After University of Pennsylvania undergraduate Gregory Pavlik wrote a column in the Daily Pennsylvanian critical of affirmative action, he was told he would be investigated for racial harassment by the university's Judicial Inquiry Office. When told that charges would be dropped if he agreed to a meeting with the group of students who had accused him, he refused. In protest, a group of black students stole and destroyed a press run of the newspaper. They reiterated their racial harassment charge, and defended their own actions as an example of free expression.

Faced with First Amendment constraints, the university agreed not to prosecute Pavlik. In fact, the only people punished in the incident were the police who arrested the students who destroyed the papers. One officer was suspended, and a follow-up report by the university recommended that the campus police begin keeping race and sex information on their detainees, "to determine if [arrest policy] has an adverse impact on any groups and if the policy is applied in a consistent, non-discriminatory manner."

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Lebanese-born Rashid Baz went on trial in late October 1994, accused of shooting at a van full of Hasidic Jewish students after they cut him off on New York's Brooklyn Bridge. One student was killed in the March attack; three were wounded. His lawyer argued that Baz was suffering from ethnic rage.

Defense attorney Eric Sears argued that his client grew up in Beirut amid civil war, violence and an atmosphere of hatred, all of which rendered him temporarily insane. In Baz's case, argued Sears, the violence in Beirut, "besides being constant and random, was often brutal. The house you left in the morning could be rubble that night," he declared in his opening statement at the trial. "Those years inevitably left scars on his personality."

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Michael Perlman in the Valley Optimist Magazine, Northampton, Massachusetts, August 24, 1994:

A friend who recently moved to South Deerfield told me that her roommate did something a little odd while they were jogging together. They had jogged into Sunderland and paused by the monumental sycamore tree—one of New England's largest—that grows near the center of town. On an impulse, my friend's roommate embraced the tree and "gave it a big smackeroo."

Could it be that my roommate's friend's affection for the Sunderland sycamore represented a welling up of the ecological (or, more precisely, arboreal) id?

If you surmise that my question is a leading one, you're right on the money. But what it leads to is another, much larger realm of questions. Why does your average passerby think it's weird to kiss trees? Is there in his or her response to the tree-kisser an analogue to homophobia? Why is it forbidden to make love with trees? Are we (if I may coin a phrase) an ecophobic society? And if, with whatever difficulties and setbacks, American society is coming to realize that bisexuality and homosexuality are in and of themselves as healthy as heterosexuality, why do we lag in recognizing the inherent healthiness of erotic, even sexual, connections with nonhuman nature? Why are we so conflicted about—to broach a concept—our natural ecosexuality?

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