center you have individuals who have devoted their lives to expressing the possibility in a potential that we have to make this a better world and so i would ask you to join me and he spoke about the month of june but in his words we see reflected in the beauty of nature and in his words we get a feeling for the euro thing that we have to be close to nature and the sex that we have that would break our school a conference like this he wrote and what is so rare is a day in june then if ever come perfect day when it happen tries or it could be in tune and over  softly her warm air lays this poem by james russell lowe i think it's an appropriate touchstone for this setting today particularly the words about every cloud or every every piece of earth feels a store of might about the power that is in nature and in state within it that reaches and towers that when we connect to the natural world we get a sense of the beauty of life and of the power of life and of our own wonderful place in the scheme of things and all of the responsibility that we have to be able to achieve and add one minute that we really connect from the heart with this natural world that we overcome the a strange moment that we sometimes feel from the natural world based on interventions human interactions in the natural world and so this afternoon i want to talk to you about the good myriad of elements that are involved in in our quest to uphold the natural world to effect a reconnection with it to restore it and to find a way to make that  great cause of our life thomas very reflected on our responsibility to restore our relationship with nature we start understanding that there are certain  preconditions for life on this planet and in those preconditions we understand our responsibility to look at the constituent elements that force their life on this planet and know that it is our stewardship which needs to be affected in first protecting the air because our relationship with the air determines whether or not we'll have the ability to survive in that our own lungs our pure our relationship with the air determines whether the lungs of mother earth will be able to survive the pollution that occurs our relationship with the air is such that we come into resonance with there are as significant elements in creation our relationship with the water and since we are made up of water is so essential when you consider what's happening in our world today with the diminishing supply of fresh water resources with the potential of conflict over water rights in the capital it's happened in many places where the attempt to privatized water resources with th school lation of water which comes through chemicals that find their way into water systems with the attempt to cause water to become a commodity on an international basis in my own state of ohio i've seen international efforts made to bring tankers into lake erie part of the chain of great lakes which represents the largest suppl water in the world to commodify this lot or take it out takers we are able to stop that working with activists in canada but we understood thank you but we understood that this had relevance not just for our area could have relevance for all of humanity because water is a precondition of life on the planet and it's a precondition of our own lives when we understand that this terra firma this land this mother earth that we speak of is a physical presence in our life and that we have to it's the place of reference it's a place where we stand it's a place where we work out our destiny we come to know how we have this responsibility to be stewards of this land g that human beings were supposed to subdue the earth others interpret it as saying we're to have dominion over the earth or control over the area when a closer inspection of the principles that we're behind that spiritual teaching relates to being a steward of the earth now there's there's a debate as to whether or not she seattle actually said this or not what i'm about to quote but if we know anything about chichi at all we could assume that he may have said it and that is that the earth doesn't belong to us we belong to the earth and this teaching is a profoundly spiritual teaching that prepares us for an understanding of what the appropriate relationship should be between ourselves and the europe to leave a light footprint to literally tread softly to understand that this earth present source where they have attack where we can work out our destiny but there is another way of thinking earth we're the ones who have the responsibility to question the technology that have entered the earth and we're the ones that have the obligation because our political systems become the and so we think about the preconditions for life the air the water the land but we also can't think of it in terms of our own selves there's a type of thinking that and that we have no claim to existence that should supersede that of any other creature who is part of life in and in effect that we're all in this together and so we're called upon to in a world where there's conflicting ideologies about what our purpose is on this planet we're called upon to make conscious decisions every day about what kind of world do we want and the fact of the matter is that if you start with our individual selves when we are aware of the connection between what we think the connection between the consciousness that we have the connection between the working of spirit thro and the working of the spirit of the world with us we then come to an understanding of the critical necessity of linking thought word and deed that if we are to repair our relationship with the natural world we can't fake green and act in a different way we can't speak of grain and then do something different that the restoration and the maintenance of this world itself depends on integrity it depends on us having a real connection between what we face what we say and what we our mind at work in our community as well as in the universe are working through spirit and having our physical selves being present to be the active doers in the community to have our hands on every opportunity that we can to make this world a more gentle place and a more sustainable place we have a challenge though we have an economic system that is devoted to extraction we have an economic system that is devoted to destruction of the natural world we have an economic system where a few profit at the expense of the many we have an economic system which has which has been capable splitting the atom but in doing so no help to provoke what i would say would be a split consciousness of of us versus them a split consciousness of who we are versus the natural world it's a condition that the writer morris berman talked about over thirty years ago when he made a call for what he described as the  the necessity for us to move away from the current day shrinks which have visited in the wake of the industrial revolution and to move towards meeting with the natural world and in doing that we help to heal ourselves as well as help to heal the natural world because we are at a time in human history where the very meaning of what it is to be human is under attack that we're being told that only if we participate in the exploitation of our environment can we survive we're being told that only in four you split the atom and create nuclear power are we going to be able to survive we're being told that only if we go along with the experiment that is genetically modified organisms when we survive we're being told that only if we continue to use carbon based energy will we survive and i say now we might be told we are told that war is inevitable and when we fall into that type of thinking we are then locked into the south fulfilling prophecy of war you wonder why we never get out of war you wonder why government ploy in gender wars you wonder why war has such a hold on the world you wonder why the fog of war is something that people turn to first when they've been offended over there in a conflict you wonder what is it about the human condition that some would try to keep the yoke of war on the back of humanity and i tell you that we have the obligation to challenge this thinking which visits upon us not only poverty not only desperation not only a disconnection from our loved ones and our brothers and sisters around the world but which carries in its grass the ability to create eco side in the end of the species we must challenge war and we and when you come to understand that the call for human unity is the fundamental cause of our time that we are all one that we are interconnected and interdependent and that the type of thinking that would separate us needs to be set aside in favor of a more integrated approach in favor of an understanding of the power of holistic a holistic view of the world we can for own thoughts begin to transform the world we have to believe we have the capacity to do that we have to believe we have the capacity to indulge in what the philosopher thomas perry call that great work the great work of reconnecting with the natural world of healing the natural world of finding a way to restore the land to restore the water to restore the air there is such power in that kind of common unity thomas theory called it a communion that we are communion of of subject and that if we understand that we then have the ability of overriding the economic systems that would have us believe that we must only pursue one  we have an ability of challenging the political systems which are taught to speak to a certain inevitability when we know it it's not right and we have the ability of being able to foster the kind of unity which we yearn for we have the ability to give back where what has been taken away to be to be the healers of the break to be dosu who come to a resonance with nature the reconnection to the natural world is something that then enables us to truly champion sustainability now it's not government by the way that en itself it's going to save the planet i think that we have to understand the limitations of government i would say the government's inability to come to a full understanding of the challenges we meet or face frankly raises serious questions about the legitimacy of of a nation state if you can't come together to solve problems if you can't come together to here will be the environment if you can't come together to meet serve people's economic needs if the only reason we come together is for war then what is the supply hope we must be about more than that we must think about creating opportunity not just economic opportunity but coming into harmony with nature so that we can have an opportunity to thrive and to survive let's talk about what individuals can do it reconnecting with the natural world let's talk about what we can do that will move these institutions we know as government to a higher level of understanding of what's possible what we can do begins with something very simple and that is with our diet now there was a time when i had a pretty conventional diet may be too much quantity but meat potatoes  the crones disease that i was dealing with from the time i was a child suddenly began to dissipate but i changed my diet to a beacon diet and i started to see the symptoms the physical symptoms that i had started to disappear and then i went to slightly different kind of medicine i will ever respect around the path of medicine i began to use more alternative medicine of experience chinese herbal medicine and those two things gave me a path towards healing now no one could give that to me i had to take responsibility for my own diet and as i did that for health then i came to an understanding of what role i had in the dietary choices i was making what role that has in the planet i found out that for every for ever that for one pound a made it takes seven pounds of grain to make it i found out about all the water you need to that needs to be made to make that pound to be i found out about how a great contributor to our environmental crisis is the is the entire endeavor of livestock production you don't really know anything it was nothing i owned and thought about before i changed my diet but then i understood that my diet had some connection to sustainability understood my diet had an ability to change my relationship with the natural world and that my diet had the ability to show compassion to animals and that the diet world and reconnect us with better choices so that we respect the earth and have a more sustainable approach  my own journey as with many of you it's been about what we can do as individual consumers now throughout this green festival we see how many business people have been able to catch the rhythm of consumers demanding more environmentally responsible products and we got a chance to vote on that every day with the with the money that we have for the purchases we have and this is our power here this is what we can do to guide the market that actually trumps whatever government might do or might not do it it is up to us it is up it's up to us to make the choice of what i talk about reconnecting the natural world i talk about my own experience that i had here thirty years ago and loving the opportunity to to go through the good the trails in this area i think also about the opportunity i had at night to contemplate the stars you know if you if you if you go on to iran when they're at night where there's no light pollution you can see a magnitude of stars that may be eight point five or sixty ordinary experience but when you do that you get a real sense of humility about about how vast the universe is and what our place in it is and you get a you get a respect for nature and you get a profound connection with with with all that ever existed through time and you understand the responsibility we have to try to protect that experience for everyone who would come after us before i came here on stage i saw four month old child backstage lorraine i think her name yes and you realize the responsibility that we take as stewards of this planet to know that this isn't just about us this is about generations to come we're told that we should live in a way where seven generations to come would be protected that's why we're here which celebrate that ethic we celebrate a philosophy of commonality here we understand that we can do things individually but we also protect it we've been given a life that is so sacred and we need to make sure it's always replenished and we start we've been given an opportunity to commune with nature to get in touch with that great spirit that moves