 and I appreciate the opportunity to be with you. I was invited to provide an external set of eyes as a professional evaluator. I've been doing evaluation for some 50 years now, and that's part of what we do. I'm not a forestry expert. I'm a journalist working across different sectors or virtually every kind of human intervention I've encountered and worked with at some level. And so that's a perspective I bring. My background is sociology. And when we're talking about transformation, I was invited to think about both the things that you're dealing with and any things that I thought might deserve more emphasis. And so in that regard, I'm going to bring up a broader perspective, bigger picture perspective to zoom out in order to help zoom in on the specific kind of technical research and development issues you're dealing with and facing and put those in a larger social, political and cultural context and help emphasize that connection. I want to do so by beginning with a creation story. Over the years, I got fascinated with the different creation stories in different cultures and began collecting them. And there's one in particular that emphasizes trees among all that I've collected. So I thought I would share that with you in order to introduce the cultural and human connection to trees that is a part of any kind of transformational process. These aren't just technical issues. They aren't just issues of changing the landscape in a developmental way, but they involve human beings and their connections to those transformational processes. So the Maori people have a creation story that begins with Father Skye, whose name was Rangi, and Mother Earth, whose name was Papa, locked in a fierce embrace. Such a fierce embrace that their children were born into darkness in a tight space. And over the eons, the children became disgruntled with being in that tight, dark space and tried to push their parents apart, but were not successful. And they appealed to Tane, the oldest and strongest of the siblings, to join them. But he wasn't sure this was a good idea. They nagged him and he eventually agreed and having watched their failed attempts, he showed them that they had to all put their shoulders against Father Skye and their feet against Mother Earth and push together, which they did and succeeded in separating Father Skye and Mother Earth. And immediately as the light poured in, Tane saw the tears from Father Skye at separation from his beloved, which became the rain. And then he saw that he had exposed the nakedness of his mother, of Mother Earth. And he began to plant trees to cover up her nakedness. But Tane had no experience with planting trees. And so the first time he planted them, he put the leaves in the earth and the roots in the air and the trees died. And then he tried again, this time he put the trees flat across the earth. And again, he watched them shiver up and die. And the third time, he put the roots in the ground and the leaves in the air and not only did the trees grow, but the birds and animals came. And Tane became the God of the forest and went around the earth planting trees, became the master of the foresters for the world. And in that tale, when I went to work with Samouri, I told them that it seemed to me that in their culture, in their very creation story, was a commitment, a principle of experimenting, of trying out one thing and seeing if it worked and if it didn't work, trying out something else. And that they appeared to be the original innovators and indeed evaluators in looking at what works and doesn't work. And so connected the work that we were doing together in evaluation to their cultural issues. What I want to raise is the importance of how people relate to trees and forests. Personally, emotionally, we are emotional animals. And so connecting the work to what people care about in their cultural and social dimensions is a part of bringing about change and transformation. Lee talked about there not being a silver bullet. We now use that term, there's no silver bullet in a generalizable sense, but the origin of the silver bullet myth in medieval Europe in the 1700s was not one size fits all, was not generalizable, but was actually a very specific option for one purpose. It was to kill werewolves and vampires. And so it actually has a very narrow cultural meaning that's very contextually specific. In that sense, there are silver bullets that in much of what's been talked about are highly contextual specific solutions to particular landscape issues. And that was the original purpose of the silver bullet. Another cultural issue in honor of Indri's presentation from Indonesia is that today in Bali is Galungan. Galungan is the celebration of the ancestors visiting the earth. And in many cultures, trees have spiritual significance. I worked in a culture in Africa where the ancestors resided in trees. And the health of the trees was the ancestors message about the health of the people. The point of all of this is to have us realize that when we're bringing about transformational issues with human beings, we're dealing with their relationship with that work. It's not just the technical decisions, but what we're learning is that these are emotional decisions. And there's an urgency about them. Part of what we're dealing with in the context of the global emergency and climate change is the need for speed. Dr. Hall in her opening comments talked about looking for quick wins for positive change. And this is a part of being aware of the fact that constantly we are the first generation to know that we are destroying the planet and the last generation that can do anything about it. Keeping our work connected with that with the people that we're working with so that their personal, social, cultural connections to the work are part of the decision-making. We're not simply rational beings. Economists are discovering this. Half of the last 10 years of Nobel Prizes in economics have been for the incredible discovery that people are emotional about money and not purely rational. Well, they're not emotional, they're emotional about landscapes and trees and forests. And that's a part of the calculation that comes through culture and through our attention to these larger issues and the importance of trees and forests for that. The climate emergency as a point of emphasis, the Oxford Dictionary identifies a word of the year every year and last year that word was emergency, climate emergency. But we're not always acting like it's an emergency. Emergency is that we've got a lot of time. It's to think about with people what's happening. Of course that gets us into the political realm. The coronavirus COVID-19 has highlighted the distinctions between the political actors and the scientific actors. And so I wanna place your work in that larger context that we are dealing with how people understand science in every issue you do and every project you do, you're not just representing the knowledge base of forests and trees, you are representing how to think about the world and how to deal with our cognitive biases, with our values and with our decision-making processes. One of the principles that emerged out of the coronavirus was to follow the science. But the challenge of following the science is that there's not agreement among all scientists at an operational level. There's actually more agreement at the principles level. And when a field like epidemiology, which is heavily principles-based, where there's agreement on that, that gives us a basis for engaging together in the knowledge that flows from those principles. What we're up against in that regard though, is not just the pandemic, but what's come to be called the infodemic, the spread of wrong information. We're in a tug of war of facts, evidence, truth, data, reality and thinking against post-truth, fake news, alternative facts, make-believe, groupthink and distortions. And all of us are a part of that battle. I, Indra, made reference to the honey bees, the stainless honey bees, on a small plot of land with a cabin in northern Minnesota, where we're raising bees. I came across this quote attributed to Albert Einstein, that if the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, the man would have only four years left to live. So I did some fact-checking on that, because we all have to be fact-checkers. And I asked the bees, did Albert Einstein say that? And what I learned was that that statement came when Belgian beekeepers in protest against new government policies on beekeeping made up the quote. Einstein and Thomas Edison are among the most made-up quotes in the world. So a part of what we're doing with principles is dealing with scientific principles. Agroecology then, as a science, is also a movement and a practices, and principles and infirm and undergird all three aspects of agroecology. So at the level of principle, we, the panelists were joking and talking before this began, and there was a reference to whether or not a comment that someone had made was statistically significant. So I thought I would be sure that you all are aware that last year, the American Statistical Association in a open access version of the American statistician published a special issue on moving to a world beyond P less than 0.05. And what they suggested in that was to ban the term statistically significance, that it's become meaningless, it's mechanistic, it's overly rigid, and they proposed four principles for statistical analysis to replace statistical significance, except uncertainty, be thoughtful, be open, be modest. Now these are broad picture principles, but they involve how we engage with people around thinking. And when we talk about agroecology as a movement, listen to this movement language from the statisticians. The initial slow speed of progress should not be discouraging. That is how all broad based social movements move forward and we should be playing the long game. But the ball was rolling downhill, the current generation is inspired and impatient to carry this forward. So let's do it. Let's move beyond statistically significant even if upheaval and disruption are inevitable for the time being. It's worth it in a world beyond P less than 0.05 by breaking free from the bonds of statistical significance, statistics in science and policy will become more significant than ever. I use this as an illustration of where principles bring us into a common frame. Carl Sagan said science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. And in evaluation, we have come to pay more and more attention to that thinking dimension of our work too. When we're engaging people in evaluation, we're helping them learn to think. When you're engaging farmers and small holders and policymakers in your work and doing extension work, it's not just about the technical answers. In a complex dynamic climate changing world where practices are going to need to change, helping people think about how to make those decisions is as important as the knowledge itself as they have to deal with which direction to go in things. So transformation includes political engagement. It includes cultural engagement. And as a body of knowledge, if you have coherent, shared, knowledge derived, values-based, actionable commitments in the form of principles, it enhances your capacity to engage in that political dynamic. So Rick referred to the guide framework that's out of my book on principles focused evaluation. You can use that to test the meaningfulness of principles, not only for technical guidance, but to communicate that as a field, you have a coherent set of principles that inform the work that you do. Bill Listerly in his important book said, it is critical to get the principles of action right before acting. And that gives us a basis in for dealing with things like the coronavirus, with the forest fires that are going on, with Black Swan events. The author of the Black Swan, which The Wall Street Journal has called one of the most significant books of the last 50 years. Nicholas Nasim Nicholas Taliib commented on principles, never engage in detailed over explanations of why something important is important, when the basis of principle by endlessly justifying it. And so what we all have, he wrote a book last year called Skin in the Game, which recognizes that all of us have skin in the game. We're not just neutral, objective, independent researchers anymore. The future of humanity, the future of the landscapes, the future of our wellbeing together on the planet is what's at stake. As management guru Peter Drucker said, the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday's logic. And so a blue marble evaluation, which refers to seeing the earth from space as one whole humanity tells us to think globally, act locally and globally, evaluate the interactions around transformation, connect our networks together, which is how transformation occurs, not only among forestry researchers, but with other people bringing about change, connect the networks together. That's how transformation occurs on a broad scale is as we connect together around the globe, across sectors, across silos, across geographic boundaries, across knowledge areas, and engage together in shared transformation. That's how we will move from where we are now into a future, a principles-based future. Thank you very much.