 I've been an environmentalist pretty much ever since I can remember, from at least the age of eight, when my father first told me about the passenger pigeons and how they were extinct and how their flocks used to cover the sky. And I was really sad about that. And I, I loved animals and, and I remember one time we went to Yellowstone National Park and we were deep in the park. We went to this lake and there were these otters in the lake, swimming in the lake, you know, and then like this gang of, of, of young men came and they started chucking stones and trying to hit the otters with the stones. And that, I mean, it was like they were throwing stones at me. I felt so indignant and so like this kind of helpless rage. And I just couldn't understand, like, how could this be? How could people do that? These, these beings are so beautiful. I didn't have the word sacred in my vocabulary then, but they were sacred to me. And I would read about the, the dwindling rainforests and see the pictures of the clear cuts. I remember there was an article about it in Scientific American in like 1980. And, and I just felt so much, so much distress about this. And, and, you know, getting worse every year, new outrage every year. And we're not getting it. And, and so this has been something that's been anguishing me my whole life. In recent years, and of course, I wasn't alone. I mean, the environmental movement has been around for, for in some form for a century, at least. So, you know, what I'm feeling is, is shared by many people. And I think actually on some level shared by everybody, even though they may not put that name to it. So then in the last couple of decades, more and more of this care for Earth, of this environmentalism. I mean, environmentalism isn't even the right word, you know, it kind of objectifies the environment. I mean, it's love of life, love of this living planet and a desire. If you love something, then its well-being is your well-being. Whether or not it has some kind of tangible, measurable, practical impact on your life. Like, if I love it and I care about it, it doesn't matter if it's going to, if it's providing the ecosystem services or something like that, or contributing to carbon drawdown or something. I love this being. Anyway, so in the last 10 or 20 years, increasingly, more and more of environmentalism and this love of life has been channeled onto the fight against climate change, which seemed like a really good thing at first. When I first found out about climate change in the 1980s, I was like, yes, because now we're going to have to do something about it. Now the people who don't care, they're going to have to do something because if they don't, bad things will happen to them. So it seemed a boon to the environmental movement, because now we're going to be able to use self-interested reasons, not just these love-based reasons. But I think, so in the last five years, I guess, it's been maybe five to 10 years, some doubt has grown in me about the wisdom of shifting the conversation onto self-interest and away from sacredness and love. So this began to disturb me. And many of the proposals and policies that have come from the climate narrative also disturbed me. For example, massive biofuels, plantations or proposals for geoengineering that would essentially allow us to continue to destroy life, to continue to destroy life as long as we kept somehow carbon levels down or kept global temperatures down. And I think that this missing piece narrows the policy menu to things that in the end aren't even going to solve the problem. Because they ignore what I've come to discover and believe more and more, which is that this planet is alive, it has a physiology and that its integrity can only be maintained if all of its organs and tissues are healthy. So I've become much more oriented toward things like regenerative agriculture, restoring soil, restoring water, protecting ecosystems, protecting the Amazon, keeping the organs of this living earth healthy. And I think that, yeah, and of course, I also believe that we should reduce fossil fuel emissions, carbon emissions, but it's becoming less and less my main priority. I think that, and paradoxically, the actions that come from holding each place on earth and each species on earth sacred will bring down carbon emissions probably even faster than current rhetoric and strategy will, because if you hold every place sacred, then you can't do fracking and pollute the water. You can't have offshore oil drilling with the inevitable oil spills. You can't excavate tar sands. You can't do mountaintop removal. You can't do any of this stuff. No pipelines, you know? So I think that there is that I really want the, so this is why I wrote this book. I want to call on the movement to return to love-based, rhetoric, love-based strategy, love-based policies, and away from the, you know, here are the bad things that will happen to us, the fear-based rhetoric, strategy, and policies, which I think will ultimately be counterproductive because the crisis, and it's bigger than a climate crisis, it's a full-scale ecological crisis, it is calling on us toward a much deeper revolution than merely finding a cleverer way to power industrial civilization, to switch to a hydrogen economy or to switch to a different, you know, to put wind turbines across the entire landscape or fields of solar panels and continue industrial energy production and a centralized system and so on and so forth. That's not the revolution. The revolution is to fundamentally different relationship to the planet and to life, where we are no longer the dominators, exploiters, and extractors in a world that is an object, but we are participants, we are co-creators, we are partners, we are members of a tribe of life, a community of life, and we seek to contribute to life. And that becomes the mission, the purpose of humanity in this time, the purpose that coordinates our gifts and our creativity, like what are we here for? It's what answers the question, what are we here for? The old answer being to rise above nature, to conquer nature, like that was a completely unproblematic answer a hundred years ago. Almost everybody thought that would be a great thing to finally conquer nature. And that's changing. That's what this crisis is about. It's an initiation into a different kind of relationship and a different conception of who we are on earth. So I want to take the conversation to that level. Climate change is part of that conversation because it is awakening in us the understanding that what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves, that we are inextricably tied to the fate of other beings on this planet, that we are part of earth, inseparable from earth. So it is a positive step in the awakening of ecological consciousness. And I guess my job is to invite us into another step beyond that.