 So I speak about the organs and tissues of Gaia, and by that I mean forests, wetlands, all ecosystems, all biomes, as well as individual species and types of animals like whales, for example, forests, or oaks, or trout, salmon. Every species and every place on this planet and every type of place, every ecosystem, is one of the organs that plays an essential role in maintaining the resiliency and the health of the collective of all life on Earth. And the ways that they do this are so complex that I think we probably understand maybe 1% of 1% of it or even less. It's recently come to light that whales and fish are responsible, and it depends on which study you read, but for up to half of all of the layer mixing in the oceans. That's really important because the nutrient dense cool water has no way to rise to the surface to feed life, except in certain spots in the ocean where it naturally happens. But if it were just up to the winds and the currents that are subjected to geomechanical forces, there wouldn't be nearly as much of this layer mixing as there is thanks to life, especially big schools of fish and whales who dive down into the depths and come up and their kinetic action mixes the ocean layers, which is really important because for life to thrive, it needs the nutrients that are in the deep ocean. They have to come up somehow, and if they don't, then not only does the surface layer get warmer and warmer, leading to all kinds of disruption, possibly even that's a factor in coral reef bleaching, but also there's no nutrients available on which to base the food web. So here's an example of how, again, life creates the conditions for life. Another function that whales exercise is that they transport nutrients across great distances from the depths to the surface. Carnivorous whales sometimes feed very, very far down on as much as a mile underneath, and then they come up and they rest and they poop, and they bring the nutrients to the surface, but also across the oceans where the whales feed in nutrient-rich feeding grounds and then travel to warmer areas where there isn't upwelling deep water, and there they have their young, and so they physically transport nutrients to those areas. And it turns out that wildlife in general plays a huge role in transporting nutrients into the continental interiors too. Megafauna and birds and other creatures, they perhaps feed in the ocean or near the ocean or they swim and then they swim upstream in the case of salmon, bringing nutrients from the ocean to the interior or they fly or their migration patterns allow plant life to thrive because it needs phosphorus, it needs nitrogen. Brock Dolman told me that half of the nitrogen in California forests was from, originated in the ocean, carried inland by salmon, which then are food for the bears, which then went off into the forests and passed their dung or eagles or whatever, eating the salmon that carry nutrients from the sea. So when we build dams and we calculate the carbon savings from that so-called clean electricity, I mean, are we taking that into account? Are we taking into account the lower forest resiliency and increased susceptibility to fire that comes when they're not getting these important nutrients from their marine origins? And so there's a forest fire and it releases tons of carbon and exposes the soil to erosion, which releases even more carbon. Do we calculate that? So a really solid environmental policy has to include this kind of knowledge and we have to understand that we can't understand it all. Sometimes we might look into one of these chains of cause and effect. The effect of bears scratching trees or of salmon swimming up river or whales transporting nutrients, but that's just scratching the surface. We can't map out everything, but what we can do is we can start with the premise that all of these beings are somehow contributing. They are important. We can't just say, oh, well, this one's not important because there's no obvious carbon impact there. So that's not gonna be part of our carbon budget and not gonna be part of our decision-making. So that'll be, we can sacrifice those because they have a less of a carbon impact. We can't do that. When we understand that Earth is alive, when we understand Earth is alive, we have to respect and take care of all of its organs. And I would even go farther than Earth is alive. That's, you know, if I stick there, then I'm still scientifically acceptable. Gaia theory says, if not Earth is alive, at least it says Earth is like a living being in important ways, maintaining homeostasis, for example, over eons, maintaining a fairly constant temperature despite increases in solar radiance, maintaining constant salinity of the seas despite more and more salt flowing into the sea from the land through dissolved minerals. Like what keeps it from getting saltier and saltier? Enough salt flows into the oceans to double its salinity every 60 or 70 million years. Something's taking the salt out. So there's many, many ways that Earth maintains homeostasis. So we can say that Earth is like a living being. To say it is alive, that is another step. And to say that Earth is conscious or intelligent, that's another step still. And I like to take that step. Why not? I don't have anything to lose. And it corresponds to information that I and many other people get through other ways of knowing besides the scientific way of knowing. So looking at whales through that lens, what about their songs? What about their communication that travels over hundreds or even thousands of miles that links the entire ocean into a neural network, into a giant brain almost between the whales and the dolphins and involving all the life there? What's going on there? Could it be that somehow the whales are organized or called to bring nutrients to where they're really needed? Could that be happening? There could be communication going on in the oceans, between the land and the ocean. That just defies our comprehension. Or what about the soil? The mycelia, which is more complicated, more complex, I should probably say, than brain tissue and uses all of the same neurotransmitters in a constant web of communication. What happens when we cut a road through that? And what happens if you cut your hemispheres from each other and then cut off little parts of your brain and prevent them from communicating with each other? Do we even take that into account when we build a road through a forest? The entire continent used to be connected in one, well, at least maybe not across rivers, but pretty much the entire eastern half of the continent at least was one living network of communication. And is that just a random chemical cascade? I have to say that I have no way of knowing that, but when I step more and more into seeing the world as alive, then it becomes conceivable that it is intelligent as well, which of course coincides with the viewpoint of pretty much every indigenous culture that's ever been on earth. They saw themselves as surrounded by beings. The world is a being, the soil is a being, the trees are a being, the wolf is a being, collectively it is a being and individually they are all beings. They were not alone here. And if something is a being, then it's worth respecting. There's something to respect. There's something to love. It's not just anthropomorphic projection of beingness onto something that we then naively, childishly love, even though it's just a thing. I mean, that would be pretty childish to love a thing. But if it's a being, then it's something that's worthy of love that is even rational or thinkable to love. If we wanna motivate our efforts to protect earth on something other than self-interest, something other than making more clever use of earth and its resources, we have to go there. There has to be something to love. Otherwise it seems kind of irrational, not serious, which might be part of the reason why for something to be in legitimate policy conversation, it has to be somehow framed in instrumental utilitarianism in self-interest for human beings. Otherwise it seems like a bunch of kind of hippie-woo-woo imaginary stuff. If you grant that earth is just stuff, then it is irrational and a fantasy. So we need that foundation. We need to begin seeing earth and all of its beings as beings. I can't emphasize that enough. Without that, we're just left with being more clever about serving our interests. We need a mental model to coincide with our hearts longing and our innate love of life. Because on some level, we all know this, this indigenous knowledge is in all of us. So yeah, that's why I find it really helpful to look at some of the ways in which earth is alive and acts and has a physiology and perhaps even has things that we could call a mind. That those pieces of scientific evidence reinforce my, like I would believe it anyway, but it really helps to have these allies so that heart and mind no longer need to be in conflict.