 I'd like to invite Julie Griffin up who is a graduate student in geology at UC Davis. She is going to be introducing our keynote speaker. Hello everyone and thank you for joining us at the third annual YOLO Interface Climate Conference. I am Julie Griffin. I'm a graduate student in geology and I study paleoclimate or Earth's past climate history of climate on Earth. The debate on climate change has been raging since before I was born. As someone who is most comfortable with herself when she is outside, I have always felt a strong pull towards environmentalism. The preservation of wilderness is a logical extension of self-care for me. Listening to this desire, I took environmental science classes in college. I vividly remember the first time I was struck by the importance of managing climate change, ironically sitting in a cold lecture hall. We were viewing maps of the east coast of the United States that had been altered to show the landscape and coast when enough glaciers had melted to cause one meter of sea level rise. I was shocked to see the Potomac River flood over the region where I grew up, the greater Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Rock Creek Park with the bunnies and squirrels that scampered from me as I ran the trails, the flowers that I love to pick, even the poison ivy that irritated my skin, would all be under water. Those furry animals would have to move and the flowers and ivy would be fish food. I realized that because of climate change, parts of the world that I grew up in would be gone within my lifetime. So I decided to study climate change. I got rid of my car and started taking the train or carpooling. I began eating less meat and carrying reusable bags. I work every day to reconstruct how the earth has previously coped with drastic climate changes. In the hopes of discovering some part of the climate system, some lever that we might be able to pull and reverse or at least slow the warming of our planet. I dedicate my time to educating students and others about climate change and try to pass along useful tips for individuals to reduce their carbon footprint. Nevertheless, our planet continues to warm. In my lifetime, 26 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen over 50 parts per million. This rate of rise, two parts per million per year, is unprecedented in earth history. The natural feedbacks that mitigate rises in earth temperature have never before responded to this rapid of a change. The geologic record does show us that life on earth is resilient and will continue on through a dramatic change such as this. However, the life that occurs after this change will be, like my drowned park, very different from what existed before. Humanity must cope with this change. We must take action, like all of you today, to educate ourselves and mitigate climate change. And with this, I am pleased to introduce nature author, public speaker, and environmental advocate, Kathleen Dean Moore. She is a distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy from Oregon State University who recently retired to devote more time to climate talks and writing. She will offer her perspective on just what our work is as we stand at the cliff edge of climate chaos. I for one will be listening for a new path to understand who we are in the world that we have created because sometimes I don't know how we ought to live. Is my hope that her speech for us, as well as our conversations today, will help us figure out how to lower our carbon pollution significantly, even as we cope with the drastic changes that come with a rapidly warming planet. As a scientist, I think that life on earth will persist, but the question is whether humanity will be part of the new ecosystems that emerge. I am listening for Kathleen Dean Moore to answer her own question, where do we find the courage and the hope? I truly hope that this talk sparks the beginning of our work together towards personal and community ethical actions for our imperiled planet. Thank you, Julie. You're a remarkable young woman and I think the answer to the question where will we find hope and courage is in people like you. That's great. So they're going to want to know the story of this time, our grandchildren will. It's a pivotal decade when we either find our way forward or we do not. They're going to give this time in history a name. It's that important. The hinge decade, the last blessed time, or the end times, or the great turning, or the eighth day of creation. Let me just stop. Are we good on sound? I'm getting some indication we're not. Can you hear me? Can you turn me up? Okay, good. So our children are going to want to know, was it like this, they'll say, storm clouds building on the horizon and desperate people pushing across the borders, is it going to be about shouting and gunfire? Or will it be quiet? The simple disappearances, the lost opportunities, lost species, quiet as snow melting, quiet as desiccation. Was it exciting, they'll ask us, the new ideas, this new sense of empowerment, the weepy joy of relief and redemption. They're going to want to know if we saw it coming. They'll want to know how hard we tried. They'll want an accounting. They'll want a book filled with the prayers people prayed. They'll want jars filled with the last of things. The point is that we're the ones who are going to write the history of this time. What will it be? The story of these pivotal years of global warming could be a crime novel. In many ways I think it is a crime novel. It could be a horror story with zombie cockroaches. It could be scripture with all its terror and grace. It could be it will be a thriller with a thousand plot twists. Or it could be an absurdist nihilist farce. It's up to us. Of course we're living out the end of the old story now and that's a story that we tell ourselves that has driven this industrialist extractive growth economy for centuries. It's a worldview, it's a cosmology, a set of assumptions about who we are and what we ought to aspire to. That story is over. It has brought us to a dead end. So I was thinking about that old story when I was on a red eye. I said dead eye. A red eye on a 737 coming across the continent back to Portland. And we were over North Dakota. We were over the back in oil fields. Shale oil fields where this massive fracking operation is underway. I have never seen anything like that in my life. The whole plane, horizon to horizon, horizon to horizon from 35,000 feet up, was studded with flames. And being a writer, I always ask myself, how could I describe this? And so, you know, you've seen, you've been to Europe perhaps, or you've seen the military cemeteries with those closely ranked rows of crosses as far as you can see in any direction, yes? And you think, my God, how is it possible that humans would do this? Now imagine that you're in that cemetery and it's night and that all those crosses have burst into flame. Flames flaring off the methane from drilling rigs, closely ranked rows of flames as far as you can see in every direction. You think, my God, how is this possible? Well, clearly what it is possible for us to do depends on the story we tell each other and the story we tell ourselves. What is this story that allows us to ransack the earth and think of us as good and smart people? What is the story that's brought us to this dangerous, dangerous place? I think that for the last 500 years or so, Western civilization has been living in a story that's basically an adolescent superhero comic book. The sort of cartoon fantasies of planetary subjugation and mastery that stir the loins of teenage boys and Wall Street bankers. The fantasy would have us believe that humans are the superheroes of the planet so different from and superior to the rest of earthlings that we might have descended from the sky. The fantasy that we're in charge of the planet in control, wrestling riches from the earth which lies supine and stupid at our feet. The idea that we're the lonely heroes on a dangerous planet in competition with one another. That competition has winners and losers, that's the way of the world, and that losers should just be grateful to live on the toxic trickle-down excess of the heroes. Of course superheroes are exempt from the rules that govern the rest of the world and that govern the dumb roots. And even God is on the side of the superhero humans. He gave us this world. But in fact, who needs God? If we get into danger, our superhero technologies will save us. Who needs fresh air when you have oxygen bars on the street corners? Who needs fresh air when you have cigarette filters that you can stick in your nostrils as people are doing in China? Who needs predictable weather when you live in a techno bubble? Who needs other people when you have money? Who needs glaciers when you have desalination plants? Who needs earth when you have Mars? Who needs compassion? Who needs compassion when our superpower, our superpower, wait for it, our superpower is the iron grip of Adam Smith's invisible hand, this magical hand that supposedly turns uncontrolled selfishness and greed into community thriving? That story's over. It's gone. It's a failed experiment. The world doesn't work that way. We can't, in fact, destroy our habitat without destroying ourselves. It's based on an outdated view of a mechanistic earth, this worldview that's wildly inconsistent with what we know about emerging ecological, evolutionary understanding of an interconnected planet. And playing out that script has brought this entire planet to a cosmically dangerous place. So what's the next story? That's the big question, isn't it? What's the next story? If we're not careful, I really worry it will play out as an absurdist nihilist farce. Have you read Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett? You've got these two ragged men and they're standing by a dead tree and they're waiting for whom is not clear, for what is never clear. So I wrote a few lines of dialogue of a farce that we're playing out here. It goes like this. What are you waiting for, Vladimir? Not waiting. Yes, you are. And what? Waiting. Oh. Nothing I can do, just one person, kind of sad about the polar bears. Sad. See what I mean? We've got to come up with a better story than that. And whatever it is, that new story has to have as much power as the story of creation. It has to be a story so powerful that it can bring itself into existence. In the beginning was the great creative unfolding, petals unfurling, and it was good, and it was good the tiger lilies and the walrus and the laughing children. And now on the eighth day of creation, how can we imagine a story of a new creation, of another great unfolding of new ideas and new life ways, a new sense of ourselves in relation to the world, a blossoming, and it will be good, and it will be good, and it is good. Page five is missing, so I'll just tell you what it said. What it said, I can't believe this. Really, you're not here, page five? What it said is that the only story I know that's going to have that kind of power is a love story. It's going to have to be a love story. And so page five invites you to think really hard for a moment about what it is that you love too much to lose. And it could be a person. It could be a place. It could be a principle, justice, democracy, honor, loyalty. It could be a celebration, a cultural practice. There are many, many things in your life that you love this deeply that you would hold onto them with everything you've got. And then I was going to invite you to think about what that calls you to do. That loving isn't a kind of la di da, but loving is a sacred trust. And what you love calls you to honor it with every ounce of your being. It calls you to a ferocious defense of what you love, maybe a tragic defense of what you love, but a tireless and endless defense of what you love against those who would destroy it for what? For profit. So when you think about what you love, maybe what you love is children. If that's the case, then you're going to be paying attention to the recent scientific consensus statement by 500 scientists led by a team from Stanford that said, if we don't take immediate action, by the time today's children are middle-aged, the life-supporting systems of the earth will be irretrievably damaged. What are we talking about here? The life-supporting systems of the planet. Well, one of the things we're talking about is the food supply in the ocean. This is very dear to my heart. When you add carbon dioxide to water, you increase its acidity, right? That's how you make Pepsi. Acid is corrosive. Think Pepsi. We're not talking about seawater that dissolves the shells of the oysters. It's way worse than that. It pits the tissue-thin membranes on the larvae of the oysters, of the krill, of the phytoplankton, these creatures that are the broad foundation of the food pyramid. One out of seven people on the earth depend on food for the sea. When that pyramid collapses, it will all come tumbling down. And what will the people eat then? Consider fresh water. 68% of the planet's fresh water is stored in ice caps and glaciers. When they've melted, the water's gone. And what will the people do then? And what will the animals do? The ice on the Tibetan Plateau waters 10 major river systems that provide irrigation power and drinking water for 1.3 billion people in India in that area. Nearly 20% of the world's population when those glaciers have melted, what will those people do? Consider agriculture. I read that by the time the century is over, if we don't take action, 99% of Africa will be unsuitable for agriculture. What will the people do then? This is hard to talk about, and I'm done with that. Do you love the plants and animals of the Senozoic era? These birds and frogs and wildflowers? Then you'll be interested in the millennial ecosystem assessment that said that every ecosystem on the planet is in decline or collapse. Coral reefs, great boreal forests, monarch butterflies, tropical forests, Arctic ice sheets. Do you love justice? Climate disruption is going to create the greatest moral disaster of human history. People aren't going to just suffer. They'll suffer unjustly, because the people who suffer the most will have been the least responsible for its cause. Do you love freedom? Then you'll be interested in Nicholas Stern, the author of the Stern Report on Economic Effects of Climate Change, quoting, Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. They will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. End of quote. And when the wave of people whose lands are swamped or poisoned by rising levels of saltwater, when that wave begins to move towards high land, what can we say then about life and liberty and security of person? What can we say then about peace? One of my recurring nightmares is that the ultimate solution to climate change may well turn out to be the nuclear winter. But it doesn't have to be this way. That's the whole point. Scientists know how the chemicals respond. They know how the temperature responds to the chemicals. They know how the oceans and the weather respond to the temperature. Those are data points. That's geophysics. But there's a missing data point. What they don't know is how the people will respond. And that response has the power to set those models spinning and the arrows on the charts diving in different directions and telling a different story. So what I'm trying to say is that what is called for is action that is the moral equivalent to the power of our love. That's the measure. How much do I love children? How much do I love the whirling lives of the planet, justice and freedom? How much? That's how much is required of me. Easy to say. But how can we write that new story? How can we write this story of a second creation? How do you write a story that is so huge that it calls everything into question? How we feed ourselves? How we educate ourselves? How we exchange goods and services? How we work? How we answer the basic questions of the human existence? What is the world? What is the place of a human being in the world? How then shall we live? Every writer knows the answer to that question. How do you write a new story? You write a story by writing it. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene. Bird by bird. I'm referring, you might know, to Anne Lamotte, the writer who said in her book Bird by Bird, 30 years ago, my older brother, who was 10 years old at the time, was trying to finish a report on birds that he had three months to write. It was due the next day. We all leave things to the last minute, even climate action. He was at the kitchen table close to tears surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, he immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then Anne Lamotte says, my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder and said, bird by bird, buddy, just take it bird by bird. And that is how we will take it. That is how we will write this new story. We don't know how it will end. It's the work of a lifetime, it's the work of many lifetimes. Every chapter is the context for the next. You start with the place, you start with a couple of characters, protagonist, antagonist, and then you start making it up. The meaning and the worldview grows from the story unfolding. So writers, who's the protagonist in this story? That would be us. We're the heroes of this journey. We are Bilbo Baggins and Odysseus and Harriet Tubman, and I am not exaggerating. If there are heroes in this story, it will be us. Now that's good news, because we were made for these times. We are educated, we're experienced, we're interconnected like never before. We are absolutely to be sauted with life. We are powerfully in love with the children and the earth with justice and freedom. If we can't do it, it can't get done. So who's the antagonist in this story? We want to be careful here. We're not struggling against climate change. Our struggle is against the fossil fuel pollution that's causing climate change, and those are human decisions. Human decisions can be changed, and this means that our struggle is against those mega corporations or the just passively obstructive bureaucrats whose business plans are making fortunes while they're wrecking the ecosystems that evolved over 50 million years. Our antagonists are those people who are bullying us into living ways of life that we don't believe in. And the measure of our success isn't going to be how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. That's a matter of physics. Our struggle is to be sure, and the measure of our success is how many fossil fuels stay in the ground, whether it's by conservation or replacement, or because it's just no longer worth the trouble and the cost to get them out. We can't stop short on the chain of causation because that disempowers us. The melting of the Arctic, it's not warm winters. It's burning fossil fuels, and we can change that. The massive die off of the Taiga forests, it's not beetles, it's burning fossil fuels, and we can change that. The displacement of 55 million Bangladeshis by 2040, not by rising seas, but by burning fossil fuels, and we can change that. The second thing I want to be careful about is that we've been encouraged to be confused about who the struggle is against, and that confusion has all but paralyzed us. And it may be one of the biggest triumphs of big oil to make consumers blame themselves for climate disruption. I spoke about that last night. We have met the enemy, and he is us, we say, and we take on this burden of shame, and we allow it to disempower us and take away our license to speak out. Well, okay, for heaven's sake. Okay, well, here's what I want to say. This is going to test my memory. That's right. I can't wait to tell my husband. At my last speech, he lost my power cord and destroyed my PowerPoint presentation, so this will be fine for him. Lewis Mumford says that we have been offered a great bribe. We can have it all. We can have endless parties. We can have music on demand. We can have movies on demand. We can have anything on demand. Whatever we want, we can get it guaranteed two-day delivery from Amazon.com. We can have beautiful homes. We can have healthy teeth and bodies. We can have as many cars as we want, and they can be big as homes. We can have it all on the condition that we never ask the cost. If we look back to the past to see the die-off of the forests, to see the damage to the lungs, to see the peril to the earth, we've lost it. If we look forward to see the consequences of our great consumption, the lost chances of the children, it's over. We can't have it anymore. This great bribe has put us in the position of forcing ourselves to be blind to the cost of what we're doing. Okay, so we've taken on this great bribe. What's interesting to me and Davis are the ways in which that bribe is falling away in the face of alternative ways that are wonderful. And maybe that's one of the answers to the great bribe. Okay, so I've said that, but having said that, having taken on some of the burden of shame, I want to say that corporations are only too happy to say that they're responding to public demand, whereas it's very clear that they are manipulating public demand with all the skill and expertise and money that's at their, at hand. And that they're building and maintaining infrastructures that force consumers to use fossil fuels. When you criticize fossil, when you criticize or act against climate warming, someone always stands up and says, do you drive a car? As if that makes you completely powerless to criticize that whole system. Well, to me, the answer to that question is, yes, and now let me ask you why. Why do I have to drive a car? Why don't I have good public transportation? Why don't I have safe bike paths? Why don't I live in an area that has access to good food? Well, because the plan is for you to drive a big car, because the plan is for us to make a lot of money by forcing you to do that. They're convincing politicians to lethally underfund alternative energy. They're increasing demand for the energy-intensive products. They're creating confusion, and this makes me very, very angry. The confusion they have sowed about the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels and their influencing elections on an, oh, I don't even need to tell you. California, how do you do it? How do you have, how do you elect people who are perhaps uncorrupted? Is that, am I right? It's not right? Oh, so here's the point I want to make, is that of course we should, of course we should spend and invest and work and travel more thoughtfully, and of course we should dramatically cut our use of fossil fuels. We've met the enemy, and I'm going to make sure it isn't me to the extent that I can, and as I said last night, but while big oil is externalizing all of its other costs on me, I'm not going to allow it to externalize the moral shame, the moral shame of its attack on the earth. When a corporate executive, in order to make astonishing and unimaginable profits, shows himself willing to take down the systems that sustain life as we know it on earth and cause suffering on a scale we have never before seen do this knowingly, intentionally, as part of their business plan, that's moral monstrosity on a cosmic scale. Now people call me a bad person for saying that. They call it vilifying, and because I'm in a setting with a lot of people from faith communities, I want to acknowledge that this is going to be a complicated love story, and it's going to require us to embrace paradox, which we're not necessarily good at. Can we name the wrongdoing? Can we call out the lies and the liars? Can we speak the truth about the destruction that is part of the business plan? Or do we need to be compassionate the way hungry dogs are compassionate? I am reminded of Jesus, not a bad person who said, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. But it doesn't take a logician to realize that this entails that we do have enemies and that there are people who persecute us and that we should love them. So I don't believe we're called to deny the wrongdoing that is happening on the planet. And I think about the Dalai Lama who says, survival on earth as we know it is by human activities that lack a commitment to humanitarian values. Destruction of nature and natural resources results from ignorance, greed, and lack of respect for the earth's living things. This lack of respect extends even to the earth's human descendants, the future generations who will inherit a vastly degraded planet if world peace doesn't become a reality. It's not difficult to forgive destruction in the past that resulted from ignorance. Today, however, the Dalai Lama says, we have access to more information. It is essential that we re-examine ethically what we have inherited, what we are responsible for, and what we will pass on to the coming generations. So okay, I can get with the program. If love means empathetic understanding, then it may be one of the most important things I can do is to try to put myself in the shoes of Rex Tillerson, who is the CEO, chairman of the board, and executive officer of ExxonMobil, and try to understand the forces that drive his decisions. But this is going to be fierce compassion. This is going to be tough love. So okay, our story is taking shape. We have the protagonist, we have the antagonist. How will this plot unfold? It's going to be a thriller. Whether we can stop fossil fuels in time. A global temperature rise of two degrees might be something that life forms, including humans can adapt to. A global temperature rise of four degrees, six degrees is something else entirely. So what happens next? Last night I talked about the way that rivers work, and I'm going to very briefly mention that same metaphor. I am overwhelmed by the ways in which we are being, why the river is sweeping down upon us. It's deeply embedded even in the lay of the land. It has engraved on the landscape. Harmful ways of acting are embedded, deeply embedded in the landscape that we live in. How are we ever going to stop that river? And we have this notion that we have to dam this river. But anyone who spent time as a child throwing rocks and rivers and building little structures that you don't have to dam a river to change it. That the river works according to certain rules. And that if you put a stone in the river you will see that the river, when the current slows, it drops its load and pretty soon sand begins to build up in front of that stone. And it gets bigger and it gets bigger. The force of the river itself increases the size of its own obstructions. Do you see what I'm saying? And that when you put a stone in a river the current will curl around it and turn back upstream. The river itself changes direction in the face of an obstruction. So our work in this world is not to build big dam across this thing. Our work in the world is to create obstructions to complacency. It is to place blockages to business as usual. It is to make small obstruction to profits. It's to create a better idea and then another and then another until the river has been altered and it's forced to reverse its flow or to change its course. So the point that really empowers me and makes me feel really hopeful is that each of us has lots of rocks. And our work is to choose the rock and chuck it in. First question, what are you good at? This is how you find your rock. What are you good at? What gifts have you been given? My friend, Pottawatomie Elder says the salmon has been given the gift of red flesh so its work is to feed the people. The robin has been given a gift of song so its gift is to raise the sun in the morning. What are your gifts? What has been given to you? That's question number one. The second question is what do you love too much to lose? And how can that love empower you to use your gifts to stop anyone from damaging them? It doesn't matter what rock you choose. All these problems are interconnected. Just choose a rock. Technological change? Spiritual change? Find your rock and chuck it in. This is going to take lots and lots of stories. So what do we have to do? I think that three big strategies are going to drive this plot. I call them, sorry, the three C's. The first one is conscientious objection. Every refusal to go along with the system is a rock in the river. And soldiers used to say hell no to an unjust war. Can we say hell no to an unjust and far more disastrous economic systems? Can we refuse to let big oil make us foot soldiers in their wars against the world? We know this, that every decision we make, how we travel, whether we travel, what we eat, what we invest in, how many children we have, what toys we buy or make for them embodies a moral value. Our decisions speak for us. Yes, I believe in this. No, I don't believe in that and I will not participate. This requires a radical imagination to think of new ways to live that are joyous and fair, the kind of radical imagining that is happening in your community. And don't for one minute think that your decisions don't matter. Study after study shows that the single most powerful way to influence people to change is to show them that another person, someone they respect, has made that change. I believe what Carl Safina says, this wonderful ocean ecologist, he says this in moral ground and I see that you've quoted it earlier. He says we think we don't want to sacrifice but sacrifice is exactly what we're doing. We're sacrificing what is big and permanent to prolong what's small, temporary and harmful. We're sacrificing our integrity, our children, our future, our species, peace all to enrich those who disdain us. It's sold of our ring but conscientious objection is joyous and liberating. This is divestment. This is the bicycle. This is local food. This is the well insulated home and the recycled paper and the second hand clothes. This is the potluck and the garden and the birth control pill. This is the poison free yard and the rosemary bushes. This is the life you believe in, claim the right to live it and refuse to participate in what you don't believe in. Conscientious objection, the first C. The second C, creative disruption. Creative disruption. What blocks can we... what can we imagine that is going to block this flow? They could be technological, new inventions, new ways of doing things. They could be cultural. They will be wildly creative and a lot of fun. Technological? No money driven economy, many of the disruptions will be alternative ways of doing things that are better, cheaper, cleaner and more successful than the fossil fuel driven technologies. Cultural? It's going to take creative disruption, imaginative action that uses music and theater and children's choirs and literature and all the beautiful human expression of grief and decency and celebration as a call to witness to tell the truth about the moral consequences of an oil-fueled future. If the truth is that big coal is going to destroy the dreams of the children then ask children to draw their dreams on paper and paper the railroad tracks with their dreams so that the engineer has to make a conscious decision to grind over their sweet hopes. That's the kind of thing I mean when I'm talking about creative disruption. Bill McKibb, and remember when he said well, we should have politicians put patches all over their suits that advertise their sponsors. The way that race car drivers do they'll be plastered with them. Well, we can't force them to do that but we can make a billboard that hose their picture with all those patches on it. This is the sort of thing I mean. Get together with your friends and have some fun. This is the hearse that's following the fracking trucks. These are the roadside funeral bouquets at the turn off to the logging site. I don't want to say it's easy but I do want to say that it's possible. Third C, courageous, relentless citizenship. And I mean two things here. We're citizens in what's supposed to be a democracy. Make your voice heard. Let crying out be the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do before bed. Put your representatives on speed dial. There are many, many ways to be heard. What do we need to tell them? We need to tell them stop, block, prevent all new infrastructure that expands the fossil fuel economy. No more coal port expansion. No coal trains. No liquid natural gas depots. No pipelines. No roads to carry the equipment. No fracking pads. No suburban mega malls. People might say who cares about a stupid pipeline in North Dakota? The answer is who cared about a lunch counter in Alabama? Who cared about a photo of a single naked Vietnamese girl running with her back on fire? Number two, imagine number two in terms of what you do as citizens of a democracy is to imagine into existence. Imagine into existence a world without internal combustion engines. Whatever we can imagine, we can imagine into existence a world powered by the sun, by the wind, by the waves, or not powered at all in some cases because who needs more Barbie dolls? The first thing to imagine is the quiet. Imagine the abundance of open public spaces and gardens that used to be roads. Imagine the abundance of power. The sun is free to everyone and the wind blows on every continent. There is enough and no reason to fight over it. Imagine local sharing economies and a loyalty to place as strong as the love of swallows for a barn. But there's something far more important to say about citizenship. Even as we're citizens of the U.S. of A, we're also citizens of the planet. And ultimately, we're going to need a new story, a new cosmology that replaces this comic book Superheroes. A new set of answers to the questions about the human condition. We are the creatures who are deeply, we are creatures like all creatures, who are deeply entangled in this interdependent system of resilience and beauty and ongoing creation. We're the ones with the imagining minds. We're the ones who can imagine that the world might be different from the way it is now. We're the ones who turn back to the universe and try to understand its meaning and celebrate it in soaring songs and understand our duties to the earth to return its gifts by our own gifts of planting and gratitude. So here's the agenda. Because life on earth is interconnected, we will foster the mutual flourishing of all life. Because humanity is dependent on the earth, we are called to defend and nurture the regenerative potential of the earth. Because the earth's resources are finite, we will embrace an ethic of self restraint. Because life on earth is resilient, we will take courage and guidance from earth's power to heal. And because humans alone on earth can imagine that things might be different from how they are, we will become part of the unfurling creativity of the universe as it blossoms into new forms. We are, as Thomas Berry said, the dreaming of the universe. We can dream a new future if we try. Let me close by reading you. You're lucky I'm not going to sing them. Reading you the words to a song that is called Winter Wheat by Libby Roderick. When I was young, I dreamed the earth was healed and whole again, creatures, trees, and rivers free and wild. Now I am old, I dream the earth is healed and whole again. The dreams are born forever in the heart of each new child. For we are planting winter wheat that other hands may harvest, after we are gone. We will plant shade trees that we will not sit under. We will light candles that others may see their way. We'll struggle for justice, although we'll never see it flower. Our children's children will live in peace one day. All the children will live in peace one day. We will write this love story. Sentence by sentence, stone by stone, bird by bird. This is our work. This is our joy. This is our sacred trust. This is what we were born to do. Thank you for all you do.