 Yeah, I see a lot of encouraging signs that civilization is returning toward an understanding of a living earth. Maybe one of the most hopeful is the permaculture and regenerative agriculture movement, which really is not anymore how do we extract what we want from the land, but it's how do we take care of the soil and how do we take care of the community of life, knowing that if we do that, it will take care of us too, but really oriented on not just human, not just on yields, not just on what we can measure, but it is very much grounded in participation in a system larger than ourselves that is itself alive. It's not just a community of life. It is, it is a community of life, but it's not only a community of life. It is also alive in and of itself. So that's one of the most hopeful things that I see. Another is the rediscovery of the, it almost sounds like I cliche to say it, but the wisdom of the indigenous. Now there's a lot of shadow going on here, a lot of attempting to fill the void of identity that modernity has engendered in us by importing identity from our connection to indigenous people, importing indigenous spirituality or rituals or ways of seeing things like that. So, oh, here's who I am. I have an indigenous name. I have something like that. So there's shadow there. There's cultural appropriation there. There's the commodification of indigenous practices. I mean, there's a lot of shadow there, but fundamentally, there's another thing going on which is, which is born of humility. The humility of our society may not seem humble, but it is it is a dawning humility born of the failure of our worldview and our science and technology to create a utopian society. 50 years ago, very few people had any doubt that things were getting better and better, that we were going to solve all of our problems. We were going to engineer them out of existence. We were going to create a material utopia and a social utopia through social engineering, through political science, science applied to politics, social science, psychology, sociology. We were going to, economics, we were going to have a perfect society replicating the success of science in the physical realm, in the social realm. 50 years later, 75 years later, that dream has not been fulfilled. And we are having harder and harder time denying that it's not working. It's so obvious now. We were supposed to be in utopia by now. And instead, we're in a decaying society where people are less happy than they were a generation ago, less healthy than they were a generation ago. I mean, come on, lifespans were supposed to be 200 years by now in this impossibly futuristic year of 2018. When I was a kid, even 1990 was going to be this utopia of robot servants and space colonies and like magical, you know, we haven't, we don't have any of that flying cars, right? So the failure of our world story, our story of the people is a tremendous humiliation. We no longer think that we're the ones who know best how to do this. So let's go civilize the savages with their superstitions and their primitive ways. Let's make them like us. Back in the day, of course, we want to make them like us because look at this glorious destiny we have. We want everybody to come along. That was our sincere desire, our well-meaning desire to bring everyone along. Now in practice, of course, it meant incorporating them into a global extractive economy and exploiting them. But there was an ideology that enabled that that was very pure. No more. The extractive machine continues to run, but there is no idealism underneath it anymore. The idealism of development. We're developed, they're developing, they will be like us someday. Hooray. That idealism of development is gone. So we only have the momentum of the machine. This is very hopeful for me because without the ideology underneath the machine, it's just a shell that can shatter. So in our humiliation, in our growing understanding, wow, we don't really know how to do this. We don't really know how the world works. If we knew, we would be living in a much better society. We don't know. So now, from that place, we can turn to indigenous cultures with the sincere questioning, the curiosity. Maybe you know. What do you know about how to live on this earth? Maybe your society wasn't as poor and miserable as we thought. Maybe your primitive huts were actually beautifully designed for coolness in the summer and warmth in the winter, and aesthetic nourishment in sacred geometric proportions. What have we not been seeing about your way of life and your way of thinking? How is it that you've stayed in equilibrium with nature for thousands of years? So we're beginning to open up to more and more of the indigenous mind. So this is not about respecting indigenous cultures for the sake of respecting indigenous cultures, to alleviate our guilt and shame at what our civilization has done to them, to be no longer blameworthy for all of that, to be on the side of good rather than the side of evil. It's not about that. It's not about diversity or inclusion because we have to bring everybody into this grand project of civilization and some people have been left out and we have to bring them into and give them a place. It is because we know that they have knowledge that we need, that the earth needs, that we have to let in. So it is about receiving precious knowledge that has been kept safe, safe enough at least, from the colonizing influence of modern education and modern economic systems. Like it's still there, it's still preserved, something that humanity desperately needs right now and we want access to that. Not for ourselves, not to make money from it, not to add it to the edifice of industrial civilization but because that edifice is crumbling and we don't know what to do. It's, we don't know what to do.