 So you often hear people saying global warming is the single greatest challenge ever to face humankind. We've got it treated as just like World War II and fully mobilized society in order to combat this problem. And nothing else really matters. Compared to this, nothing else is important. I've had an environmentalist say this to me really, like, like, come on Charles, you know, like, yeah, you might be interested in repairing relations between the genders or you might be interested in reviving dying languages or even in saving the lions in Southern Africa, you know, or something like that. But those are not actually important because if we have runaway global warming, then there aren't going to be any lions. They're not going to be any communities. They're not going to be any languages, you know. Now is not the time to pay attention to all those things. You have to devote all of your efforts to the one important thing, the one thing that solves everything else or that allows us to even have the chance to solve everything else. So I'm suspicious of this narrative. It is very much a fundamentalist narrative and it's very much a kind of war thinking because when the enemy is at the gates, then you sacrifice everything else for the war effort. You sacrifice civil liberties. You sacrifice the arts. You sacrifice the finer things in life. And it becomes a way to control everybody and deny what makes life beautiful. And that doesn't mean that there isn't an enemy at the gate. I'm not saying that there isn't. I'm not saying that there isn't right now. That's not my point. My point is that there is a fundamentalist or war mentality operating in the standard narrative of climate change. And you could call it global warming fundamentalism or carbon fundamentalism. Here's the one important thing. It's very similar to the mindset of money, which is, I think this is one of the major ways in which we habituate to this kind of thinking, that if I only had enough money, I would be able to solve all my problems. It's the one thing that gives birth to everything else. So when I was doing my research and from the living planet hypothesis, the living planet view, I believe that soil erosion or biodiversity extinction is going to affect the climate because it's a living being. And if you have, say in your body, if you have massive cell death, if you have an organ deteriorating, maybe you won't be able to regulate your global ecosystem, your body temperature even. So I have this hunch that the causality goes in that direction. So I go on Google and I look up effect of biodiversity loss on climate, where I look up effect of soil erosion on climate and I get page after page of results that are the opposite. Everybody's talking about how climate change is going to cause biodiversity decline, how climate change is going to cause soil erosion, et cetera, et cetera, which fits into, it's a comfortable way to think. Wouldn't it be nice if we could solve all of our ecological problems and social problems too? Climate change is causing migration, climate change causing war, et cetera, et cetera. Wouldn't it be nice if we could solve all our problems by addressing this one thing that can be and for which our progress can be tracked by measuring a number. And it becomes a min-max problem. It becomes a matter of reducing a number, making a budget, reducing this much carbon here, offsetting this forest here with another one there, with solar panels here, et cetera, et cetera, maybe using carbon capture machines to draw down carbon from the atmosphere, et cetera, et cetera. This is something that we're very familiar with, this kind of thinking. So it is a reduction, a comfortable reduction of health, which is organic and physiological and nonlinear into a matter of a quantity. That is a kind of a reductionism. And what is the problem with that? It leaves out everything that doesn't fit into that measure. The things that we can't measure, the things that are unmeasurable, the things that we don't understand and cannot predict, they get left out. So in the carbon reductionist frame, how important is an elephant? How important is a whale? How important is a beaver? What's the carbon contribution of these? It's really hard to measure, a bear. But when you understand ecology and when you see the world as a living being, then you start to think, okay, each of these beings, whales, bears, salmon, whatever it is, elephants, these are an organ. These are a tissue. These have a role to play in maintaining health. And so you start to look for it. And then you discover things like Paul Stamets discovers that bears scratch marks on trees. So the resin, the sap comes out and then fungi grow on that sap. And then bees are attracted to those fungi and they derive antiviral compounds from those fungi that allow them to withstand some of the diseases that are devastating bees and maybe other insects today, which then allow them to pollinate more and maintain the food web that allows forests to be healthy and crops to grow healthy and soil to be healthy, which then draws down carbon. So, oh, actually bears are important. But can you put that in a model? Can you put that into a climate model? Can you possibly measure all of those multiplying lines of causality? It's impossible to do that. So those things get left out of the models. They get left out of the budgets, the carbon budgets. They are not emphasized in environmental policy. They're not the climate strike people and they're not on the radar screen. They don't seem as important. When you reduce the problem to a matter of levels of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases, you render invisible the things that only make sense that only seem important when you understand Earth as a living being. So I'm asking, and this is one of the main movements inside myself that brought me to write this book, I'm asking that we expand the scope of our care beyond the things that we can add up in a carbon budget, that we expand it to include all of life on Earth, every place, every ecosystem, every species, whether or not we can calculate its greenhouse gas effects, its carbon footprint. But we expand the scope of our care in the knowledge that every one of these beings is important. To maintaining climate health, to maintaining more generally ecological health. This is the place we need to come from. It's a holistic view rather than a reductionistic view.