Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you today and by extension, I think it is a pleasure to be with all the people who are watching and listening to your podcast, which is extraordinary.

That's a really good question. I was at University of California, Irvine, yesterday speaking to a graduate class. They were comprised of engineers and chemists. Actually, it was the chemistry department and engineering department. They had paired off for a whole year in their class to solve problems, to deal with the underprivileged that are suffering or the greatest impact from climate change and air pollution and other aspects of industrial society. They asked the same question. By the way, that's why I'm mentioning it. They are graduate students.

Actually, what I said was that whether it is a book or a business for me, both of them were about something that I developed when I was very young, which is curiosity. I did them all to learn. I write to learn. I do not write because I know. The other thing, I do not write to change your mind, because I feel like that is not possible, that's number one. Number two, that is not my business to change your mind. It is your business and my business is to try to change my mind. So, I try to write and communicate in such a way that create the conditions and that opportunity for people to see differently, or think differently, or change their so-called mind, as opposed to being, I do not know how to say it, but there is a tacit narrative in the climate literature, which is I know you do not listen up. That may be true. Some people are very well-informed, as scientists, as writers, journalists, but I do feel like on a larger narrative, what we need to do is to connect into each other and to listen and to explore our curiosity where we don't know whether we feel uncertain or even threatened and that is a listening curiosity process and that happened to me when I was very young, because I actually grew up in a home where I did not feel safe. So, I went outside and I felt safe outside. I always felt safe in the living world, but I also knew right away that I did not know anything about it because I did not know the names or the sounds or what was crawling under the rock or was the red berry edible or anything like that. So, right away it started, I could say, a sense of, what is that and how does that work?

When you go outside and you really have that kind of open mind, whether you're a botanist or a biologist or not, it does not make any difference at all. The fact is, you realize you would take 10 lifetimes to understand what you see in here. That is kind of wondrous and sort of extraordinary. It is very different from what we are taught in school, it is to master all, complete an A, do it, and outside it is a completely different teacher.

Yeah. That's why I enjoy it so much. To me, it is my happiest place. My happy place is writing. It is difficult, you know that very well. I think everyone listening knows that very well. But, somebody once said that the thing you are going to be the best at is the thing that you are willing to suffer for.

It is interesting. For most people, writing is a kind of suffering. There is no question about it. It is very difficult because we are judging ourselves, as we write and read. We never quite live up to our ideal and to other writers that we admire and look up to so much, but it is my happy place, because I go into where I don't know. I go read and look, and I find things and discover. There are just giants out there, in terms of women and men who just see the world in such brilliant ways and are able to communicate that to us. For me, I just feel like I am a dreamcatcher, catching these butterflies or whatever you want to call them of inspiration, ideas, knowledge and science. Science to me is bedrock. There are two types of science, though. There is Western deterministic science, extraordinary, amazing and then there is observational science, which is the science of place developed over tens of thousands of years by indigenous people. The difference between those two essentially is that in Western science, if you cannot repeat an experiment, it is not true. In observational science, you know that in nature nothing repeats itself ever, not even one oak leaf, repeat is the same as another oak leaf.

There are different ways of looking at the same world and they are both valuable. No question about it. For me, writing the last book, "Regeneration" , there are 7262 citations in the book, but really, facts do not change our minds. They are interesting, they are fascinating, things you can throw out, but actually what changes our minds and our hearts are narratives and stories. That has been true for thousands of years.

Yes, absolutely. I mean the intellect is profound, but it is just where we can get separated by our intellect. As if our body is designed to hold up our cranium instead of seeing ourselves as an entity, as an organism. The intellect in the way we teach very much individuates us. It separates us. It makes us think we are an individual and that is just not true. The only place where there are individuals is comic books and westerns. It is just an illusion, and we are inseparable from each other and from everything that surrounds us. The western education definitely emphasizes our differences, our separation and our disconnectedness. What happens out of that is, we tend to move to languages that we call “othering” language. Nature is other and other genders, other sexualities, other races, other ethnicities, other religions, other, you name it are definitely other. That is not me, and therefore, I can sit back and judge it, and discriminate against it or believe that I am better than that or better than that person or what that person does is ignorant and I am not ignorant, and all that sort of dissolution of community and dissolution of connectedness really comes with our education in the West. We do not think about it. It is not what we want, it just happens.

I think that what is being called for right now, the climate crisis, as it is called; this climate emergency. This is actually to look at it as a teaching, as an offering. In other words, we are being taught this is a lesson. Who is the teacher? A mom called Earth. Call it what you want, but this is feedback from this beautifully complex, extraordinary system we call this planet. If any system ignores feedback, it perishes. The feedback here is not to the living world, it is from the living world to what we call civilization.

What is at risk here is not the climate, it is not weather. It is us. It is civilization and therefore it goes right back to who we are, our values, how we think, how we are disconnected and how we disconnected ourselves from nature, from the living world, and how we have even disconnected it from itself; by the way we farm, the way we treat land, treat the oceans, how we treat the pollinators, how we treat animals, how we treat all the different aspects and expression of life on earth. We keep slicing and dicing them into bits and parts and pieces and thinking that we can take whatever we want.

India was a subject of colonialism. Colonialism from the European powers was 500 years, once they got their ships going and figured out to stay afloat for a long time, starting in the early or late 15th century, it was really about exploring the rest of the world as if it was you could just take whatever you wanted. That was the European mindset, whether it is the Dutch, or the French, or the English, whether it was the Portuguese or the Spanish and so forth. It was just an expedition. It was all about extracting, taking people, taking culture, taking resources, taking anything, it wanted and thought it had the right to do so. We are living in basically the wake of that world and we are still doing it because all our industry, all our companies, all our products, the things that you and I buy with respect are actually extracted just the way the European colonial powers were. We are still colonising the world in the sense of seeing it as separate and then taking what we want. Every business does that, whether it knows it or not. So, regeneration is simply a way of putting another lens on, looking at the world differently and saying, can we imagine a world where we have commerce, which I think is a very sacred activity between people, that is why I call it the ecology of business and did not say the ecology of capitalism. Can we have a commerce which we used to have at one time in many indigenous cultures, where the action of fulfilling our needs actually creates more life instead of less? That is really a 180, it is a pivot, but we know we can do that and we are doing it in certain areas, and we know people have done it for tens of thousands of years here. Human beings as our Diné teacher Lyla June said recently, from a Diné point of view, human beings are a beautiful expression of the Earth, and not something that landed on Earth.

Even our religious teachings really say the same thing, if we really parse the language and so forth. But we do not feel that, we do not feel like we are a beautiful expression, because we do not even have a sense of what the Earth is, even though Earth means dirt and soil. We call it Earth; we don't call it water. There is this wonderful opportunity that is really calling forth, calling to us from our sense of threat, which is valid given the science. I am not in any way saying that is not true, and our fear and our urgency about what we must do to stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and bring them back home. But there is a really sweet lesson here, a sweet teaching, as I say to people, this is not an apocalypse, it is a teaching, it is feedback. It is only an apocalypse if we do not go to school and this whole world is our school.

Yeah, it is so interesting about Mahatma Gandhi, because there is a connection between America, Gandhi and India that is not so well understood, which is that Henry David Thoreau wrote, obviously on Walden Pond, but he was arrested once and he was arrested because he would not pay his poll tax. It was pretty expensive, that was to vote. You had to pay money to vote. He thought that was wrong, because it discriminated against the poor. Basically, in that time, African American people who could not have had $0.25 to vote, that was a lot of money. He refused and then he was arrested and placed in jail. His sister, Sophie came and brought him some hot chocolate and she stayed overnight and he was let out. It was not so rigorous, but he wrote an essay about that and that essay became very famous actually. But after he died, I think it was 1842, I could be wrong about the date stamps. Four years later a book was published with his essay, and it was renamed and was called "Uncivil Disobedience." No one knows to this day where that name came from because it is not in his journals. It is not in the essay. He never spoke those words.

When Mahatma Gandhi was in Durban in South Africa, a new barrister, skinny and young, the Black Act was passed, which required Indians and people of colour to register under the Black Act. But, then the Muslims and the Hindus got together, to meet about that. There were both presences in South Africa and the only place they would allow them to meet and get together was actually a theatre owned by a Jewish person, who knew something about being discriminated against. They voted to defy The Black Act, to defy it and get arrested. Gandhi went home, and he journaled. He was afraid, because he knew if he got arrested, he would lose his licence. He just got it and his family was so proud; my son is a barrister in South Africa. That week, somebody at the Durban Times went there or handed him the essay, Uncivil Disobedience and he read it, what he read was that when there is injustice, basically, then the just man is in jail. Up until that point, being arrested was ignominy, it was shameful. If you got arrested, your career was over, your respect from a community was over. It was a big deal and what David Thoreau said, no, it is an honourable thing to do in a case of injustice and Gandhi got arrested. When he was arrested, he held up the essay, as he was going to jail and when the government is unjust, the just person goes. It was interesting because it is so connected to satyagraha, which was an Indian tradition, very silently but being present to injustice and witnessing it, sometimes by just sitting in front of somebody's house, not saying anything, but why are you sitting there? There is a reason. It was such a beautiful melding of those two different extraordinary human beings, Thoreau and Gandhi.

So much richer. When Martin Luther King was hired, brought in from Atlanta for the Montgomery bus boycott, which began, he was brought in as the pastor of a church there to lead the boycott. He had not been there but a few months. He was at church when he heard that the front porch of his house had been dynamited and his wife and children were there. Nobody was hurt, but he was mad. He was a father. He was furious. He was outraged. That could have killed Coretta and his son. It is interesting because then as he began to be better known, people began to visit him from other civil rights leaders, Bayard Rustin, and others who came down to Montgomery from New York and the Northeast to visit this amazing, outstanding, eloquent Martin Luther King. When they got into his living room, I think it was Bayard Rustin sat down on a couch or something. He got on the cushion and it was a gun. Then somebody else said and there was another gun. There were guns there. It was at that moment when they asked him, they said, "Have you heard of Mahatma Gandhi?" He had not heard of Gandhi at that point and the principles of non-violence. That just was not in Martin Luther King's DNA. Certainly, biblically, it is in a sense, but not when somebody tries to kill your family. He wanted to defend himself and it was another Methodist preacher from Texas that gave him Gandhi's autobiography, and he read it. People said that he read it on the spot. It was fairly significant and that next Sunday, everybody could tell something had shifted in his rhetoric and his understanding and that became really the core of Martin Luther King that I think the world got to know, because it was still formative at that time. Gandhi had a huge influence on that pivot away from the right to defend yourself with a gun. Of course, you have a right, but then what?

Well, I was just a fly on the wall. I was the press coordinator for the march to Montgomery registering the press that came in. Once it became a national international story, then press came in from all over the world and my job was simply to register them, that was all. It was actually to keep track too, because people were being killed, and there were some practical reasons to do that. I just had the occasion of listening to him, watching him in a couple of meetings, but also in the Brown church in Selma, which became the centre of the whole march to Montgomery movement. I was there in the church and I got to listen to him preach extemporaneously, just completely capture that whole church. There were quite a few people who came there and it was almost like every afternoon, evening and night, there was preaching and singing.

For me, what I remember most about it is probably something that you might not associate with, because you think of a movement and the march, the extraordinary heroism and bravery of the children and the teenagers who first started this thing. The march to Montgomery was started by teenagers, not by anybody else, but what really impressed me was the community. Here was a population in Selma, who had been treated so badly for so long since slavery began in the United States. But in that AME Church, there was a sense of connectedness in the community. the choir, they could sing like nobody's business. These are the choirs that created Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin and so many amazing black men and women singers in our culture. Just four weeks earlier, one of the deacons had been killed by the Alabama state troopers just up the street in a cafe for no reason, unarmed and his mom was there in grief. There was joy, grief, weeping and singing. I was like this white kid from Berkeley, California, looking at this and going, I have never experienced community before, that is what I learned. I was like, Wow! It was so beautiful. It carried forth in my life in ways that were a little odd, which in the sense, I realised later to this day that all life is community, all life is organised in community from a single cell, which is the only place life does exist. It is in this cell. There is no other life outside of a cell, but the cell has a trillion molecules and it is a very, very complex community. Then cells get together and form communities of cells and we call them organisms.

For me, to see human beings organised in this beautiful way was indelible. It made such an indelible impression upon me and I think about the climate movement, the different environmental movements, ecological movements, social justice movements and so forth, but most of them on the ecological, environmental, I really do not know how to organise as a community. They know how to protest, they know how to march, they know how to try to change policy. They do amazing things, but not in the sense of community that can share grief and joy. They can sing, move and preach and really feel all like they are one body, in a way that is just spectacular. I think it happens in India in other ways, in Hindu ways, in chanting and celebration, but in the United States, I never experienced that before.

Well, that is what community, I think is. It is like the subordination of the separate sense of self in the individuated way and that it is transcendent. I think actually everybody wants it. I do not think it is like some people want and some people do not. I think we all do. We all hunger for that. We long for it. In many ways in the culture today, we look for it, but we find it in all the wrong places, if you will. It does not have depth and breadth and it is not sacred, but whether it is Coachella or big rock concerts and things like that; part of that is the same.

You used the word balanced. I think that one of the things that we should really acknowledge is how extraordinarily imbalanced all of civilization is right now. We are so good and clever at creating comfort, creating extraordinary technologies in terms of communication, access, travel, knowledge that tends to be focused on the achievements of that or literally the richness or the riches and so forth. That is where we get focused on in our media and different forms of our media, who we idolise, who we look up to, who we think merits our attention and all that sort. So, I think when we talk about balance, we should really step back a little bit and look at who we are and where we are now. I would say that first of all, just factually, half of the Earth has been destroyed in the last 200 years. It is gone. The biomass, the creatures, the life, it is gone. Most of it in the last 50. It is almost exponential and that is still happening right now. So, the people are just blind to it. Whether it is oceans, whether it is our grasslands, whether it is our forests, whether it is pollinators, whether it is wild mammals, not the ones we put in CAFOs; cattle and cows. You name it, and we do not have about half of it or less now than we did 200 years ago.

We are the only organism out of 8.7 billion organisms or different species on Earth, who is actually making the earth unlivable. Partly, we have done that because we have identified so strongly as something, whether it is a culture, tribe, race or you name it and that identification basically then becomes the basis for defence, which becomes offence, which becomes separation, which becomes war, which becomes so many different things. You see that so clearly around the world right now.

What is happening now is that our actions, the way we think, the way we produce our services and our goods and the things that are almost universally wanted by people on Earth today is destroying our home. We are eating our home. One of the manifestations of that is global warming. People can say, well, I do not care if the globe gets warmer. That is true and neither does the globe. What changes is that combination, that dynamic between warm air and warm water creates a real change in the jet streams, which bring cold and heat, and they're in the south and they're in the north, there are these waves of rivers, of wind, and they carry water, clouds or cold and heat. What we are experiencing is kind of whiplash because of the dynamic between more heat and so forth. So, it is changing the vibration of the earth in that sense. The jet streams cause drought, wildfire, floods, heat, overheating and cold. It all is perfectly described by meteorology and physics. They know exactly what is going on and it is coming from our behaviour.

I want to go back, which is basically what the Earth is saying, not in English, but it is saying, do you want to live here or do you want to destroy 'here'? Because, the climate is perfect. It cannot be anything but perfect at all times. It does not care what we think or our science is perfect. The problem is we are used to climatic stability at a level that has created the Holocene, created everything that we want and many things we do not want. But of course, many things we want in a material sense and that is changing, and we have done it. Our focus is going to come back to who we are, those innate values and how we have disconnected from core values of being a human being. I am not saying people do not have them. They do. Of course, almost everybody does, excepting that the busyness, the pressures, the stress, the demands of our lives around the world have pushed them aside. They are suppressed and so when somebody like your father bows and touches his forehead to the feet of a monk, what he is doing or she is doing in that sense is remembering…where we are recalling. So, we know we have a job as a teacher or a police person or venture capitalist or whatever, but we are reminding ourselves, Muslims do it five times a day. That is to remind themselves of something. It does not matter what the name is, what matters is that you are paying attention.

The tumult, the threats, the disasters, the cyclonic disturbances, and the social disturbances and the social unrest and so forth, are all messages. We are getting messages. We are getting this communication and what I feel and sense is that we are inchoate and discordant. These are kind words for the socio-political systems that are arising in the earth today. But what is going to happen is that weather is going to trump it all. It is locked in and it is going to get more extreme, more volatile, more unstable, and frankly, there is going to be more suffering, which I would not wish upon anyone. But that is now locked in to what we have done over the last 100 years in terms of greenhouse gases and the way those are continuing to be emitted into the atmosphere.

As I said, this is feedback. I feel like what is going to happen is that people are going to wake up and realise that their pursuit of their thinking, their political beliefs or what they think is true and not true, their conspiracy theories or all their guns are meaningless in the face of something that is far greater, and that is this Earth. It is almost like they are shaking off the bad passengers. I mean, just like a horse will shake off horse flies. It's solely Earth and that is what is happening. I feel like what we saw last year in 2022 are extraordinarily climatic events: superheating in London and Paris, then a week later both cities flooded. That whiplash of jet streams and the Po River drying up in Italy, it never dried up in any memory in any history of any Italian going back for thousands of years, so is the Yangtze River. We had so many events and so forth. What is happening is that global warming has been a concept for most people. They read about it, they agree, they hear about it. They may notice something and so forth, but it is a concept. It is simply a concept in people's minds. They go about leading their life as if it was the same as always.

What happened in 2022, is it became experiential, either directly or vicariously. That is what is going to happen on Earth over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years, is that it is going to become experiential and at a certain point, you wake up and you realise that whatever illusion or delusions you have about self and other about place and about security are actually beggared by the forest and the impact that is happening on Earth today. To me, that is what brings people together. It brings people together. We think that they are going to go get guns and hide away in Idaho. Maybe they will. I hope they stay there. But really, what happens in that situation, just like the Memorial Church in Selma, Alabama, when you are being attacked and people are being killed and forces are arrayed against you, you come together. I feel like the Earth is going to create a community that is going to devote and dedicate itself to realisation that the only reason we are here right now is to restore life on Earth. If we are not here to do that, then why are we here? It does not take away from discovery and science. Science right now is exploding in so many extraordinary ways. But we are going to realise that if we are not restoring life on Earth, then we kind of do not get the message, because that is what the Earth is asking for and that is the only way we can bring back a sense of meaningfulness to our civilization. Because right now, with all due respect, it is careening out of control.

If you have it, you are welcome to read it. It is interesting. It was 15 minutes and then later I looked at it and I may have changed a couple of words, but actually I was shocked and surprised that it just held up.

Yeah. I spoke yesterday at a class of graduate students, and what I said to them is regeneration is a lens. It is a lens to look at the world. There are many other lenses, of course. In this area, generally, there is a sustainability lens. There is something sustainable and all that sort of stuff. Then there is the climate lens. Climate change and tackling and fighting it, decarbonization and all that language around that, which I call carbon tunnel syndrome, because it is so siloed, not to diminish its importance. It is crucial, of course, but it tends to be siloed and then there is the regenerative lens, and what you read is really the regenerative lens. Each of them is fine. I am not saying, one is better, so much as I am saying, is that the regenerative lens has bigger arms. It includes everything, it does not exclude. It does not try to, sharp elbows and make room for it. It is really just a suggestion of how to look at the world and see the world. We know that when whatever the cause is, it could be a teacher, it could be an experience, it could be even a book, or something, but when that shifts and when we have that shift in our life; it is called growing up, where a childish way of understanding and seeing the world is discarded or put away and replaced by a different way of understanding self in relationship to the world.

The religious awakening or the spiritual awakening, is such a shift. You really do not go back from it. Once you see it that way, you cannot unsee, because it is in your heart, it is in your body, it is in your cells, it is in the part of the body that we do not have a description in English anyway. We do not have good nouns for it, in terms of soul and spirit. But, I think that that regeneration is the lens that allows us to see the future as being more instead of less. Because if you really look at the language around the environment, biodiversity, climate and all the areas where there is so much good work going on, no question about it. I am not being patronising here when I say that extraordinary work is being undertaken by people all over the world, every country. But if you look at that and then say, well, what is the common denominator really in all that? The common denominator is that humanity is trying to regenerate and restore life on Earth. That is what we are trying to do, so we can call it social justice. We can call it decarbonisation. We can call it, basically, setting aside 30% of the Earth by 2030, for wilderness and so forth. We call it rewilding. There are a whole bunch of things we can do, regenerative agriculture. There are so many things that are aspects of that. But once you start seeing it that way, it opens up possibilities.

I was at University of California, Santa Barbara, not so long ago and just before I went on stage, I was speaking to 900 people and embarrassingly, but it is true, I do not know what I am going to say before I go on stage. I do not have any notes or anything and it is an interesting moment of truth? But I am trying to speak to the audience, and I cannot speak to it unless I am being listened to, feeling it, as opposed to coming in with a preset set of notes. When I walk onto the stage, I had been told earlier that 70% of the students were anxious, worried, depressed, had mental health issues, and 40% of them were considering not to have a family with children, not going to bring children into this world. It is all about climate 70%. What I said is this is what I am told about you. This is what you are feeling. I said, I am not worried about you at all. I am worried about the other 30%. You got it right. You absolutely have it right and your challenge, as it is for all of us, is to take that stress, it is stressful. Coming to Earth now and see where we are at and to metamorphose and to transmute that into action. You have a great science school here and what you have been told is that you are being regaled with the probability of what is going to happen, where and when and how because of human activity. Fair enough. But what you are not being told are the possibilities, because every problem that you are getting to understand is a solution in disguise.

So, what regeneration does is open up the sense of possibility of what we can be, who we can be and talk about dignity and having meaning because the number one cause of depression in the world today is lack of relevance, lack of meaning. You are irrelevant. It is not difficult to feel that in a world of 8.1 billion people to feel like you just do not even matter. Again, what regeneration offers in its specificity and in its different expressions is the agency. The thing that we forgot when we looked at these big conferences or the parties or the US Congress or the EU or other, big bodies of governance and so forth, we see repeated failures, repeated corruption, repeated politicization of what are really human, humane and human issues and so forth. We get depressed, we get like, "Oh my God, we are screwed." What we have forgotten is agency and the thing about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King is that before they were the Gandhi and the King that we knew and know of and revere, they were just one single person and all change starts, all agency starts with one person. It does not mean one person can change the world. It does not mean every person is going to be a King or a Gandhi. Certainly not. That is so rare. We know that because disease starts with one cell in the human body and it cannot start anyplace else. The power of what we think small, is extraordinary and agency arises when you have that clarity.

With Gandhi, I do not know what that point was. I do not think necessarily when he got the Henry David Thoreau essay. But, there was that point. I read his autobiography and I am sure you have too. He described it more as a panorama, but same with King. What was that point in his life? Childhood, adolescence as an adult at school? I do not know. But something shifted and really what the world is calling us to do is making available that point in time for us. This is why I am here. It puts everything into perspective. Do I want to make millions of dollars? No, I do not want to waste my life. I want to really enjoy my life and I cannot enjoy my life unless my life is absolutely connected to all other life.

You cannot beat that. It is so extraordinary. It is so beautiful!

Yeah. Each person's pattern, each person's template, each person's path is different. I would not even begin to imagine or presume I knew it was for anyone else. But I think the commonality of possibility is simply the realization that one's life and that of all other life is inseparable as opposed to distinct. If you act that way, then and I think the teachings of Yogananda and many spiritual teachers will say, you will suffer. It is suffering, it does not matter. That is why you see people getting bigger and bigger, $400 million yachts and this and that. There is nothing that they can get that is ever going to satisfy that need. Some people have resources to keep expanding on a material level and it just does not work. So many other people then imitate that and try to do it in their own lives and so forth and that is the extractive world we have. Extraction takes many forms. The most extractive industry in America is Google. They are taking every scrap and bit of information they can from you no matter what you do on Google and then sell it so that somebody can basically entice you to consume it more.

When we look at extractive industries, it is not just oil and gas. It is the whole social media world. All social media is extracted Meta, Google, I could go on. When you say extractive, people sometimes think, like a mine. Well, that is extractive for sure, but it so permeates our lives, in our relationships, how we speak, and even in our relationships, there is a part of us that always is looking to get. I think Seth Godin or someone said that, "Sorry to tell you, but everybody is a salesperson now because of the media and what you have to do." What does a salesperson do? He is trying to get something, right? That is very apparent. We are really honoured to this day, we just fall over backwards, people like Bryan Stevenson and others who do the opposite, frankly, and live on behalf to give for others, whether it is people or whether it is places.

Again, to formulaic extractor versus regenerative is actually, regeneration to me is about coming home and every cell is regenerating right now and every living being, that is what cells do. They are constantly regenerating every nanosecond; they do not stop. They do not go to sleep, but at the same time, if we look at who we are, to me, regeneration is about coming home. It is not a concept. It is about who we are. It is the default mode of life.

There are two examples I want to share; one is just the fact that when we care, what does that mean? The thing is that human beings universally care. It does not matter what they are or what they do and they may not seem so, but they care. They care about their children, their family, their friends. They care about where they live. They care about their church, synagogue or temple. They care about their pets. Anytime we care, what does care mean? It means we care about the life of something. We want it to have life, to give it more life, to endure, ensure as a life. That is one thing. But there is also a beautiful example, way in another modality, which is Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell in the UK, who inherited a 3500-acre farm in Sussex and a castle with it. He was a baronet and they inherited it surprisingly. He skipped a generation or something and all of a sudden, they found themselves with a farm that was losing money and they tried to improve the agricultural systems and spend money and this and that, and lost more and more money. So, they met an ecologist from the Netherlands, who was rewilding, that is just turning land back into wilding, but his technique was so interesting. The technique that they used on the Knepp Estate, which is what it is called, and she has written a beautiful book called, "Wilding" by Isabella Tree I highly recommend it.

What they did is, they took out all the fences inside and they got rid of all the equipment. They ring fenced it, and they brought in three animals, the Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies and Longhorn cattle, and these three animals were the animals that basically were the closest relatives to the animals that roamed Europe and the UK thousands of years ago. The auroch is the Longhorn cattle today and they did nothing. They just let them go. 20 years later, 3 years ago, the first nesting stork occurred on their property since 1414. A white stork with a nest, which is in fairy tales and the stork bringing the baby. We have it as a creature that definitely is in our stories and tales, just that there was none there for 600 years. This year there are 20 nests. They have more red listed species on their farm than all of the UK conservation areas put together and more. Where did these creatures come from? The pigs. This is a farm made huge, almost lakes, ponds, big ponds. They made them. There are mussels at the bottom of these ponds. Where did the mussels come from? They are inland. They now dive for the mussels. They feed themselves. It is just extraordinary what has happened at the Knepp Estate. People come from all over the world now to go look at it and see it, to tour it. It just proves that regeneration is the default mode. You get out of the way in this case, right? And we have to get out of our own way. Our beliefs, what we have been told, what we have been taught, what we think is true and not true, and so forth. Regeneration is an ethos, too.

Absolutely. I have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow, so much less beyond that. But really, I explained that I write to learn, and so for me, I am just as much a part of the learning process as is everybody else. There is no difference at all. I do love to share what I am learning as I go and many people seemingly enjoy it, too. If that is a way that I can express my agency by how I can connect, then I feel so grateful. How lucky am I? How fortunate am I? But it really boils down in its simplicity. I was an altar boy in a Catholic Church. I held out the wafers in this little tray for the priest to put into people's mouths, as a sacrament in the Catholic Church, flesh of God and Jesus. For me, that gesture, which I was taught, of course, as a young boy, is the same gesture that I think all of us really feel comfortable with? Can I help be helpful? That is where we feel our truest self, in that sense and many people do not have that opportunity. They need the help and maybe there are not enough of us, who are holding out our hands and offering. But each has to do it in his own way or her own way in a way that makes sense.

What I love seeing right in the world is the objects of and the victims of colonialism rising back up worldwide and reclaiming their culture, reclaiming their voice and speaking truth to power about what has happened and what is happening, and to see all these new voices that actually express ancient understanding and wisdom and wisdom holders and traditions; to me is just one of the joyous things that is happening right now. That is what I mean about when the weather changes, when things get more inclined, rocky, disruptive and distressing, it actually brings something out into the world and it is happening. There is no question in my mind that it is.

Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote a book called, "Sweetgrass." She is a native American and she tells the story of a scientist, a botanist, going into a tropical forest and hires a young lad who lives there. I think it is India, as a matter of fact as I remember, but I could be incorrect, but it does not matter. It is a tropical forest. The young lad basically just points to everything and identifies it, the name, what it does, the usefulness of it, in terms of people and medicine, it could be food, it can be fibre, it could be this, it could be that. The botanist at one point just says, this is incredible how much you know, you know the name of every plant and what it does and the young lad, in the Robin Wall Kimmerer story acknowledges the compliment, but looks a little sad and he says, "Yeah, I do know the names but I haven't yet learned the songs." Such a beautiful story.

Everybody, every culture and tribe sang. They sang to the living world. They had songs. There is a tribe in Nova Scotia called the Mi'kmaqs. In October around the full moon, they would listen to a mother tree, a big tree, and they would listen to the wind sopping through the pines and firs and it would make a certain sound. They would name the tree for that sound. That sound was particular to that tree and then they named it. They did not write it down. They just remembered the name. We do not have a capacity in the English language to do so with our 3 million words. We cannot name a sound. We can describe a sound, but we cannot name it in a particular way. Like you have a particular name, I have a name, and they could come back five, ten years later and they remembered the name of the tree in October in the full moon and they would listen to the wind sopping through the tree and they could detect whether the name of the tree and the sound they were hearing were the same or different. If it is different, that means something had happened to the tree and it was suffering.

That intimacy, that capacity of imagining the words for a sound, remembering it and just saying that is the tree's name, there is so much out there that is begging people to enter into this world. It is so different from Disney.

Yeah. It is a joy to be with you. If you send me your address, I will send you the latest book when it is finished.

Well, yeah. I would love to talk about it when it comes out. It is in 24, so it will not be right away, but I would love to come back and talk to you about it after you have read everything and we can have a good time with that one. It is called, "The Book of Carbon: A Love Story." It is really about falling in love.

I think it is Heraclitus that said, "Love is knowledge."

It redefines knowing and love both. Love is knowledge, wait a minute. Knowledge is from books and teaching.

Lovely to meet you, Hitendra. Thank you so much.