Well, that’s a long message from our sponsor preamble to this post about one of the Instagram reels that Aislin talked me in to – singing “Lay Down Your Whopper” with my 12-year-old son River and telling the story about how we saved vast swathes of Costa Rican tropical rainforest 40 years ago by persuading Burger King to stop cutting it down so as to drop a few cents off the price of a hamburger. And the Substack essay that followed.

Having brought all that to mind, I’m now thinking of a bunch of other related history which I will gather here in this post:

• The video of my elder son Bodhi (then also aged about 12 years) and our friend Emu, a year or two older, rolling into Burger King in Eugene Oregon and singing the Whopper song with customers clapping and egging them on much to the consternation of management.
  (Watch the video – starts 30 minutes in, but the rest is worth watching.)
• The story of recording this song on an album called “At Night They Howl at the Moon” with the great Washington bard Dana Lyons (you may remember him from “Cows With Guns” (7.3 million views), which was on the charts around the world and number 1 in Ireland). We rehearsed it at a summer camp full of excited kids in Lopez Island, Washington who’d just returned full of exuberance from a day of kayaking (here’s a video of that gig). And then Bob Conger recorded it live the following night on a portable VHS Hi-Fi recording system at Camp Orkila (Orcas Island, Washington). The enthusiastic kids egging us on, you can listen to that track here and hear many other of my recordings on SoundCloud.