Correspondence from Chris Wells

Chris Wells’ first letter, February 22, 2026

Dear Peter Coyote, and open letter to random Digger, Hipi, Bioregional Earlies and later day Saints & Sinners,

 It’s been many years since I last ran into you in Santa Fe. You may not remember me.  I’m still producing All Species bioregional cultural-arts public-education events. Now almost half a century of producing All Species community programs: after 20 years in Santa Fe , then Ecuador, Peru, Chile , Brazil & Sweden. We carry on now in Oaxaca, Mexico where I have a small tropical food forest farm and we are fighting the battles of glyphosate killer pesticide and gmo corn. In 2020 we along with 60 other groups of the demanda collectiva won the first supreme court battle against these ills and here is an article about our piece of that puzzle, as we now go toward putting an Historic Mural commemorating winning those cases in the National historic mural museum in Mexico City

I’ve read both your memoirs, Peter. I also spent many days & nights at Olema ranch in 1968-69 after Lew Welch sent me to meet you. As it turned out you and I were both runners for Rolling Thunder (RT).   Once coming back from Nevada with RT, a car in front of us hit a deer and RT said instantly, “Pull over, spirit dropped that for us.”  We then drove to your ranch in Olema where you and I and RT skinned out that deer and we had an instant historic Feast day for the stray Hipis just bailed out from the Haight.

One of my other early Hipi home hubs was Gate 5, Sausalito where I kept Alan Watts and Yanko Jean Vardas’ old Ferry Boat afloat and drove Alan around to his speaking gigs. You were on the WELL, the first internet mail, right there with the Whole Earth Catalog crew and Ant Farm alternative tech buddies. On Sundays everyone was invited to sail out beyond the Golden Gate with Alan & Varda on his most colorful collaged sailboat. The Houseboat area, an Anarchic community was a hotbed of mad craftmanship and wild survival arts. I haven’t been there for many years but I think the old Vallejo Ferry boat of Alan’s is still there with some of his family keeping up a web presence for Alan’s inimitable comprehensive impromptu learn-ed speeches, most always clear as a bell. 

One night up in Olema us Hipis were hanging out playing tunes like your song ¨What do you think would happen if everybody let go? What do you think would happen if nobody said no? Sun and Moon in motion, Constant as the Ocean, Shuck your crazy notions. They’ll just make you sad”—a great song of Hip philosophy. Thanks Coyote. In the midst of the jam in walked Dreadhaired Richard one of Ousley’s chemist buddies and he gathers a circle of people and straight-up says, “You know me and Ousley have made a lot of the acid in the Bay area these years, well the other day an  FBI agent  came to my  door and said, “We know that LSD is not illegal but we’re going to make it illegal for you. You can either stay here and in about a year you’re going to jail, or you can take your family and leave the country and we won’t bother you anymore.” Richard thanked him for the tip and commenced to go to crashpads and hip cultural hubs and tell everybody that in a couple of months he was going to leave for Bogata, Columbia and he was giving away 35 free airplane tickets. I knew one of those tickets was mine because I was already failing to show up for the Vietnam war draft and they had visited my parents looking to jail me.

So the day I was to leave, RT said he would drive me to the airport but  first he drove us out  to the Grateful Dead Ranch and  told Micky Hart who had just made his Rolling Thunder album, my story and Mickey opened his wallet and gave me a $100 bill, which was all the money I left with. I played guitar in the streets and hitch-hiked, rode horse and walked with digger Gandalf  for more than a year down the Andean highlands roads to Mapuche, Chile.

I returned under President Carters Amnesty 6 years later. After I came back, I produced All Species Days in Santa Fe NM for 20 years.

We borrowed empty warehouses and produced  6 months of public studios resulting in a four part event: Multi-Cultural Opening Ceremonies, starting with local pueblo dancers & Poets,  second, an All Species costumed Parade, third,  a Giant Puppet Theater, and lastly an afternoon of sideshows all about urgent Bioregional Poetic Themes like “Elk Mountain Controversy”, “Why Wild ?” and “Holding Up the Sky.”

Years later in the 90s I ran into you in Santa Fe and we talked a couple of times over coffee. You kindly and importantly sent me $1000 for that year’s All Species Day programs, which have always been amazingly culturally effective considering the little cash that was spent on them. I’ve been a Hipi refugee cultural artist, self-nominated Embassador from the Lost Country of Love since I left Olema in ’69 as part of the Hip diaspora and I carry on now, having seeded ongoing autonomous species events in many towns on three continents.

So now decades later after all these years, I have allied myself to various urgent Bioregional causes & adventures, since early All Species Days with Ponderosa Pine 1978 & Peter and Judy Berg in Vancouver 1988 where I first met some of this Cascadia crew, also since I heard of your Reinhabitory Theater improvs, since the BR [Bioregional] Congresses of the 80s in the Ozarks and around the Northern America. I’ve probably been to as many Bioregional Confluences throughout North and South America as anyone. In recent decades I’ve been part of the Consejo de Visiones [Bioregional Vision Councils] which were centered around Tepoztlán, Mexico and the impetus of Alberto Ruz Buenfil whose father was the main archeologist of Mexico during the socialist period and together they unearthed Palenque Ruins after 500 years. Alberto who died two years ago also led bus caravans mixing many movements together bioregionally throughout the Americas for 30 years. I participated in the Condor-Eagle events in Machu Pichu, Peru in 2003 and these wild camp-outs of more or less 1000 people have spawned, encouraged, cross-referenced, informed and inspired many local groups along the way. One of the great things about the bioregional gatherings is they are an escape from the Left-Right bullshit sloganeering reductionist politics. Bioregionals simply care about the integrity of Place, People and Critters. Que No?

The Southern extension of Bioregional Mapping and Land Culture Unity extended Last Year to Yucatan, Mexico and Chichén Itzá where we joined with Canadian Lakota Chief Phil Lane’s collaborators to make a Mayan Bioregion gathering and sign his World Peace Treaty. They have a lot going on.

After years disappeared, I’m back on the Bioregional list serve, but post seldom. I’m putting up this Risque rap to try to lasso in some of the BR old-timers and your families to give a sense of continuity and community to our spacey rustic red road movement. 

All this is to lead up to that I caught wind that y’all are producing a new bioregional gathering in Cascadia coming up in September. I’m all for it and hope to bring a small crew of talented & accomplished friends to contribute interdisciplinary. I think there’s a lot of important subtleties to consider before you put out the word in a way bigger scale. Also Poetics and unique expression are essential in these times wherein many damaged and damaging souls are trying to find something wrong with your rap, whatever it is.  

For example, I hope that we do not use the word ‘congress’. I like ‘confluence’ or ‘gathering’, or ‘encounter’? because I don’t want to give off the impression that we’re trying to govern anything. If anything, we’re trying to be governed by our bioregions’ needs, designs and species. I, being a long time paranoid escape-artist, have built an under the radar life and just to be as frank as I’m being here is probably a mistake what with all the new layers of scrutiny. I’ve already heard rumor that they’re searching for “Turtle Island” rebels. Let them find the Mohawk Creation story and Oren Lyons, not our gathering. Or maybe we should invite them. 

Let us focus on our obligations to nature as human society more than Rights. Que No? Bring the Poets &  Bards—those with bioregional-repertoire and doable planetary visions. Bring the kids and elders. Bring Nature Observation Skills, Arts & Crafts, PermaCultural Design, Mapping & Systems Ecology, Myth & Story.

OK enough , that was a good video y’all made. Thanks for staying on the ball. 

CAW

allspecies@earthlink.net  
allspeciesprojects.com

Spotify: Cristobal Wells –  Missing LInk and Traveling Slowly = bioregional songs, chants and hollars

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Chris Wells’ second letter, March 7, 2026

Dear Ancient friends and cohorts—John Diamante and all reading, 

Yesterday, after many years here, I became a permanent resident in Mexico. Hurray and Hallelujah. I will probably continue to return to Arco Iris Institute in Santa Fe, NM where I am a colleague and conspirator. There in my native corn gardens I offer a therapeutic songs , chants and hollars  session  with cellist Nelson Denman, also long time bioregional trouble-shooter. These early morning two-hour sessions are always amazing with a few visitors from anywhere on earth and for me personally they are a great relief from the incessant hourly troubles of being a planetary citizen. 

John, it’s been many years since I’ve received your clever missives and I’m trying to focus in on them but it may take a while. I could do the phone if it’s called for. I’ve got a not too good phone so I have this feeling the whole world is listening but onward through the fog and deceit. [John Diamante has been organizing an All Species Day Parade in Washington D.C. for July 5, 2026]

So it seems yr planning something for Washington where my parents lived for a while before they both graduated at 96. I will never go back there. It’s a bubble of confusion, a trance of useless struggle where the rule of law never really existed and seems to now be over as a control center of the word world. 

I am interested in your new All Species Day Brochure as something to pass around the planet as I get many requests for introductory educational  materials as the third generation of projects seems to be coming on.

Our Kansas City All Species Projects = sufi science teacher Marty Kraft, findable online, made a how to do it manual years ago. They have recently taken on the puppetry of Microbiology , Quorum Sensing, Composting and they are great school gardeners. 

After so many years in exile I still ramble on with bad grammar and typing in 5 languages as I am today surrounded by Zapotec corn growers as we bring in their first crop of their own native colors corn in 50 years. One of my favorite specialties is finding the old seed and using it to replace the 50 years of hybrid white corn from the US NAFTA distribution. The look in their eyes when backlands Zapotecs see their own corn of many colors after not seeing it for many years!!!

So that last history letter is the only one I’ll send like that. Now I would like to contribute to the structure and production of this new bioregional gathering. I think we have proved to ourselves over the years that there’s no set way to do this and that the goal is to organize for maximum exchange, collaboration, use of the short time we will have and quality of experience. One of the great things about the bioregional is the great emphasis on creative facilitation and we have amongst us some amazing facilitators over the years. In the last bioregional in Mexico—”The Call of the Amates” which are huge trees that can act as the main facilitators of the weeklong events. In Mexico whole provinces are named after trees and plants (“Chiapas= Chia seeds”; “Oaxaca= the Oaje tree” which are nitrogen fixing and their canopy can cover a whole town central plaza so they are the conveners of the congress, the facilitator Tree of Life.) 

But not to forget us humanimals , we have amongst us a movement of facilitation which is fascinating, fertile, complex and yet simplifying. And it is all about individual humans, Carolyn Estes, David Haenke, the Bilinguals—Bea Briggs, Ivan from Tepoztlán and his gringo father who was a labor organizer, Laura Kuri, many others. The last Mexican bioregional produced a “How to do a Bioregional Congress” book which I am trying to get translated for you right now. I hope to send it next week.

So, of course, in every instance we reinvent the process anew as it should be for this unique setting and these previous processes, and people serve to inform the process. I’m still wondering what scale we’re talking about. In the far south, we’ve had several gatherings of 1000 people with camping and hotels and we’ve had smaller gatherings of 200 with some facilitation in Mayan and Quechua .

Of course the cultural arts nights are special, but this can also be stretched out through the week, in lunch lines, Sunday morning Green Gospel hours, nighttime camp fires, dawn yawns. Here’s a tune I wrote by asking the kids at Little Earth school what their favorite animal did in the wintertime. I also have a collection of the oldest songs on Earth which are partly represented on two free albums on Spotify under Cristobal Wells – Missing Link and Travelling Slowly. – Dang the song wouldn’t send. Find it on Spotify if you like.

Perhaps some of you remember the 1988 Bioregional gathering north of Vancouver partly sponsored by the Bridge River Community. There were two stunning musical events, one, an all night until dawn campfire wherein folks from 15 bioregions passed the guitar and one song at a time sang ourselves around the Earth.  Alberto Ruz and the Mexicans carried the spirit for that.  And on the last night the Salish people who were guardians of the Douglas Fir park we were in lent us their big longhouse and the All Species procession crew from Olympia made Salmon masks for everybody and we had drummers. We made a spiraling line dance and sang Frazer Lang’s “Salmon Circle” for a couple hours. “It’s the Salmon Circle from the Sea to the Sea, Up the river of life, endlessly and they always return to the place that they’re from. For a million Years, they swam and swam and swam “

Hasta Luego .

Watch your Back

CAW

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