The first time I saw the guy manning this booth, it was right after Julia Butterfly Hill had given a speech in Berkeley, Earth Day weekend, the spring after her book The Legacy of Luna came out. A bunch of people collected around her, including a couple of Greens. I hung back a bit and watched. Some people wanted her autograph, which she gave them. A number of people wanted to give her something, mostly gifts which she graciously accepted and piled on her backpack. There was a guy that said he was building world peace by making "peace pieces", of which this was the 147,958th one. (I forget the number he told her, but it was considerably lower than the number on the sign above.)

I went up to him and gave him my little speech, and offered to trade one of my MEND YOUR FUELISH WAYS stickers for one of his peace pieces. He took me up on it, and threw in the flier to the left of my new necklace above. He gave me one with peace in Arabic on it. The pronunciation guide on the back of that flier explained that the Arabic word for peace is pronounced "sa-lam", with the a's in the word being the kind with double dots over them. On the other side of the bead is a picture of a tree with a thin blue glaze over it. He said he was giving me one with a tree in honor of my activism.