 thank you everyone for joining at this different time of day we've chosen in order to see who we could invite and welcome from around the world different time zones. For the DPADaptation Q&A this month I'm very pleased that we've got the author of The End of Ice a book I'm reading at the moment. His name is Dar Jamile and he's joining us from is it West Coast America or Canada Dar? West Coast Trump is Stan right America yeah okay I didn't know it had been renamed yet well you know let's go ahead and go there because you're using your prophetic powers again I see well anyway this is yeah I'm very pleased you could join us and by the way everyone my name is Jam I'm the founder of the DPADaptation forum and I wrote the DPADaptation paper which sort of completely messed with my life but anyway it means that I get to have amazing conversations with amazing people so Dar thank you and I've been looking through I've been I'm a slow reader I've been speeding up my reading and I was I was seeing that really this this book of yours is an invitation to witness life passing ecosystems passing to really sink into that loss and I know many people do that in order almost like a call to arms like and so we must do everything to protect what's left so I'm really wondering what called you to to bear witness in the way that you have all this terrible loss tragic loss around the world I don't get a sense it's the same kind of call to arms as we often hear could you tell us about your motivation for writing the book the motivation wasn't to try to inspire any kind of call to arms or promote activism or save the planet or anything like this it was really from a place of I personally had been witnessing the loss for quite some time having spent a lot of time in the mountains of Alaska and on glaciers as well as having been on the Great Barrier Reef and seen the changes over the years and other places around the world and regularly spending time outside new we're already very very far along in this crisis and so the sole goal of the book was to bring people as up-to-date personal visceral and scientifically accurate model of where we are from these crisis points hopefully that people would then understand more in the their body than even in their mind of what that really means and then put the book down when they're finished and then go out to wherever they connect most deeply on the planet and reconnect in not to try to change anything but to really take in the gravity of the crisis and to love what's here while it's still here so an invitation to really reconnect and appreciate for people where they're at and so reconnect with nature and creativity where they're at I'm wondering where that comes from is that is that because of how you have been finding a way to cope or even rejoice at this time I think it originally came from my own way of trying to find a path to cope and ingest and process what's happening and really a deep personal urge to go be with these places like the glaciers in Alaska where I've spent so much of my life and places in the book several of them I'd been before and had long-term relationships with like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and like that for example literally going there back to the Great Barrier Reef and showing up literally the first week of a major coral bleaching event in 2016 and understanding that this was probably going to be the last time that I saw the reef and so literally going to say goodbye and being very privileged and fortunate to have that opportunity to go say goodbye to the single biggest coral reef on the planet which now we know for well will most likely be gone before 2030 in other places where I went in Alaska where I went back to see glaciers that I used to climb on and they were already gone and then showing up in these places and literally feeling that like a gut punch and and standing there and saying okay this is this is gone now you know and this is this is a new world now and really getting to process that personally and so I feel the book having afforded me that opportunity to do that in places like the amazon those which I mentioned Sequoia National Park in California and numerous other spectacular places and and really really understand what that really means to be losing these these these critical parts of the planet and and then for me personally how is that going to inform my life going forward yeah um listening to you then um I felt what I would label sadness and grief um a tightening in my stomach and a pressure behind my eyes and through picturing you where you said you were in your process but also immediately relating it back to the ecosystems and landscapes and ways of life that I love or just had come to um assumes the backdrop or was always there when I wanted it um so so yes your book and also your experience it tells of your experience which is about loss about grieving about saying goodbye in a honorific way perhaps so I'm wondering what is most because you you write about this you talk about this this is um unusual to stay in that way of looking at the world or at least it might be unusual for our culture and our time I was wondering what what's most alive for you now in climate related grief in terms of how wherever you got to with these feelings in this outlook the book really forced the issue for me uh literally coming back home from these trips with these photos and these imprints in my body and my psyche and then all of the data and writing about it was so intense that I would literally sit I was sitting here doing it in this office and I would have to go out sometimes and just stand with the trees and just breathe you know understanding the gravity of what's happening and it really caused me to find this very pretty pretty disciplined process of you know meditating every day uh being quiet being outside at some point every day going on more intensive trips into the mountains every weekend talking with friends who understand what's happening and processing all of that a pretty a pretty you know serious and consistent milieu on a regular weekly basis just to kind of stay above water you know just to keep my nose above water enough where grieving and keeping a balance and being able to do the work and what I found recently after taking too much time not in nature I just start spinning out again and uh into depression uh into anger uh into numbness and and then last week I took basically the better part of the weekend went out again into nature for four days straight camping and and then got my feet back on the earth and so that's what I've learned is that it's a daily if I'm really being emotionally honest about what's happening um it's a daily adventure with grief as well as um a deeper love for what's here what's still here and you know daily uh processing in some way with some friend some part of the crisis that's either you know scaring the hell out of me or enraging me or leaving me just deeply hollowed out sand by loss yeah I relate to that because there's one thing to allow this perspective to come crashing into your life and destroy old stories of progress of tomorrow of self of purpose but it's another thing to abide with that to like be with that day to day over time without withdrawing becoming numb blase or just over busy motivated by an anger and a desperation and and for so you in your experience you're saying time in nature and meditation I think those are the two things that I've you've really put your finger on there are they is there anything anything else I mean for me I I I know I need that too um wondering is there other is there other stuff that helps you live with your outlook without those pitfalls that you describe well those two things are critical and then the third equally important with those is is talking with friends like that really understand uh where we are in the crisis that that aren't pretending that there's we can reverse it or draw it down or mitigate but that really all that's left to do is adapt and uh and you know and then making decisions from that place you know and and and usually that means people the people I relate the most with that I've noticed a pattern over the last year having lost my best friend in in September which really dropped things down to an even deeper level for me sitting with someone as and helping them die uh is is it's other people who've experienced that as well um really a deep personal loss of a of a loved one whether it's their partner or a parent or a close friend and and um I relate now a lot more to those kinds of people because it's perfectly analogous to what's happening and literally how it feels now when I go out into an area nearby my home and some of the glaciers I go to that you know probably won't be there in another 10 years and it's it's a similar experience like you know I still see the beauty the love is there and it's it's really brought into a crystal focus knowing how uh temporary how extremely temporary it is too yeah so the the connection I'm hearing there between loss in a a way that uh it's more sort of normal for everyone to experience such as grieving a relative or a close friend the connection there with climate related loss is um that it it reminds you of the love you have uh but I was wondering what what else can we what else can we learn from the more normal forms of grief prior to this some of catastrophic uh ecological situation such as losing your friend I think really the importance uh in in the book the process of my book and then coming to the conclusion and trying to figure out where to go with all of this knowledge and information of of really understanding the importance of endings and doing them the right way uh whether it be talking with someone about it sharing it or having ceremony but really marking endings really understanding what it means that when I see a polar bear now I know that you know assuming I don't have an unforeseen early death that that will go extinct in my lifetime and I'm one of the last generations of humans that it's gonna get to see that that animal alive and and really noting that and and I think that that's worthy of finding a way either internally or in community of having ceremony for for things like that that are going away and as as well as things that you know have just come to mind that have just left the planet you know more recent extinctions that are happening and ongoing so when someone dies that we know sometimes part of the grieving can be not only a celebration of their life but also a recognition of what they've contributed to who's still around and therefore implicitly to society and culture and our current stories of meaning I'm wondering if the kind of cataclysm that we're sensing from climate change adds an extra level of loss or grieving because that goes to potentially that that sense of the meaning of a life in terms of how it contributes so if a species is going extinct that's quite fine but if a culture is collapsing that also there's no no one around to remember your loved friend or our parents for example our grandparents so I was wondering is there is there a quality to climate loss that's different in any way or is that not the case it's basically still grief and it's the same thing I was wondering what your thoughts are on that that's a really great question and and I think you know it's one that's going to stay with me long after we get off this call um I the thing that comes to mind is just the magnitude of the scale of this I mean we're talking about every living thing any of us have ever known for our entire lives or read about or seen a documentary on or let alone what we've seen and experience with our own bodies and our own eyes but just the the the magnitude the the gigantic scope of loss that we're talking about of how everything's always been done at this stage of the game on earth to all the other species to all the other biosystems on the planet that everything is changed irrevocably and so many things are going away forever and just just to take that in and you know talking about a a so-called normal grieving process but applying it to the entire planet and cultures and civilization and languages and things like this is is um you know I I think about this pretty regularly but on that scale I think I I would only do it in a direct conversation with someone that has experience that really understands that because it's it's it's a huge thing and this it was the thing when I first started having my early recognitions about the the scope of this and what it means you know the very possibility of our species going extinct in a not-so-distant future as a possibility in everything that comes with that you know that it for me it kicked in a fight-or-flight response like okay my my ass is on the line what am I going to do and then realizing like no we're not going to get in our Tesla's and drive to Mars we can't leave this is the one planet we have to live on and and then and then the feelings come okay I'm stuck what am I going to do well after a long depression it meant starting to figure out a way to adapt and physically emotionally spiritually yeah thanks I'm glad you um I'm glad you gave me a full answer because I was no one else has brought me to tears in these Q&As and um it is the yeah it is that depth scale and sense of finality which is very powerful and somewhat overwhelming um you mentioned about human extinction I was wondering what your outlook is on the possibility of human extinction this century and what that has meant for you and what you just were saying that at the the end well I I am even in my book towards the end I do write that it's it's hard for me to see that humans don't go extinct from this crisis and but what I've learned through my own process and it's been a long winding process of going from someone who absolutely believed humans were going extinct and I would debate you under the table about that given the opportunity to really realizing that while that certainly looks to be the trajectory that we're on and as I said it's hard to see that not happening I came to a place personally where I had to realize that I needed to have enough humility to understand that while that looks like it could be the case I can't say that for sure personally because there's so many different factors involved and so much happening that it's it's it's just impossible to say and I personally wouldn't make that prediction that said I do feel very confident in saying that I personally believe that we are about to undergo a dramatic reduction in the global population in the numbers of billions probably well in advance of 2100 and and I think you know civilizations I think you know people talking about this in the future tense is a misnomer I think we are in a state of collapse of civilization look at what's happening right now with you know coronavirus economy you know everything just you can literally feel that you know there's no more future tense about this we're in it and it's accelerating and today's better than tomorrow so for you that that outlook is part of the process you've gone through that you've described already I wonder do you see any problematic responses that can arise in people from sensing it's probably too late for the human race or it's probably the beginning right now of a form of mega death in the billions are there problematic responses and for example some people might quote terror management theory whereby all of us at a deep level unless we're yogis have a have a fear or anxiety around our mortality and that drives us to want to contribute and be part of something that lives on beyond us and so our culture and therefore the argument is is that we feel mortality more imminent we may be more likely to subscribe to the dominant stories of our culture as a desperate grasping for a sense of longevity what are there things that can go wrong from have you met people who say da I totally agree with you and the next thing they say horrifies you what are the what are the pitfalls um oh boy there are many um I I think you know one that you just pointed out of of that people get a kind of glance of what's going on and how far into the crisis we are and then just you know well but I'm going to just throw myself that much harder into my activism or my job or whatever you know getting overly busy and and and part of that busyness being overly busy and pretending that what's happening isn't happening and I think that's very dangerous I think another way is people falling deeply into despair despondency and depression which I've spent my time in those places and throwing up their hands and saying oh well what's the point if that's the case and uh or you know other people even celebrating it like well great you know they're so angry at themselves and the human race for causing this to the planet well great you know bring it on it can't happen fast enough I think all those things are very very dangerous and and but my perspective that I've come to more recently is that you know when giving talks on my book and being confronted with that well you make it sound so doom and gloom why do anything I argue now confidently that if you know we're in a place where all really is lost it's like it's like sitting at the bedside of someone that you love and it's they're on their death bed are you going to hold anything back at that time absolutely not you know you're going to tell them how much you love them you're going to they're going to see it in your eyes and in your body and in your presence and you're you know anything left unsaid you're going to say it you're not going to hold anything back and I feel like that's a silver lining of this crisis where whatever it is that we each are doing to love the planet and care for it and be of service in our lives uh it's clearly the time to just let a rip uh don't hold anything back and I think you know those who are more activist incline if you're not going to put your body on the line for what you believe in now then you probably never will. So I'm wondering that I what you've just described is quite similar to my own journey over the last 18 months and I felt that I needed to why would benefit from ways of becoming less afraid of my own death which starts with recognizing that I might be subconsciously afraid of my own death and a lot of my striving for achievement and contribution um wanting to be a good guy all this might actually be connected to that so um and I thought I was doing okay and then after about two weeks of friends and family peppering with news about COVID-19 and prepare and the amount of stress that everyone seems to be experiencing about how this is likely to be a pandemic and shut down the global economy and disrupt the availability of daily resources in my own life. I felt last night I have to admit it I don't think I slept very well last night with a fear response and so I'm it's all well and good isn't it intellectualizing but how can we help ourselves and help each other into that place that you've just said which is to focus on the rejoicing and the honoring of of each other and of nature and of being as loving and present as possible how do we help each other not go back into that fear that I experienced last night as I tried to go to sleep. Yeah and I can completely relate to that too and because it's a balance between watching the horror show of what's happening in the news on a daily basis whether it's you know the the the the lurching into over authoritarianism in the US and other western countries or the the COVID-19 or or you know pick your pick your crisis or your trauma and it's it's so challenging to take that information in but then not get consumed by the emotions in kind of the fight-or-flight response around it and for me and I I still you know given on given the week and what's happening on the planet and how good of a job I've been doing personally to have my kind of daily self-care maintenance routine in action I I still find days where I literally have had to say okay just get out of bed just literally talking to myself that way like get out of bed go do you have these work obligations today and then you're gonna need to go you know do this and and do that and literally make myself go do these actions and and a part of that every day is that one thing that I learned from a Native American elder that I write about in my book is he says look there's then this is a tool that I try to share in all my talks because it's one of the most helpful things to me and he says look in settler colonial mindsets there's this belief of you know we have rights what are my rights but in indigenous perspectives they believe that in a Native America concept that is that you're born on the planet with two primary obligations the first is to serve and be a steward of the earth and the second is to serve future generations of all species and so if I get up each day and ask myself how can I be of service to the earth and how can I be of service to future generations then there's no shortage of things that I can do to go be of service each day yeah thank you that's that helps that helps me I think it will help quite a few people I wanted to go back to when you said about experiencing depression I think for some people really truly waking up to where we're at is then waking up to the destruction humans have wrought on earth and therefore a form of self loathing as being human and a form or if not a form of alienation from every other human this kind of hatred about who are we who am I I was wondering if you've you had any of that and if you process that in some way I that's a really fine articulation of of the feeling that that I wish I'd heard that articulation a ways back when I was going through that because that was I think part of my depression is because depression right is like unexpressed anger sadness at least my experience of it is and and you know the sadness I think we've talked about but that anger of my own hypocrisy you know I mean I I drive a vehicle that burns fossil fuels I still use airplanes from time to time I mean I I do what I can I reduce my carbon footprint every year and all that I have a solar powered house I have I grow most of my own food now etc etc etc but I am still chock full of my own hypocrisies and and that brings up anger and that brings up my own other feelings around that so I think yeah that anger at us as a species for having done this to the planet that was the big one you know even kind of getting outside of just talking about me and just the anger at humanity and I think that was part of me you know my my lack of resolution of that was what was driving I think some of my thinking about well for sure we're going to get extinct and part of it was anger like well it serves us right we'll get what we deserve yeah and was it did you come out of that because of something else not not intellectualizing that away but through just more time in nature turning up the volume on the greatness of life rather than the shittness of it how did you come through that it was what you just said coupled with just look it's not serving the planet and it's not serving future generations to sit around being pissed off or depressed or in despair and despondency that I need to have those feelings and let them come through I think they're part of everyday life now for any of us that are really open-hearted to what's happening but then I don't want to hang out in those emotions any longer than I have to and I do want to get on to serving and not to pretend like well everything's fine everything's great and it's all about oh I just need to feel happy but it gets down to the brass tacks of you know one of the another question that I picked up along the way that I brought into my talks is you know imagine ourselves on our deathbeds wherever that is in the future for each of us and there's someone of a younger generation there and they say well what you know you were alive in 2020 did you know what was happening to the planet of course we'd have to say yes we were acutely aware and then the next question being well what did you do and so I want to be able to say that I did everything that I could and for me that means you know getting proper information out to people but then it also means working with younger generations helping them come to terms and process what's happening on the planet what does it mean for them in their own lives and then being a good steward on the land where I get to live and then going out and loving the parts of the planet that I love the most while they're still here I'm pleased to hear that you outreach to young people and that's good then that I show your book at the start of my film Oscar's Quest where I also reached out to young people I'm just going to let everyone know that we're going over to questions after my next question so in just a few minutes so please if anyone has a question for Dha please send it to to Matthew who's named himself questions here please so you know where to send them and please do that now Dha before we go to the other people on the call with what you were just saying at the end I think partly answers the question that some people put to me that is I hear your love of nature and your pain at its loss I hear that you are suffering from some kind of anticipatory grief but isn't that self-indulgent given the number of people who are dying now through climate driven or climate things made worse by climate so for example malnutrition in Africa the spread of diseases because of climate and and you know guys get over yourselves no one's going to thank you for doing your own spiritual processing in 2020 in years to come they will you know if you had got out there and tried to do your very best to stop the worst-case scenarios then they'll be grateful for that so get over yourself stop being self-indulgent what what would you say to that well when I say be of service to the planet that of course includes humans and all species but it does include humans and I I you know I can't you got to have it to give it away right so I can't go try to be of service to someone else if I'm don't have something to help them with and if I'm stuck in my own anger and depression I'm not going to be of much use to anybody or anything so hence the self-care part but point made it's absolutely not a time for self-indulgence and I think being of service means really you know use your imagination right I mean I work with pizza in one instance of my life without divulging too much I go work with other people far less fortunate than me in a nearby community where I live and I do that on a very regular basis and so there's myriad ways of being a service and these are to other people some of them are you know in jail or some of them are in other difficult situations and so you know other people they might find yeah I'm going to go work in a homeless shelter I'm going to go work in a soup kitchen or things like this and you know just like what you said there's a you know recent statistics show that there's a new climate refugee every two seconds somewhere on the planet and it is it's and this is a major crisis and it's going to expand and so obviously helping other people is an imperative part of helping the rest of the planet thank you okay so we're going to go to questions first is Brennan if you say where you are in the world Brennan and ask your question to Dar. Thanks Jim and thanks Dar I'm in Massachusetts here in the United States and thank you for your book and your speech at the Lannan Foundation where I first interfaced with your message my question is born out of the statement you made earlier tonight where you were talking about if someone was on their death bed you know wouldn't you just go full out and expressing your love and out of everything that's been said so far that's really touched me and I started to get curious about whether imaginings of a post-collapse world ever spontaneously arise as part of that love and if so if if that's something that you consider part of your expression of love what those imaginings include what they might picture how that could come across for you that's a really great question what really came up in me with with something that happened right here where I live yesterday where there's several of us some of us who live right here on this land and one person who doesn't but it's part of the community and we have a very large garden and we were sitting here talking about okay we have to figure out what to plant when you know these things are time sensitive and then we realize we're behind the timeline on planting potatoes and so spontaneously two of us are out there literally digging in the dirt planting the potatoes that we had and and it was a you know it got done and then we had a great meal we ate leftover potatoes from last season and I had a great conversation and and I realized that it really was indicative of what's happening to me as I'm feeling a stronger desire to just root down in where I am and travel less and do less public activity and just really these are my core people these are my core community and this is the land that is taking great care of us while we try to our best to take care of it and let's just grow food together and talk about what's happening and then you know we have a movie night we have you know we might you know we have a special way that we say a prayer together each time we do break bread together and just just little core basic things like that but that ties into the death bed stuff because having lost close loved ones most of us can probably think back and some of our nicest memories are just sitting around having a tea with them or having a meal or a certain conversation it always comes back to really the basic living stuff and I think that again is the silver lining of this whole crisis is it really underscores how precious life is and how amazing everything on this planet is in nature right now and and just brings it into this focus of okay let's let's live thank you and our next question is Sasha please unmute and say where you are I live in the Ozarks in the United States I'm in Missouri and yeah thank you so much for your sharing and so heartfelt and resonated so much that's what you're saying and what I'd like to ask you is that for a long time I've been interested in the idea of the Jaya theory that the earth is actually its own living organism and we're more or less a you know just a part of that living system and you know for me that feels very real and so I sometimes wonder well if we if we see the earth as more than just this material object to which these physical things are happening then how how do we take on how it might be processing or participating in this experience yeah that's that's a really great point and I think I was having a conversation with a friend a very close friend of mine here the other day about this that because we're both talking about some days we just get up and are just sad just deeply deeply sad even if we hadn't like read news that day and it's because we're as as you just said in it's you know right in line with indigenous perspective is that you know we are part of the earth the earth is part of us you know all my relations you know there is no difference and so if you know given how much the earth is suffering right now how could we not be sad on a regular basis you know how could we not be struggling with all these feelings I mean maybe in that sense we're processing some of it foreign with the earth you know and and so that's what that's what really I think strikes me about that along with the really hard and scary parts of that you know looking at the the spread of the coronavirus or other things like this and other diseases now being released from the permafrost where you know we as a species fail to keep our own population and check and so nature is going to do that for us just like it would any other species that gets out of control as nature you know things happen and that species gets brought back down to right size and I feel like now that's what we're in the process of experiencing as well thank you we have a question from Karen Karen yes hi dar I am here in Santa Fe and I just wanted to acknowledge that hearing you speak I think it was about a year and a half ago here was really really important to me because you spoke what I had been feeling and it was hard to listen to but I really really appreciate um your work for that very important to me when you speak about grief uh Stephen Jensen has talked about the situation we're in as not being comparable to being in a hospice situation as some people talk about because this is really about what he says is human beings and human society spinning out of control not knowing when to stop having to have more and more and more and he makes this distinction about that and I know in my own experience of grief of people I've lost and animals I've lost that in that grief process um there was always something that I could hold on to whether it was some kind of a belief some kind of sense that things continued life continued and death was part of life and this is just so confusing because it's on such a huge scale and it's happening in the way that it is now for me personally that distinction that Jenkins and made has been kind of significant and helping me if I have a passion my passion right now is to be as present as possible and I feel that presence is what I can offer and to really face what's happening it's been very important to me but I was curious what you think of that of what he he is saying about the the place that we're in in terms of grief yeah it's it's complicated I mean I I am familiar with a lot of Jenkins's work and actually quote him in my book because he's shared some extremely poignant things about what shall be the manner of our failing right and and things like this that he spoken of but I I think that my perspective is that we are very much in a hospice situation I mean we know for a fact that we're losing between 150 and 200 species a day and and we can you know off the top of our heads probably several of us on this call could think of several just like that like I mentioned the polar bears earlier that you know there's there's no way they make it through this century and and so that is a hospice situation and we know that that these you know the great bear reef other huge parts of the biosphere most likely the amazon before the end of the century are are going away so that you know just biologically speaking for me it's hard not to to think that we're we're not in a hospice situation and and possibly even with our own species it well but I really appreciate what you shared about presence and the importance in your your drive to to be that way I think that's a really critically important thing and I want to I actually included a a quote a quote from Ticknot Han in my book because he talks about the value of being present what's happening on the planet and he said when your beloved is suffering you need to recognize her suffering anxiety and worries and just by doing that you already offer some relief thank you and we've now got a question from or two from michael over to you michael say where you are as well hi dar nice to see you face you too um dar i'm i'm curious about what's that oh yeah i'm curious about uh your journey out of journalism um because it happened really at the peak of some of your recognition around your book and I know for me personally there's this dance around how much I stay in contact with the news and what's going on and how much I withdraw yeah and I can imagine you withdrawing from journalism part of that was wanting to step out of the the constant inundation which is a different story every day that we might get that's depressing on one level so I'm wondering about your own journey with that and your move away from journalism and how you negotiate the news in this place yeah that's a really good question and I part of it my my decision to withdraw from journalism was burnout from 16 years of being on deadline essentially but then uh really the core of it was um I was super saturated with heartbreaking news about the climate every day and and my job was to literally archive catalog rewrite articulate that and um it got I was writing these monthly I call them the climate disruption dispatches for the website where I wrote truth out and it got to where the last several of those I did I wrote them once a month each time I did one it felt like I lost a quart of plasma it just killed me to write it was like doing a dissection on a loved one that was already in the throes of pain you know is what it felt like writing about that information about the planet and so I have withdrawn you know I've stopped journalism overall I can't say it's been a completely clean break but I've you know I'm definitely not doing it full time and I I still find you know it's an interesting dance with how much information I take in I've tried things from like I don't read any news on the weekends if I'm being good and the the other thing I've tried more recently off and on it works to great effect when I practice it is there's no sense to read any news past 10 a.m. right that I was just going through the day kind of like re traumatizing myself rereading a story or maybe maybe getting an update when in reality just like a bad soap opera you know if you don't read it from 10 on you're really not going to miss anything and I found that helpful too I could at least get a general beat of what's going on and then just go out into my day and you know how can I be of service yeah wow that's really helpful that's really helpful I know you know just doing the the podcasts that I do I have this sense of needing to stay up with the news you know so I there's something but staying up with the news is such a heavy weight to hold as well it is yeah yeah um journalist says don't read the news headline shocker from da there there's a good I good a good idea um I'm wondering then da with where you've got to if that you're some people are arguing that and some people are choosing a path of contemplative or spiritual activism or just contemplative and spiritual practice and outreach uh is that is that something you would say that you're now embarking on perhaps even just without or rather that it's sort of coming to you um even without a conscious effort in that direction without a conscious effort in that direction it's it's come to me but more in the form of of uh service work uh like I like I didn't go seeking out young people they just started showing up in my life one of them being a nephew another one being a friend another one being the son of another friend they all the all the sudden you know within a year I had several young people that I was having very frank honest conversations with I didn't seek that out it just came to me uh in the same way now with what's happening very organically on the land of working with you know several other people who are really really emotionally and invested in gardening and taking care of the land here and growing our own food and it just started to finally happen after kind of trying um mistakenly plugging wrong people into it at wrong times and things like this it just started happening you know and and once I walked away you know once I literally walked away from journalism and kind of freed up space in other areas of my life and I mean I do still um engage in an essay here and there I do have another small temporary journalism project coming up about an issue that I really care about and I I do have another book contract lined up to co-author a book with a Native American elder about some of this topic that we're talking about here but from a Native American experience so um um I haven't I'm not stopping writing and uh it is funny though is once I once I did step away from journalism the book has been nominated for some pretty big awards and it's shortlisted for a pin award and things like this and I find it quite ironic now that I'm not identifying myself as a journalist anymore. Right so uh Dar is there something that's really important to you that you that you have that has come up that you haven't shared in this uh almost this coming up to the end of the hour now? Um you know Jim you asked phenomenal questions and and this has been a great and evolving conversation for me and I really can't think of anything off the top of my head that is left pressing that we didn't cover. We do have one more question and uh I don't know the lady's name because unless the name is Smasino um I'm presuming that you have a different name Smasino if you could ask her a question of Dar. Um can you hear me? Yes. So I'm just wondering if you suddenly what's your name and where are you from? Oh it's it's Susan. Susan. Okay hi um I'm just wondering if you woke up tomorrow and you were suddenly the leader of a community that's not facing imminent flooding or pandemic or starvation or anything super horrible um what would you try and really kind of focus your collective community action on um protecting nature, food security, health, spiritual work. I'm just wondering if you have any ideas from your work with Native American communities or your own personal ideas. That's a great question and I think you know again it's one of these things that's kind of started happening organically where I live where and you know full disclosure Susan's a friend has actually visited where I live and um really we're eating ourselves to like okay let's do our best to take care of this land that's taking taking care of us right where we live and that includes you know the health and welfare of the physical land itself is it protected is it cared for is it clean etc and then our own you know are we can we grow enough food here for ourselves to be as self-sustaining as possible um what are our energy needs can we you know in finding a way to do that cleanly what about water etc etc and then from that place being able to kind of reach out and support the community I mean one example I could give is the last couple of seasons the the garden here has produced so much food that we ended up giving a whole bunch of it away to the local food banks so you know if we do a really good job of taking care of ourselves then that puts us naturally in a position to then being able to go out and start serve others around us you know so and I think organically that's the one thing that makes sense and I think going forward into a increasingly dystopian future I think that would probably be best case scenario thank you um we've come to the end Dar so thank you very much for joining us and thank you everyone who's joined from around the world and the video of our q and a will be on my youtube channel which is just put in Jim bandel to youtube and then you'll see all the past q and a's as well so dar thank you once again for I'm I think this is one of the interviews I've done perhaps the first where I want to sit down and watch it again just to listen to you again and reflect and learn and integrate because I definitely still have quite a long way to go maybe I'll always have a long way to go and never get there but it's certainly in this direction I need to go thank you and thank you everyone bye bye thank you so much Jim