 Our next speaker is Michael Ann Gardner. Michael Ann believes in building Zion through any means you can. This includes her professional work as a marketer and fundraiser for the nonprofit sector. It also includes her favorite hobby of learning about and implementing environmentally sustainable lifestyle choices. She serves as treasurer on the board of LDS Earth Stewardship. Great, thank you. So, as stated, I have a little bit of a bias, so I am part of this group called LDS Earth Stewardship. It's my other Mormon fringe group that I'm involved in. And what I really found fascinating is how I think actually these two fringe groups, so to speak, actually have a lot to learn from each other. My presentation is primarily a theological one and a question also of culture, of how the Mormon culture interacts with itself and how we can improve it. And I think that these two groups have a lot to offer in terms of making us more of the culture that we could be. So, first of all, the question I have is what do Mormons believe about the Earth, right? So we believe that the Earth is created by God. The Earth is our inheritance. We even have this sort of like Eastern mentality that the Earth has a spirit or a personality. But here's an interesting thing. So my friend George, I know him through LDS Earth Stewardship. He's one of the most prominent LDS researchers on LDS attitudes towards the environment. And he makes a statement where he says, many years ago, I began research on the relationship between Mormonism and the environment. I was struck by how many authors, all non-LDS, either assumed or directly asserted that the LDS Church was officially anti-ecological. So this is interesting, right? For a theology and a culture that sees the Earth as having even a personality, yet we're seen and sometimes even perceive ourselves as being anti-ecological. Sorry, one second. And the question I have to ask myself, of course, is why? Why is this the case? Why is it that we don't see environmentalism as a valuable aspect to incorporate into our lives? And there are a lot of reasons for this. There is everything from political to not enough time. But I think actually there's a lot to do with our orientation towards morality and what we consider to be moral actions and what we consider to be morally valuable. So here's an example that I think is really amusing. This is a parody written by Mormon blogger. And this is what he says. Glenn Beck, global warming debunker, morality savant, and one having the common sense to know that we humans cannot, through consumption or pollution, affect the planet, knew that there was a connection between the Japanese tsunami and what he called, quote, the stuff we're doing. So the next time you hear some wild-eyed tree-hugging environmentalists tell you that our expanding waste lines and our nation's ever-expanding consumption of the world's resources affect in any way nature. Tell them that such talk is patently absurd and that it is sins, bad thoughts, evil words, non-beliefs, drinking coffee, cheating on a test, gays wanting to get married, not attending any meetings, and or anything you could think of that at the time that is causing nature to become disruptive and even deadly. Now, that is not crazy talk, but a sound understanding of how natural disasters set in motion. So this is a parody, right? But if you've ever talked to just a general conservative Mormon like Glenn Beck at church, they're gonna tell you that in the last days there's gonna be a lot of calamity coming, right? We're gonna have tempests and we're gonna have floods and there's gonna be all this destruction going on on the earth. And why are we gonna have it? Because gay people wanna get married, right? I mean, they may not out and out say that, but that's the assumption that they're making, right? That in the last days, wickedness will increase. And I'm not here necessarily to make a statement about sin or about God's judgment, but to me, it's interesting that we make this very clear connection between things that aren't related at all and we say this is God's judgment. What's fascinating about it too is that our theology in general is not a few different things. First of all, it's not magical. An example Paul Cox gives is that a God who works in magical means could have easily and instantaneously restored lost 116 pages and erase the memories of evil men who have seen them. But instead the law foresaw the calamity 2,500 years before it occurred in inspired Nephi. Truly worship a God who can work through small means. So we don't believe in God coming and just making things happen out of nowhere without any relation. Our religion is not anti-science either. And Brigham Young said, our religion will not clash with the contradict that facts of science in a particular. You may take geology for instance and it is true science. To assert that the Lord made this earth out of nothing is preposterous and impossible. Our theology is not isolated. We believe that what one person does affects others. We talk about salvation. We talk about it in terms of families, in terms of nations, in terms of cultures. We know the whole city of Zion was saved. We're also not a denial of man's ability to affect his world. On the contrary men are agents unto themselves. So if the main viewpoint in our culture is that things are going to be happening in the earth unrelated to anything realistic or probable and yet we're not magical, we're not anti-science, we're not isolated, we don't deny our ability to affect the world. Why is it that we don't see environmentalism as valuable that we don't see environmentalism as valid? I think it has a lot to do with where we're orienting our moral compass. In the book of Nephi, we talk about the liahona which was a compass or a ball that led Nephi and his family to know which way to go. And it worked. It functioned primarily by, well it was a spiritual means, right? But it functioned by the things that Nephi chose to give his focus to. I think that as a culture we've given our focus to perhaps I might say the wrong kind of morality or the wrong aspects of morality. I think that in contrast, a morality that focuses on the environment acknowledges that what we do, what we do affects other people. It's a theology that acknowledges that we have a not only a right but a requirement to care for the earth. I think of Mormonism that would turn its morality from this focus on sexual sins and its morality from the individual and what the individual can do and accomplish. But instead of focus on the broader perspective would actually have the power to be one of the strongest environmental movements that there is. If we change our morality from a sense of what I can build for myself, but instead have our goals set on what we're going to be accomplishing in the long term. An example here is changing our moral value to wanting to grow wisdom and knowledge as practice for the millennium. Brigham Young dismissed the notion that man's degradation and pollution of the earth is something that would be swept away as if by the wave of magic wand upon Christ's return. Not many generations will pass away before the days of man will again return, but it will take generations to entirely eradicate the influences of delitiary substances. This must be done before we can attain our paradicycle state. Secondly, if we can acknowledge that our morality, that what we do affects other people, that it's not just about going and trying to maintain a kind of personal morality, but seeing the widespread effects that we have in a more concrete way. When we turn to morality as simply about sexuality or simply about the actions of individuals, we fail to realize that our unsustainable living practices are preventing us from being able to build Zion. They're preventing us from being able to care for the poor and for the needy. And on another point too, it's fascinating that if you go and you do a search for morality on LDS.org, you pull up talks, for example, from Tad Calister, where he says that to be moral is to be sexually clean, or you might pull up a definition of how the world is falling to pieces because our internal character is not being controlled to make sexually pure choices. Constantly throughout Mormonism, these two are equivalent. I think there is room for a different definition of morality, but it's not explicitly talked about. That's kind of my basis, I think, for saying that we need to change our moral orientation. It's the fact that over and over in these talks, we're not focusing on the ways that our actions can help us prepare for the future, and we're not focusing on how our actions and our moral actions can help us care for other people more effectively. So the last thing that I wanted to touch on was transhumanism's ability to sanctify Mormon progress. This is kind of a play on Don Bradley's, his talks title, which he titled, the ability of Mormonism to sanctify human progress. But I think that transhumanism has the ability to really transform Mormon morality and Mormon progress, and not just with environmentalism. I think that transhumanism and its acknowledgement that our actions matter, and the acknowledgement that human means can contribute to a greater human accomplishment and a greater goal that we want to achieve, those two things that transhumanism brings to the Mormon conversation, I think have the power to really help us be more environmentally moral and otherwise moral. The thing that is interesting to me as well is the number of times in our theology that we do talk about the need to focus on cause and effect and our ability to influence the world around us. One of the best examples that we have actually is the brother of Jared. If you may remember from the Book of Mormon, the brother of Jared goes and he takes 16 small stones. He's trying to cross a great deep in boats without any light. He takes 16 small stones, he refines them with his own power, his own tools, takes them before the Lord. The Lord touches them and makes them glow, and then they're able to transport themselves across the great deep in light. What I love about this story though is as many philosophers and theologians have pointed out, is that it was his own means that he brought to the table that enabled him to achieve godliness. Now, when we think about Mormonism and our desire to have an effect on our environment, so many times we talk about environmentalism. We don't think that we can have any effect. We don't think that our actions even matter because God's going to come and just wipe it all away. He's going to kind of make things clear for us. But as we observed with the Brigham Young quote, we know that that's not going to be the case. We know that it'll take our actions, they'll take many generations of our effort to entirely eradicate the influences of what we have done to the earth already. So as we, like the brother of Jared, learn to be moral participants with God, as we learn to turn a morality from a narrow set of definition to a broader focus on other people and on the actions that we can have in the world, when we, like the brother of Jared, are able to do these things, the brother of Jared was able to see the face of God. And I believe as well that as we bring these aspects of transhumanism to our theology, our own morality will be transformed, our own ability to be Godlike will be transformed, and that we will also be able to see the face of God.