 My wife Stella and I have been living in Rhode Island, where she grew up, for a few months now. Right by the ocean, we walk on the shore. There's this rocky part where there's tidal pools. And I really like tidal pools because I like looking and seeing the... There's some of them seaweed is growing and there's snails, sometimes you can see. And she was recalling, when she was a kid, they were so much more full of life. There were little fish in them, there were sea anemones, there were starfish. These tidal pools were really diverse and now there's almost... I've never seen another animal in them except for snails. They're really depleted from where they were. And we went to the estuary of the Nara River where it meets the sea and she said, oh yeah, we used to swim in that pond right there, in that brackish area. I'm not sure exactly what it's called, but she would swim in there and there was all kinds of kelp and all kinds of fish and she said one time she was swimming in this eel, came right up into her face and she was really scared. And now there's none of that. It looks beautiful, like the water is crystal clear, but there's no life anymore. And we feel really sad. Stella felt sad about that and I think many people have, I know I have memories like that too, of ruined places, of places where there's so much less life than there was when we were children. So yeah, another memory that should be called is that there will be all these horseshoe crabs on the beach and occasionally we find one now, but she said there used to be like, there would be hundreds of them all on the beach. And in the morning, she and her friend would go on a rescue mission because at night these boys would go and flip them over and they'd be helpless there on the beach, just like the senseless killing. And so Stella and her friend would go and they'd turn them back over again and rescue the horseshoe crabs. So these stories really affected me and part of me is like, I have this impulse also to find the cause because it hurts so much. The eels, I love eels, the eels are gone. These beings are gone and why? Why are the eels gone? Why are the horseshoe crabs gone? And I want to find a cause. And today a lot of people would say, well, it must be climate change. That's the cause. Climate change caused it. Well, do I know that though? Or is that just the convenient go-to that might even distract attention from something else that is local and that we could do something about? To make it about this global thing kind of disempowers you because the only way to do something about it is to sign a petition or go on a march or something like that. But what if there isn't a cause or what if the cause is something we haven't considered? What if it is glyphosate that is entered into the water through agricultural practices and people spraying their lawns and things like that? Or insecticides, neonicotinoid insecticides. Or the massive increase in endocrine-disrupting chemicals that enter through pharmaceutical waste and when people take these medicines and they get into their urine and they get into the water systems. What if those are affecting the eels? What if it is a combination of all of these things that make them, that one impact makes them a little less resilient to something else and that those two together have a synergistic effect and that makes them less resilient to something else and unable to deal with more temperature fluctuations? Like what if it's that? So again, I come to this place of I don't know. And in that stillness, I recognize a totally irrational cause for the decline of life in Rhode Island on the seashore. And the cause is basically those boys flipping those horseshoe crabs over, the senseless killing, the callousness, the disconnection from life that is necessary to even do such a thing. That relationship to nature, holding nature as something expendable, as a plaything, as something that isn't even a being. If it's not a being, like you don't have any compunctions about flipping a brick over, not that a brick isn't a being, but just for sake of this argument, let's say you don't have compunctions about flipping over a brick or a rock or something, and if a horseshoe crab is in the same ontological category as a brick or a rock, then why wouldn't you flip it over and look at the legs waving around? Isn't that fun? So that diminishment of the sacredness and beingness of the world, that is where, for me, if there is a cause that kind of underlies all the other causes, that underlies the pesticides, that underlies the fossil fuel emissions, that contribute to climate change, that is the cause. If you want to go to one cause, that's the cause. It is our disconnection from a living world, our diminishment of that world, our desacralization of that world, our rendering it into something less than what it really is. That's the cause. If we hold the world as a dead thing, as a bunch of stuff, as not a sacred being, we're going to make the world into that. We are going to create the world in the image of the story that we hold about the world. And that's why it's so important to change the story, to reawaken our innate perception, our innate knowledge that we live in a sacred world, in a living world, that we are surrounded by beings, that a horseshoe crab is a being, that an eel is a being, that all of the things that we are disrupting and ruining are beings. When we see them as beings, then no longer can we so lightly choose to destroy and ruin them. We still might make hard choices. We still might cut down trees to build a house. But we will not be abetted in that choice by an ideology that holds them as just stuff, and that choice will be done in a ceremonial way. If we do not reach down to that level of cause, the story that we hold about the world, nothing is going to change, nothing substantial. The symptoms will migrate from one thing to another, and the world will continue to die in conformity with a story that we have, that the world is not fundamentally alive. And if alive, not a being, and I'll say also that this story that kills and diminishes the world is not just an intellectual construct. It's almost the clothing on a traumatized, hurt-wounded state of being. Those boys that were turning over the horseshoe crabs. What were they suffering? That allows them to do that. That even invites them to hold the crabs is not alive. That cuts them off from their inherent knowledge that this is a brother, that this is a sister, that this is a relation. Who knows what happened to them? Who knows what brutal experiences they had that cut them off from their empathy? And here we come back to the inter-relatedness of all healing on this earth. Because when we identify the cause, the cause, as our civilization's story of the world, and when we identify that that cause is part of a state of being that's in great pain, then we know that to address that, we have to reach to that level. And all healing paths become one.