 Some years ago, I was privileged to visit the first national park of Brunei, Ullutumburam, and was deeply impressed by the fact a relatively small nation of 400,000 people has secured in perpetuity a stunning and biologically critical portion of Borneo. Brunei has set aside 56.2% of its 60 million acres, rich with over 6,000 species, as protected. Five times more, in fact, by percentage than in the UK. But biological numbers do not acknowledge political boundaries, obviously, any more than watersheds, rivers, migrating birds, or climax forests do. The UK protects approximately 10.5% of its estate, which translates into roughly 32 million acres, or about the same number of acres as in Brunei, 56% of Brunei equals 10% of England. That's why a global view is critical to understanding overall data. Worldwide only 12.5% of the terrestrial earth is protected to any degree. Brunei exceeds that level by nearly 45%, whilst the UK falls short by 2%. That said, England's several dozen categories of conservation underscore the notion that a few good people, as well as governments like Bhutan and Suriname, thoughtful and committed, as anthropologist Margaret Mead famously wrote, can indeed and do affect momentous change. Bring down a Berlin wall, invoke a Magna Carta, enact hard-won legislation like that under the aegis of environmental protection agencies from the US to China to Japan. They uphold Roe v. Wade, defending a woman's right to abortion and abolish slavery. Would that we could abolish hunger? We can. We must. Just the other day, of course, the nonviolent activist George Clooney in a brilliant heartfelt strategic move brought yet more global attention to the crisis happening as we speak in Sudan and throughout East Africa. But such are the exasperating struggles of the human collective. A single individual can hope to accomplish nearly anything. This is the essence of my optimism. Every single spiritual tradition I can think of has its own courageous thinkers and activists. In the case of the giant legacy, I reflect immediately upon the theory of the five senses delineated for all sentient beings for purposes of initiating a dietary revolution thousands of years ago. Giant theories of violence and nonviolence pivot upon the inevitability of having to make hard choices, but with the confidence, the stability, and staying power to make those decisions with conviction and focus. In his 1995 Nobel Prize speech, Irish poet Seamus Heaney concluded by describing poetry's quote, power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it. William Penn wrote in the solitary confinement of the Tower of London in 1668 his two seminal treatises on nonviolence, the Sandy Foundation shaken and no cross, no crown. Pamphlets that would inspire Thomas Jefferson to write quote, all men are equal under God. Clearly giant doctrine with respect to human consumption presupposes that the one sense beings we may eat may be equal under God, but not equal enough to prevent our consuming them. There is no poetry in consumption and as Seamus Heaney reminds us, we are quote, hunter gatherers of values, hence the giant position tolerance. There are no absolutes. This is why Gandhi himself declared a hymsa nonviolence limps, nevertheless it is the only way. The same holds for animal rights, animal liberation and biodiversity conservation, at least in human hands. About one third of England's 60 million acres are owned by some 1200 British families. Such private holdings vary from nation to nation. In the U.S., for example, private ownership is double that in the U.K. Moreover, most of the aforementioned private estates in the U.K., the U.S. or elsewhere are not typically counted within the protection statistics. In other words, the amount of land and water actually free of outright desecration is far greater than the strict definitions of sanctuary. This is all very good news, the largely unspoken secret of conservation. One of the many reasons, in fact, there are still so many life forms cohabiting Earth with us despite our seemingly intractable stubbornness with respect to our own escalating self-importance as a species and for the most part, our lack of stewardship. One of England's largest landowners is guardian of many such private endowments. The National Trust protects a half a million hectares of land bequeathed by individuals often unheralded whose philanthropy was inspired by their love of land, historic buildings, and their ecological resolve. Beatrix Potter being a case in point, or Sir Isaac Newton, the apple, the apple tree in the Midlands, which is protected by the trust and was visited by 33,000 people last year who all I presume wanted to get the religion of gravitation, such that the tree has been protected now because there was root damage from so much ecotourism. Britain's National Trust, now four million members strong, was formally consecrated in 1895. It sets a green standard for several dozen other subsequent national conservation and preservation trusts around the world. Three late 19th century individuals with no scientific degrees, special ecological know-how or religious fame, came together to consecrate a tradition that is now universally celebrated along with the national park system. It was in fact the British ambassador to the U.S., James Bryce, who declared that America's national parks were the best idea the U.S. had ever devised. Much of Bryce's life was devoted to the ideal of biological conservation and the possibility of finding a pragmatic paradise, not to mention, in his case, Noah's Ark, one that humans might inhabit. He went on an expedition in search of it. Since America's first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872, there have been over 120,000 parks and other kinds of formally codified protected areas subsequently enshrined throughout the world. That's a good beginning, to be sure. Here in London, as early as the 12th century, Henry III named Waltham Forest a Royal Preserve, later to be known as Epping Forest. 6,100 acres of mixed biomes, the first politically protected area in the world. Today, some 66% of it is designated as the site of special scientific or a special area of conservation, and in the heart of this protected area sits a house known as the Great Standing constructed for Henry VIII in 1543 as the kind of platform enabling royal guests to watch and or participate in hunts with crossbows. What the City of London's website describes as a, quote, venue for royal tutor corporate hospitality to show off the wealth and power of the king. More recently, the name was changed to Queen Elizabeth's hunting lodge. The status of the first protected area in the world is a Western myth. For it was not entirely protected, unlike, say, much of India's tar desert in Rajasthan, where the 15th century Jambaji identified 29 potent ecological principles adhered to to this day by more than one million vegetarian Bishnoi. In 1778, in allegiance to Jambaji, several hundred tree-hugger Bishnois exerted the power of their collective conscience to protect the sacred, high-protein-bearing trees called Kejarli against poachers. Many were martyred doing so. Fast forward to 2001 when we saw the tragic death of 51-year-old British animal rights activist Barry Horn following his lengthy hunger strike while serving an 18-year sentence for his direct actions to help shut down companies that engaged in vivisection, fur, and leather production. The notion of Henry VIII using a crossbow to kill deer in Epping Forest evokes a great iconographic moment in Christian lore, as depicted in The Vision of St. Eustis, painted by Pizanello in 1442, and displayed in the permanent collection in London's National Gallery. Pizanello, also known as Pizano, took the nobility of wildlife to supersede the hunting instinct of man. The story depicts Eustis on his horse out on a hunt when the aura of a crucified Christ appears to him crowning the stag, his huge brace cast precisely to either side of the revelatory appearance of a crucified Christ. The whole image perfectly choreographed so as to make the getting of religion in the guise of animal rights, a visual compact, a trust that would never occur quite so literally again in art history. Giorgio Vasere hailed Pizanello as one who hearkened back to early pantheism in Greece, which produced in philosophers like Pythagoras and later Neoplatonists such as the Greco-Egyptian Plotinus and Porphyry, some of the first Western treatises on philosophical and spiritual vegetarianism, later to be taken up by such notables as many that Peter Flegel earlier this evening mentioned, but also poet Percy Shelley, Leonardo da Vinci, of course, and an entire movement here in England to protect in Britain's parliament horses, Lord Erskine's appeal and other appeals and such singular establishments as the medical school in Edinburgh where dissection of animals was greatly frowned upon. Today, Epping Forest, of course, no longer allows hunting with crossbows. I shouldn't say, of course, because many of those aforementioned 120,000 or so protected areas throughout the world and 99% of the planet's oceans do witness hunting, both legal and illegal, as in the case of indigenous people's hunting rights. Usually it is simply the lack of monitoring and policing infrastructure that admits to imperfect conservation. Hence the attempts, usually after the fact, by nations and lawmakers to enforce international treaties and societies specific to those trafficking and illegally caught wildlife, which is an industry said to be worth well over $20 billion annually, but I suspect that's a very conservative estimate. Over 2,500 years ago, a giant prince turned mendicant named Mahavira espoused his own message of protection, non-violence and unconditional love. Today, that message resonates with an unprecedented urgency. Mupati or no mupati, pinchi or no pinchi, the varied trappings of giant sadhus and sadhus are less critical to ecology than the Jain ideals. Those ideals are everything. By present estimates, there are possibly as many as 100 million species on earth, 60% or more of which could go extinct before the end of this century. Each species might well harbor on average some 3 million individuals. Jains recognize that each of those beings, great or small, has a soul, an atomistic life particle or Nagoda, to be acknowledged and respected. In the midst of the first global extinction frenzy ever triggered by a single species, ours, such entreaties for reverence must strike of clinical contradiction. The crux of this, what I'll call psychic dialectic, I believe comes down to that transparent debate or evocation between rarity and familiarity. Every day trusts, promises, family, acts of kindness, friendship, and the reality of an alien but all too familiar world of brute force. Devolving beyond all such dichotomy to consistent behavioral logic, daily giant practices that might yet inform legislation, policy, community standards, and the individual belief systems of friends and colleagues and the public at large, how each and every one of us may yet be empowered to assert and believe that change for the better is important, attainable, and essential. That all of our individual actions actually add up to more than their mere sum, that the love and reverence of nature and our individual life forms is not merely about science or the ongoing, essentially fundamentalist tactics and debates of our age, pitting ethics against monetary and resource considerations, but about our very survival as a species in a biologically interdependent world. In other worlds, a moral compass with palpable magnetic leanings towards significant and widespread protections for those we call endangered, whose future is tenuous at best, and those we call our companion animals or friends, and in the worst case, but most common case, dinner. Both the critically beleaguered and allegedly common place are all vulnerable to pain and annihilation. This biological similitude invites each of us to be an ambassador for nonviolence, particularly in a world of hugely amassed and inescapable reciprocities. This sixth extinction spasm in the 4.2 billion years of life on earth is most widely discernible in the nearly three dozen terrestrial biological hotspots on the planet, which are down to less than 10% of their original habitat. From the eastern Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, the denuded wilds of Nepal, Madagascar, India's Malabar Hills, southernmost Africa, the tropical Andes, and southern California to name just a few. In Britain, a mini hotspot, or as some might term it, cold spot would include the Caledonian Scotts pine upland reduced to a mere 1.5% of its original habitat. Such attrition should not have happened, but for our species, and must be viewed as a central, if not the most conspicuously palpable rallying point of religious, indeed philosophical, activism, in my opinion. Multiple holocausts occur every day, with over 42,000 discrete populations of species dying out every 24 hours across the planet. In that same blink of an eye, our one species has usurped more than 50% of net primary production on earth. All that photosynthetic green space. Well over 60,000 square kilometers in North America have been paved over, an amount equal to the size of the state of Georgia. Well, 30% of the terrestrial ice-free earth has been converted by multinationals as well as small family farmers into products for the fattening of 1.3 billion bovines and other vertebrates. Most of those precious animals bound for slaughter, and they know it. This carnage is for needless food fixes, largely unessential protein leading to obesity, heart, and zoonotic diseases. Meanwhile, scientists have dug deep cavities and polar landscapes to protect genetic seed sources, genomes, from the rapacious conquest by humankind of the very food banks of our future. Now in addition to this sixth current Holocene epic extinction, which started some 10,000 years ago, but whose acceleration is measurably draconian in the past two millennia, there is an equally heinous seventh extinction taking place. By this I refer to the very animal holocaust wiping out individuals. Many trillions in this decade so far, if one includes the more than one trillion fish, killed for human consumption annually. The near crash of the more than 7,000 known global fisheries, and the more than 50 to 100 billion other vertebrates that people in corporate persons obliterate, eat, turn into leather or glue or thousands of other products, those products embody sentient beings whose deaths at our hands are in fact non-essential to our own life support systems. Generation after generation of crows, birds of every persuasion, ravens, nuisance animals like magpies, and then the cows, the pigs, the turkeys, the chickens, the deer, the emus, the ostriches, the horses, the sheep, the dogs, the goats, the monkeys, the pigeons, the dolphins of the whales, the list goes on and on. So in order to grasp the geography of this cruel and unrelenting trespass, Jane Gray Morrison and I have analyzed and described this expansive landscape of fatalities as what we call an atlas of pain points. Those areas most prone to the largest aggregates of cruelty, meeted out on earth, and the pain points concept shows us where the key veins and arteries have been slashed. Hopefully the embrace of such awareness is a precursor for adopting methodological, endemic, and ethical remediation. The aforementioned hotspots elicit a stark truth about human nature, the fact we put price tags on the environment. But in the tropical Andes hotspot, particularly in Ecuador's Yasuni National Park, in a single tree, scientists have extrapolated the biodiversity index suggestive of as many as 60,000 to 100,000 diverse species, one tree. Carbon markets to date cannot begin to account for that tree, for 100,000 species, and for their offspring far into the future. While we are carbon based life forms, our economic capacities are without the slightest know how in terms of actually coping with the inestable worth of a single living being. In India, for example, victims of Bhopal were deemed to be worth about $300 per person. In the US, a few thousand to a few million dollars per person, depending on whether they died in military service during the 9-11 tragedy or in some other manner. Federal, state, and local environmental choices are often contested and decided by the polarized jobs versus environment debate. Cuba has protected 46% of her coral reefs, the British and Dutch Caribbean territories far less. The largest democracy in the world, India, has seen her forests and wildlife poached with no less cause for hope than across Nigeria, much of Indonesia, Haiti, and hence the juridical process that prides itself on a global sea change toward democracy resembles the Arab Spring in Egypt. 80 million people with inadequate means for most ecological remediation, or Portugal and Greece whose economic downward spiral affords little ecological optimism. No reason, in other words, one would think, to be confident that animal rights and biodiversity protections and all the grand philosophies and moral intentions in the world will be globally consistent to protect multi-jurisdictional ecosystems. Since it has believed that human language emerged as a corresponding approach to the keeping track in the Middle East of hoarded grain surpluses as well as slaves, economics have been woven into our psyches with a severely challenged and inconstant consideration of our fellow humans and all other species. I think of a used up racehorse worth on the market in the US $25. A rare parrot in a fetid cage in West Africa left without water in the burning sun of an illegal animal market, 95 cents. Having rescued thousands of them, I know the price is quite down to the penny in many cases. Moreover, during good economic times financially based conservation arguments remain comprehensively illogical and dangerous because they create commodities out of life forms, which is precisely what corporations have done in securing patents for more than 40,000 living and or biologically synthetic organisms. Other all too disingenuous economic theories have enabled some to justify selling off ivory or culling elephants in national parks in South Africa. While it might be useful to cite a city like Pushkar in Rajasthan as a stunning example of how a metropolitan region can actually profit from its mandatory vegetarianism, that is not the reason for vegetarianism. Any more than I would suggest that the 1200 or so remaining totas of Tamil Nadu are vegetarian for economic benefit, they are not. It is a cultural and ethical tradition as it is with the Vishnoy of Rajasthan, the Karan of Myanmar, the Tasade of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines, the Inner Badui of Java, Seventh Day Adventists in Southern California, the Islamic Pure Brethren Sufi sect of the Eti Mes non-meat-eater neighborhood in Istanbul, or the approximately 100 million others known to be vegetarians, whether Brahmanical Hindus, Buddhist monks and nuns, traditional Orthodox Jews, and so many others. The giants to varying degrees are foremost and probably the most ancient of these oft unheralded celebrants of non-violence. Never before has spirituality in its broadest possible meaning had such a tremendous opportunity to declare the myriad of convictions with an earnest sense of prospect, of true conscience that might well translate into equitable governance for all of nature. Governance that declares economics is dependent upon our compassion towards nature, not the other way around. To achieve that proper prioritizing, let us not fail to be observant and realistic. While it is one thing to harness a new nature, a new narrative, a new and revived ecological code of ethics that harkens back expressly to Mahavira and his lasting legacy, it is also clear that Cervantes' dreamer, Don Quixote, is right outside our door, tilting at windmills in the form, for example, 469 European Union-certified abattoirs across the UK, some nearer than others to the University of London. The global hot spots, cold spots, slaughterhouses, neighborhood butcheries, over one million just in India, and the inconceivably vast demise of aquatic innocence. Do not, for all of their horror, necessarily do more species, not at all. I am an optimist, despite what I have said, despite what I have observed, despite what I have felt in my bigger lifetime. Nothing is genetically, economically, or morally ordained. Evolution does not condemn us. Only our choices can do that. By the time Cervantes had died in 1615, a year after the completion and distribution of his Don Quixote, the fantastic dreamer-turned-activist took England by storm, and most of Western Europe. Readers quickly embraced one of the book's most celebrated sagas, chapter eight in book one set on the plains of La Mancha, where the night of the woeful countenance attacks a windmill, thinking it to be a horrible giant. That memorable encounter of shining armor, virtue, and chivalry coincided quite poignantly as details of the author's private life quickly became public. How Cervantes lost forever the use of his left hand at the battle of La Ponte, which by turns led to his capture by sadistic Moorish pirates in 1575. There he was five years in prison. A slave whose failed attempts to escape led to his torture and to a poet's madness. Upon a successful ransom by his brother, he returned to Spain only to be imprisoned on false charges, plunged into poverty, and an early death. In spite of all that, Cervantes is in defatigable belief in the ability to stand up to injustice, to be kind and loving, courteous and empathetic. Today rings more true than ever before. But Cervantes offers no obvious pathways toward the realization of that ideal, this effective embrace of the greatest good for the greatest number of sentient beings. The Jane lexicon on the other hand is profuse with just those precise methods for transmuting idealism into practical daily effect. As present in past, Jain monks, nuns, scholars, and others have helped us to grasp. From the dharma terth or holy path to all those vows surrounding compassion or Anu Kampa, you have the endless behavioral restraints, the care in walking, the complete embrace of forgiveness and forbearance, the Mahavrata or five vows of a mendicant, other arenas invoking universal friendliness, daily Jain salutations, steeped in reverence, humility and modesty, and countless aversions, whether in terms of food and clothing preferences, choices of one's profession, leading ultimately to renunciation through austerity, daily pooches, and multiple steps toward liberation for the lay person and for all Jains, for all time, samatva or a sense of kinship with all life forms concluding with the ultimate declarations of personal nonviolence and ecological liberation, moksha. As an ecological ideal, Jain ethical tradition surpasses any such ground-based human approach to nonviolence of which I have ever personally been aware. As an ecologist, however, I must acknowledge that Jain idealism has not managed to save hundreds of billions of animals and plants from suffering and from destruction. Just as Gandhi could not fix the civil strife upon India's independence or see through to the core of what Hitler really was all about, which got George Orwell to thinking perhaps Gandhi was naive, geopolitically speaking. And one of the most critical impasses of such idealism comes down to the very notion of incremental compromises that result in injury to others and reciprocally to oneself. On a living planet with as many as 10 trillion cells per human body, 7 million follicle mites in our eyelashes, something like 5 million trillion trillion, that's a 5 with 30 zeros after it, bacteria in the world, and even more viral species. How can Jain pantheism possibly cope, live and let live? We are just people living one day at a time as best we can. Yet, as revealed in one of the oldest Jain canonical works, the Achalunga Sutra, quote, a wise man should not act sinfully towards animals nor cause others to act. So, nor allow others to act so. In Loma Linda, California, a community that has been deeply informed by Seventh Day Adventist ethics and vegetarianism, the proposal recently for McDonald's to be established within the township has ignited a storm of controversy. In Mumbai, Jain owned condominium complexes where individual units will only be sold to sworn vegetarians. Maybe one way to grapple with hard truths, I can see that happening at dorms, at universities, consistent with green and genetic corridors for biodiversity. But tough love does not cut it in the realm of the Serengeti's all around us or the killing fields of a Cambodia or the daily terrorist attacks in Iraq. During the entire Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis, there was an endless lament for the oyster fishermen and their livelihoods. But little discussion of the oyster beds themselves, namely individual oysters, their intelligence, their feelings. Competing altruisms and empathy mirrors a syndrome long described as compassion fatigue. Too many priorities amidst a welter of imperatives. The world court argued for years over a consensual definition on the very word aggression. Too many motives complicating pure and simple bioremediation or even the ability to promote sound and logical answers. As in the case of the UN vote on sanctions against the Syrian regime or a deeply disturbing decision by the Supreme Court of Honduras, all but banning the right of women to control the fate of their own bodies. There are 10 to 30 million known human slaves. How does the legacy of Mahavira solve such horrors? Many would argue that ethics, compassion and tolerance are traits that can be easily demonstrated, taught, passed down from generation to generation. Jane Angus, Buddhist sutras, Islamic suras, the Judaic Talmudic studies, golden rules, Ashoka's edicts and the most famous of all such sources in the history of ethics, thou shalt not kill. All assure us that transmission of right beliefs, right intentions and right livelihoods, not to mention best environmental practices, are all possible. Maybe even biologically hardwired in our genes. Giant dietary considerations evolved in the wake of a highly refined science pertaining to the psychoanalysis of pain in all creatures. The result being a minimalist approach to its inflection. But with seven billion human mammals, mostly carnivorous, large, poised to hit 10, possibly 11 billion, there might appear to be little hope of stopping the all-out assault on the planet or what Boris Pasternak referred to as that train in a dark tunnel in the night speeding somewhere with its headlights turned inward. Many of us have had have pointed to this demographic madness, if you will, is the core of all ecological dilemmas. If we cannot stabilize the human population, all other alleged solutions, ethical or otherwise, will fail. But such stabilization ultimately hinges, I think, upon the very ideals espoused by a Mahavira and a Cervantes. Many futurists look toward techno fixes, not idealism. Stockholders have turned toward a socially responsible quadruple bottom line approach to investing with several trillion dollars now lodged in SRI, socially responsible investing portfolios. Carbon markets are surging. Energy alternatives, teeming. But the reality of a world dominated by a single carnivorous bipedal species man is daunting. No matter how much good cheer we may choose to read into the engineering miracles that have accelerated innovation and the capture of new data, exabytes, billions of terabytes with heretofore unthinkable speed. Such daily technological breakthroughs as they are typically labeled are never going to be enough to fix a paradigm that is broken to begin with. Namely, the idea that killing is acceptable under any conditions. That revenge and the social Darwinian might-makes-right winner-take-all approach to life can in any guise make moral sense. It cannot. It never will. Instead, we must embrace the mega tonnage and throw weight of our conscience. Or as Queen Elizabeth said the other day, we must love our neighbors. Giant ethical delineations in a world that is hemorrhaging cannot justify the luxury of the ideal of a hymsa if it is not emphatically prepared to take on those pain points I described earlier. This is the dilemma. Namely, the broader goal of non-violence, of eliminating cruelty and suffering, wherein future park policies, societal consensus, legal mandates, the myriad animal rights agendas, and conservation strategies might yet be comprehensively schooled beyond mere wishful thinking. In other words, the ability to actually affect solutions. Perhaps it was this this intuitive grasp of humanity and its place in nature that bid the marvelous poet Emily Dickinson to refer to the word hope as quote that thing with feathers. What stands out most poignantly for me in Dickinson's three stands a poem are its last two lines quote yet never an extremity it asked a crumb of me. This crumb affects my heart both as metaphor and reality. How hard is it to lend a crumb to a little bird? Any child knows how and why to do it. The island of Cyprus is midway along the annual migratory route for millions of songbirds from Europe to North Africa, 90% of whom are endangered to various degrees. Yet in the year 2008, poachers on Cyprus killed over one million songbirds that had stopped to rest to seek some crumbs and water during their long exhaustive migration. The poachers killed them to sell them as culinary delicacies. Songbirds which comprise nearly 40% of all known bird species or some 4,000 taxa of melodious paceriforms have migrated for millions of years from North America to Brazil. In the 1850s Henry David Thoreau is the first American naturalist to make note of the fact that songbirds were arriving at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. In 2008 the same year bird life Cyprus reported the statistics I just referenced regarding the poaching of these tiny, gentle creatures. A study came out that showed at least 24 species of songbirds arrived earlier in Concord than during Thoreau's time. In other words, climate change is hammering the birds along with poachers, that in addition to the rapid loss of their habitat due to shopping malls, freeways, not to mention greatly accelerated bioinvasives, competing with them or killing them outright. Worldwide countless bird species, particularly parrots and raptors and wading birds, are threatened with extinction. To save these endemic beauties, largely birds, island nations like New Zealand, where the public's unwillingness to come together on a consensus to apply nonviolent immune contraception to rats and possums, stoats, weasels and ferrets have resorted to the setting of traps or hand or aerial baiting of tons of toxins, and this rash of daily killing need not exist, but the legislation and the public's fear of anything remotely smacking of genetic modification has hampered the reconciliation of biodiversity conservation and animal rights. In the meantime, habitat fragmentation impeding the tens of million-year-old migrations by such species as the ruby-throated hummingbird, weighing less than five grams, continues to get worse. The hummingbird can use stored fat to fuel a nonstop 24-hour flight across a 600-mile stretch of open water from the U.S. Gulf Coast to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, but if the birds fail to find enough food, whether in the flower garden of a person's backyard or anywhere else, it will plunge into the Gulf, never making it to Mexico. How does that relate to giant activism? I'll tell you. Migratory avafana are wholly dependent upon stopover sites or staging areas. Here's the gist of it. That suitable migratory staging area might be as small we now understand as 11,000 square feet, just a portion of a Trafalgar square. Think about that. Tens of millions of backyards around the world, in addition to every park, are latter-day refuges for these hundreds of millions of birds. My sincere belief is that every neighborhood becomes an activist, liberationist, geographic spot, that you can bring yourself to care about a bird and that you can look at humanity with that re-envisioned notion of the human heart and its capacity. If a backyard, even some potted native plants on a balcony can help in the effort to restore balance to the ecological tumult, our species is precipitating, helping native insects, spiders, birds, even bacteria, which can adroitly amass in medical terms a counter-offensive, for example, to the human-induced assault of non-native antibiotics, then the world is indeed grateful to you. Four billion years of evolution and genetic diversity are grateful to you. You can make a difference. This is my point. In England, farmers and ecologists have adopted measures to help birds and insects survive harsh winters, leaving at least four percent of their croplands fallow in the same spirit as the above-referenced backyard nursery concept. Such examples are legion, the beginnings of a blueprint for the more than seven billion Homo sapiens, the majority of whom now live in cities and have children who are ecologically starved for such information that might galvanize a new generation of environmental champions, kids along with their parents, who will salvage that old adage to think globally and act locally, an exquisite injunction that presupposes that people's intentions can translate into informed, effective activism, biological redemption, as I like to think of it. Yet as logical as such aforementioned environmentalism may sound, local non-violence as we all know is never guaranteed. Consider the legislative attempt to ban handguns in the city of Chicago, a notion predicated on the belief that such pointless weapons are inherently violent and therefore do not fall under the normal guarantees of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. Sadly, this legal bit of common sense remains undermined by an avalanche of Supreme Court challenges that would uphold the same sort of violence that nearly killed our beloved author of Don Quixote. The great scholar of Cervantes, Salvador de Madariaga, described the ending of Cervantes' masterpiece when the great dreamer lies dying in his bed, whispering to his kneeling squire, Sancho Panza, and says, there are no birds this year in the nests of yesteryear. Imagine such a sentence in the giant context. Now consider the case of Lubbock, Texas, where a recent study revealed that home sales between 2008 and 2009 conclusively proved that a blue jay in your backyard can add $32,000 to your asking price. Such urban and semi-urban backyard punger pores, gosulas, animal sanctuaries, parks where it is lawful to feed birds and squirrels and homeless people, for that matter, are rapidly becoming the iconic statement they need to be. Human beings are about love. We are not egos, but volunteers in the great mysterious chain of being, of biodiversity, of unconditional service to others. And nothing comes as easily as feeding another human being or a crumb to a bird. England's unofficial national bird since the 1960s, the half ounce robin red breast, more orange actually, long ago gave great inspiration as well as sorrow to William Blake, who had uttered one of the great clarion calls in his auguries of innocence when he reminded us that to put a robin in a cage was to put all heaven in a rage. That robin is related to the benighted, gorgeous, horrifically sinned against chicken. At any one time there are thought to be about 25 billion of these marvels in the world, these chickens. Each one with a fantastic intellect, soul, attitude. We lavish tens of millions of dollars to protect endangered birds, but before they become endangered, we not infrequently cause their demise one way or other without a second thought. Why on earth would anyone kill a chicken? We don't need to eat chickens, not with nearly 80,000 plant species edible and nutritious to humans worldwide. There is nothing about the nerve endings in our tongue that condemns us to eat chicken or beef or anything else. Nonetheless, in an average year during the first decade of the 21st century, American companies alone profited to the tune of $134 billion from the killing of chickens and others or the growing of food to feed animals that would be slaughtered. And as for those approximately 1.3 billion bovines, they too are caught up in the nightmare of concentrated animal feeding operations. To put Blake's heaven in rage into an historic and global perspective, simply consider all of those countless juxtapositions mirroring human nature, problems and gin-oriented solutions, from the dream of paradise that you saw at the very beginning of some of those images to slaughterhouses, from biofilia to young people working hard to save songbirds, elephants, tigers, orangutans, and dolphins. The vast history of human imagination and only two real nature reads like an ecological Rorschach test, if you will, but a moral test for a new generation of giant engagement, a sustained commitment by each and every one of us. Let this generation be living testimony to the staying power of our quixotic idealism, what Albert Schweitzer referred to as sentimentality, in the best sense of the world. Embrace it of all those possibilities and promises of unconditional love. This is the promise that we must keep for ourselves, for our children, for living organisms that are inside us and all around us. And if not for them and for ourselves, who will do it? The giant belief in the promise, this quality of the heart is the shurana, or refuge, the pangera poor, an animal refuge, and that some of us, the refuge to all in which Mahavira spoke to the animals and plants. This motif is also central to the episode in that great biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, when he delivered his sermon to the birds, as first transcribed by hagiographer Thomas of Chilano in the mid-13th century. This ethological revolution, as we today think of interspecies communications, is second nature to every one of us who grew up with animal and plant friends, climbed trees, nurtured injured birds back to well-being, cared for the family dog, loved our parents, loved our siblings, had a few fights now and then, but ultimately loved them, and derived great pleasure from kittens and from Peter Rabbit and the like. Ultimately, this collective giant truth with nature posits an appropriate forward-looking outcome that coincides with an inward-seeking truth, best exemplified by the very life of Mahavira, reformer, activist, a man who knew how to enact peace and convey the legacy of difficult reconciliations of opposites. The end result best frames the narrative I'm trying to convey, namely the famed Parasparajivanam, three Sanskrit words, Parasparamuchul, Upagraha assistance, and Jivanam living beings. This ecological mantra is perhaps the most notable and self-evident commitment of giant tradition we know of, and the one most applicable to a 21st century planet in dire jeopardy. The Bible reminds us that patience is a virtue, but it is clear that the sixth and seventh waves of extinction occurring at this moment do not provide anything like the ecological leisure of biblical times. The task of this generation is all too clear. Set realizable goals, benchmarks for stopping the killing by directly addressing all those pain points and the sheer numbers who are afflicted. Accelerating this urgency is the safeguarding of evolution herself before we discover that the earth's very regenerative capacities have been irreversibly sabotaged by one species under the many precarious guises ironically of what we like to think of as humanity. I believe that we are capable of combating extinction, unnecessary suffering with common sense together, one day at a time. This faith is inspired by the example of Mahavira and of all those who have chosen the path of a hymsa on violence. Thank you and Jai Jnindra.