 I'm right there with civic engagement as we usually think of it. I do think that we need to broaden the notion of civic engagement in a particular kind of way. We're always going to be dealing primarily with each other, but I think we need to acknowledge that the boundaries of the community within which we define what a citizen is needs to be expanded to include the natural systems that we both depend on and benefit from and also that are part of our heritage as a species and an essential part of what we pass on to the next generations. I broaden the notion of citizen to that of denizen, which I think of as a person who's rooted in the place that they're from, which is both a local place because we're all born and raised or grow up in specific places, but it's also our earth and our species rootedness in where we came from. So a denizen is somebody that's really sprung from the earth and their concept of being a citizen bears that in mind. In saying that I'm certainly not being original, I'm trying to translate and use the ideas that are I think most important and influential from the history of environmental thought over the last century or more, but particularly relevant would be the ideas of Aldo Leopold and his book, A Sand County Almanac, which we use in our environmental history and ethics class. So the first two-thirds of the book you see the land through his eyes and this is wonderful to share with students. And then he builds on that ecological vision to talk about the obligations that we have and how we need to see ourselves not just as a part of the human society but of a broader ecological community. So I'm informed about that. In fact, in the human ecology class when I teach that it's front and center trying to understand how we what our relationship is to natural systems. And if you look at that and you look at the trends, our resource use trends, our population trends and our the ways we're impacting the environment, there are some troubling trends. When I was in college we were taught to worry about the non-renewable resources, things that there's finite amounts of that we can run out of, minerals and oil and things like that. In fact, those are not so much the critical things because there are markets for those that work pretty well to direct investment towards substitutes when things start getting expensive or to more intensive technology when commodity can bring a higher price. And of course there's recycling for some of those things too. The things that we were taught take care of themselves, well I guess we weren't taught quite that, but renewable resources we used to think would take care of themselves so long as we only use them at a sustainable yield level as the old term that goes back to the conservation movement had it. Well those are the things that we're worried about today. We're worried about top soil, we're worried about water, we're worried about vegetation and biodiversity, we're worried about global gas balances in the atmosphere. Things that nature maintains left to its own devices through whatever has evolved, but which we are now digging into its capacity to renew. The global footprint analysis has shown this very concretely and quantitatively that every year we are exhausting the renewable amount of those resources that's produced each year by nature and then digging into the capital and it would seem well how can we keep going like that? Well it's not hard actually, it's just like if you had a bank account and you're spending into the principle of that instead of living off the interest. You can keep doing that right up until the day when you don't have much principle left and it's not enough to support you and that's essentially the situation we're in on global scale. It's very hard to perceive that, we don't see it directly, but nonetheless we do have the capacity to foresee that and change our patterns of action if we choose to and that's the challenge of the citizen or the denizen who cares at least about continued survival of