 I love the Sacred Headwaters Initiative. It speaks really deeply to me because in my research into climate change and the ecological crisis, I gained expanded appreciation for how important the primary rainforests are to maintaining planetary health so far beyond the amount of carbon that they sequester and store. That is, if you look at them only through that lens, they're not that important. You know, you could cut them down and plant tree farms somewhere else and you'd be carbon neutral. But the role that they play in maintaining Gaian physiology, the physiology of the planet, is like the carbon aspect is one percent of that or less. Much more important is the water dimension. So these tropical forests, in fact any forest to a large extent, and wetlands too, but especially these tropical forests, the rains come and because there is such dense life when the rain falls, it doesn't wash away the soil, it doesn't run off, it all soaks into the ground and gets absorbed by the plants and transpired back into the air. When it gets transpired back into the air, as it cools, it creates a cooling effect. When water evaporates, like when your sweat evaporates, it cools. So it cools the surface temperature. In fact, in Kenya, they've compared areas that were deforested with areas that are still forested, which sadly is not very many. And so same topographical conditions, everything the same except one is forced and one doesn't. And the forested areas will be like at 19, 20 degrees Celsius. The deforested areas will be at like 40 degrees Celsius. So if we're talking about global warming, I mean, here's something that gets ignored, the or kind of written off as a heat island, that forested areas are a lot cooler because of transpiration. And if you say, well, that's just a heat island where it's been deforested, I mean, that's a scant consolation for turning the whole planet into a heat island. So anyway, so the water gets transpired, creating a cooling effect on the surface floats up into the air. And then it condenses again into clouds, especially over forests, and especially, especially over really healthy forests that have not been disturbed because the forests actually create compounds and even bacteria that seed the formation of clouds. So there's another cooling effect as the clouds reflect sunlight back. But also what happens when the water condenses, it creates a low pressure zone. And the low pressure zone is a biotic pump, it's called, that pulls air into it. It's like a vacuum that pulls the air into it from whatever is adjacent to it. So if you have a continuous forest stretching all the way from the Atlantic Ocean into the heart of South America, say, then you have a conduit of ocean air into the interior. In Brazil, they call it the Flying River. So it brings water all the way into the interior because water in a forest trans evaporates even faster than over an open ocean because of the leaf area index. There's many, many layers. So this is a biotic pump that is crucial in maintaining the streams and currents of the atmosphere and I think even the ocean. So it basically maintains the flow of water on this earth. So as you destroy the Amazon, then the flows get disrupted and water, air currents no longer go where they went or they fluctuate around a lot. Like it's like the, it'd be as if you were, it'd be as if you had, try to think of a good metaphor, like a garden hose that has perforations in it that's irrigating something and then the plants that hold that hose in place get disrupted. Like that's what the rainforests are. They hold the flows in place. Global warming puts even more stress on these garden hoses. When they get, when you're putting even more pressure through them and they're not held in place anymore, then they start to ride around and they don't bring water where it's supposed to go. So yeah, so if you cut down the forests, then the water doesn't soak down anymore and get transpired. It doesn't feed underground aquifers and springs. It runs off, carrying the soil with it, causing all kinds of damage downstream and weakening the biotic pump. So you have then flood drought cycles where once you had extended rainy periods, the floods get worse, the droughts get worse and we've seen this happen all over the earth and you can replant forests which over time can like tree plantations don't do this nearly as effectively as as healthy living forests. Tree plantations are not alive. They have living trees in them, but they're not themselves alive. They can only become alive over a long period of time. So that's just, so the water lens helps us appreciate how important the sacred headwaters of the Amazon are. Without them, the continent would become a desert and the entire planet would probably die. It's that important. Would humanity perish? Maybe not. Maybe we would all live in bubble cities with algae pools to make oxygen, carbon-sucking machines, air conditioning, synthetic food grown in vats, and beautiful digital displays of the nature that has been lost. What if that is a possible future? What if this isn't about human survival? What if we have, what if this idea that climate change is going to make us change our ways? We're going to have to change now. What if that's not true? What if we face a choice of what kind of world do we want to live in? Not whether we're going to live. What kind of world do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a concrete world paved over that's a giant strip mine and garbage dump? Or do we want to live in a healing, vibrant world full of life where you can see the sea turtles, where the beach is littered with shells, where there are frogs and turtles in the ponds, where you can drink from a stream without fear, where you look out and you see not one or two whales like today, but thousands of whales covering the ocean surface when they're missed. We can choose what world we want to live in. If we want to live in a living world, if we want to be in a community of life, we have to start treating the world as alive, especially those deep reservoirs of life, the sacred places, the heart of the Amazon, which in a sense is the heart of the planet, not the lungs of the planet. It's the heart of the planet, the beating heart of the planet. If we choose life, if we see the world as alive, then and only then will we be able to serve life. If we see the planet as dead as just a bunch of stuff, a bunch of resources, a bunch of products and commodities, then we will kill the world because our stories are powerful. If we see the world as a machine, we will create a machine world. So we are choosing not only how we see the world, but we are also choosing who we are. And that's why we have such a strong sense that the ecological crisis is also a spiritual crisis, a crisis meaning in this case a crux, a crossroads, a choice of what path we are going to take, who we are going to be as a species and even as individuals. What are we going to serve? The import of the climate crisis goes all the way to that level. And really climate is to narrow a framing for the choice that we face. It's a choice between life and death and not our own life and death. Because as I said before, humanity maybe, theoretically, I don't know, could survive on a dead planet. But do we want that? It's these deepest, most undisturbed parts of Earth where the, not only undisturbed ecologically, but undisturbed culturally, where there is still a communication, an intimacy between the people and the land, such a deep intimacy that we don't even have the conceptual apparatus to understand how deep that connection is. Those are the places where the dream of the planet is held. That's like the innermost thoughts of Gaia that have not been disrupted by all of the systems of modernity. We have to draw on those places in order to construct a world in their image, in order to participate in the construction of a world in their image. That's a more accurate way of saying it. In order to be part of a healing where that deep knowledge held by the cultures and the land and the water and the trees and the animals and the biota of these deep reservoirs is able to spread out once again across the Earth. It's held in very few places now. The deep Amazon, the deep Congo, maybe a few other places, those are such precious treasures. Every place is sacred, but most places have been disturbed. That primordial knowledge and the long-held dream of the planet is especially strongly held in the sacred headwaters of the Amazon. I'm sure that I can't frame that scientifically, but when you look at images and have the conversations with people who have been there and go there yourself, and I'm not saying you should just go there yourself, some places you should not go unless you are invited and go through a transition like an airlock to step across the threshold to go those places. This is not spiritual or ecological tourism. This is like you wouldn't penetrate the heart of a human being without the appropriate preparation. This is the same, so the best way that we can serve these places is to protect them. This is one of the most important things we can be doing on Earth right now.