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Meet the Genies. The Forest Ranger is a good man, so is the Wildlife Sciences major running his own enviro-communication business. They went into their work to protect trees and wetlands and wildness. The developer's a different fellow - he went into his work for a different shade of green.

These three men are worlds apart. Within six months, I heard each of them them use the words: Wish List.

At a meeting with those of us opposing local ski-resort expansion, the forest ranger said his budget bosses contact him at the beginning of the fiscal year and tell him to make a wish list of what his district needs. The enviro-communicator spoke on a green strategy panel, "We get the differing parties together and have each side make up a wish list."

The developer told a coalition of environmental organizations working to stop him from developing around a fragile wetland: "You guys give me a wish list for how you want this area preserved, and I'll see what I can fit into my plans."

Wish List. Baby talk. The yearnings of the inner child. I confess I used to be a counselor, facilitator and communication consultant. I was part of the humanistic psychology movement that influenced much of the upper middle-class in the 1970s and '80s. I believed in what I did. I thought people could heal their pasts, live in the present, and have everything they wanted without hurting anything. I believed that people who learned to love themselves would love the earth. That was my Wish List.

I was wrong. Witness the proliferation of starry-eyed millionaires on their redwood decks on home-sites blasted from once pristine red rock, holding thousand-buck Brazilian crystals in their hands and believing they are one with the the earth.

My have-everything-feel-good colleagues and I loved the wish list. You tell a chronic victim, a troubled couple, a floundering non-profit team to make a wish list. "You won't get everything you want, but before you can ask for what you want, you have to know precisely what you want."

You watch the faces of the people writing their wishes, and you see the little girls and boys they once were. When they look up from the carefully written lists, their faces are softer, smoother. You might believe you have given them hope.

"Yes, Virginia," you might as well have said, "there is a Santa Claus."

And, in that moment of false hope, you are the adult. They are the children. If we and our earth have any hope left of coming into balance, we can no longer function as children. Adults don't make wish lists. Adults set goals, evolve strategies, organize and make demands. Grown women and men don't wait for Santa to arrive. They remember Thoreau's words: Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

Adults live with limitation. Only a 3-year-old truly believes he/she can have everything - and should. Though we are surrounded with advertising that tells us "You work hard. You deserve everything," We don't work hard - compared to a Vietnamese sweat-shop worker, a Calcutta mother salvaging rice from the pavement, a maquiladora seamstress wearing out her eyes for pennies an hour.

"Hey," a Scottsdale, Ariz., multi-millionaire wheeler-dealer brazened in an Arizona Republic article, "I'm the guy who moves the factory overseas. I'm the guy who's worth millions and doesn't pay taxes . . . I told my workers that when I made it big I'd take them with me. Well, I made it big and I didn't take them with me. That's why I write books on money. They can't count on the factory owner. They have to learn to do it for themselves."

Now he buys and sells land. That way he can bury his profits and retain an interest in everything he sells. This man doesn't make a wish list, and, he is the hidden voice of those who say you should.

As long as we function from a belief in wishes, in magic, in fairness and bail-outs through the ultimate goodness of those who run the corporations, we will live a tragic fairy tale. We will continue to watch helplessly as our once-diverse communities are homogenized by global franchises, our wild lands levelled by development, and our intentions infantilized and dismissed. We are being taught to do just that. Trust me. I know. I was once, unwitting, one of the teachers.

Mary Sojourner writes from the shadow of the sacred mountains near Flagstaff, Ariz. She is the author of Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest, Solace: rituals of loss and desire and the short story collection, Delicate.