so this book and my journey of reporting on climate disruption started back in one thousand nine hundred five that was the first time i went to alaska and laid eyes on an alley and it was love at first sight and it was like this tractor being started and pulled me she was like saying come on come on up and i just knew that was the place on the planet where i need to spend a lot of time and so a year later i moved up to alaska and started mountaineering and it wasn't about conquering peaks or any of that nonsense it was just about that was the place on the planet that for some reason i felt deeply drawn to be and spend as much time as i could and so accompanying that was an immediate lesson in climate disruption it was nine hundred ninety six and i was going out to early season ice climbing fests outside of encourage and the glacier that we were going to the mountains glacier was receding every year further and further quickly and so they'd have to move the parking lot closer to it the dirt you know expand the dirt road in further and then the long the walk would get longer again each year pools forming on the glacier or things like this going through christmases in anchorage with no snow on the ground dramatic temperature shifts so it was clear then even though i really had very little personal politics i was a long ways off from starting to work as a journalist and certainly wasn't studying climate disruption but it was clear as people in alaska know that with the arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet that something was amiss so i was actually working on dunalley i started just climbing it  individually and then working as a guide and then later working as a volunteer with the national park service and it was up on top of or on the heights of the nelly listening to the b b c world service in my tent at night during the iraq invasion in two thousand and three that something inside of me said you're going to need to go do something the regular activism in writing letters to senators and things like this is not getting the job done so i felt this pole to go over to iraq in just write about how the iraqi people were being impacted and so i was younger and crazier and so i just sit myself into iraq bought a laptop and a camera and i started reporting from the streets and not too long after that found myself in fallujah and all the sudden i was working as a journalist and i followed that thread because it came to me from being really really tied into a place on the planet that was really really special to me i see that today and what i found though over there obviously was horrific and it was far far worse than what most people here at the time at least understood was happening i was reporting on atrocities being carried out by the u s military war crimes mad dog who was formally the cool head or the grown up in the room of this so called administration watching him singlehandedly order war crime after war crimes being carried out in  course with the comfort of some time between those events and now most of this is common knowledge and accepted in mainstream society here but what's been disturbing to me especially working on this book which i use the same model is my iraq reporting i sit myself out into the frontlines where climate disruption is the most obvious happening the most dramatically the fastest and in places that a lot of the places i went to the life that i went there to write about literally will not be there within ten years and i wanted to go there to really bring these places to people since so many people won't get a chance to go to the amazon or the great barrier reef or a lot of these glaciers that are vanishing before our eyes and really give people a visceral experience of of what is to these places and so  i came into the book thinking that i write this monthly climate dispatch for truthout and it's essentially a heavily scientific base survey of the last thirty days of really deeply  disturbing scientific studies that are being published showing how fast things are accelerating and and i came into this book thinking yeah it'll be mostly seventy five percent science and that kind of thing because i was really angry and i was frustrated that people weren't really getting the magnitude of what's happening and especially getting how far along we already are and so like the sentiment behind many of those dispatches i was angry and i wanted to kind of shock people awake and but then i started working on the book which entailed having a much much deeper relationship with the planet and instead of this this idea in my head of it's going to be seventy five percent science and then maybe twenty five percent personal narrative in some nature writing it flipped self and i started writing the book and it became much more about look at this planet look at this planet really look at this planet where we are and look at what's happening to it and look at how fast it's happening and i started going out into these places and getting broken open over and over and over again which was exactly what happened to me in iraq going into these places and talking with these people and these families and these kids and watching what was happening and just getting broken open over and over and over again and that every chapter i wrote in this book that was the experience just like in iraq what happened and so my hope tonight is i want to take you to a couple of these places and do my best to bring at least a few moments of that experience to you and and because we are at a point now where we're literally in the six mass extinction we're losing over one hundred species a day around the planet and it's exhilarating and this is a topic as we heard in the introduction what bigger topic is there more important topic is there it affects all of us even the people denying it it affects all of us and it's going to intensify every day for the rest of our lives no matter what we do and we're in it and we're going into it together and my hope is that if we really let this information and and get a very accurate map of what's happening then we can come into it fully awake and understand the grieving that's going to have to happen and all the associated emotions in order to show up and go through that and then come out that i think a lot with a lot clearer eyes and a lot clearer heart and a lot more focused on what's really really important and what we're going to need to do together to go through this so like i mentioned the book provided me with a great privilege of going out to some of the most amazing places on the planet with incredible people who had dedicated their entire lives to studying them and i made it a point to go to places some of them i'd been to twenty years before and have long term relationships with and if i couldn't do that then to go to these places and be in a company scientists who'd been studying them for twenty twenty five thirty years one of them longer than i've been alive and talk with them about what they were seeing when they went out into these places so i thought given our geography and how reliant upon glaciers we are here in the pacific northwest i just live over in port towns and i thought i would start with taking us to glacier national park there's a man there named dr dan a scientist with the u s geological survey and he's a researcher ecologist and directs the climate change in mountain eco systems project there he's also importantly the lead investigator of the u s g s been smart glacier program and he's been working in the park since the one nine hundred ninety one in the benchmark glacier program is really important because glaciers really are a canary in the coal mine of climate disruption if you want to know what's happening and how fast it's happening just look at what's happening to the glaciers in the benchmark glacier program they take a specific glacier that's representative of the region where it's located there's one in glacier national park there's one in north cascades national park there's one up in alaska and there some others and they've been this program has been going on for over fifty years and they measure them every year in tabulate what's their maximum what's their minimum how much of they lost in this gives us a very very accurate real time  indicator of precisely what's happening with climate disruption and dr fay agree i met with him in his office the west part of the park he's very excited to talk about glaciers  and he had made international news that summer when i met with him because montana was undergoing experiencing record heat waves record wildfires and the day i met with him it was you know in the middle of one of these heat waves a couple of summers ago and so i'd like to read a brief section from my book i've been talking with him and he took me out for a little ride up going to the sun  highway up to logan pass this really stunning highway carved into a very sheer mountainside going up to the pass at about six thousand feet and so we get up to the top of the pass we've been talking all the way up in his cars taking notes and he was being kind enough to stop and let me get out and go off and take photos of the magnificent landscape and we get up to the top and we park and we walk up to an area where there used to be a glacier and so that's the setting for this conversation where he says talking about what's happening this is an explosion a nuclear explosion of geologic change he says he says this describing the impact of climate disruption while we looked out across the valley together this is unusual is incredibly rapid and exceeds the ability for normal adaptation we've shoved it into over drive and taken our hands off the wheel he takes me to stand in another area of slush the people who built the logan pass road had to deal with  glacier here right here he says pointing down tired feet now there is no glacier to underscore his point they agree tells me that this year they had one hundred thirty seven percent of the normal snow pack and two days earlier it was already below normal for the year for this time of year because of the heat we had a snow fall up here recently that needed to be plowed he says smiling and it melted before they could plow it i asked him if that kind of thing is what keeps him up at night he tells me these are non linear changes that aren't based on a simple proportional relationship between cause and effect they're usually abrupt unexpected and challenging to predict the aggregate of multiple non linear changes is enormous in orders of magnitude and that's what keeps stan fakhri worried at night he says after a pause to let all that sink in they were he goes on to explain that the earth has a resilient system that has been through much worse than what we've caused ice ages volcanism it's so many of these things will recover he says of the glaciers and forests that are vanishing before our eyes but not in the time frame that includes humans we return to the car and continue driving down the other side of the pass we roll down our windows and neither one of us talks for a while i know it's a sensitive topic to bring up with scientists and most of them avoided at all cost but i decided to ask him what   is like for him especially to watch the glaciers vanish before his eyes it's like being a battle hardened soldier he says but on a philosophical basis it's tough to watch the thing you study disappear i watch him drive for a couple of silent moments and i look out across the valley and listen to the waterfalls as they stream down toward the river far below us glacier national park around the time it was being considered to be made a national park there were one hundred fifty glaciers that covered roughly one hundred fifty square kilometers of area today they're down to twenty six glaciers and they cover less than twenty square kilometers of area the definition of a glacier changes depending on what region it's in in glacier national park it has to cover a certain amount of square kilometers and it has to move those are the two criteria by those criteria fakery he made headlines that summer when he announced that there will be no more glaciers in glacier national park by twenty thirty so that's less than eleven years from now he also i quote him in the book saying this and i cite the studies that back it up we are on a trajectory to have no more glaciers in the contiguous forty eight united states by twenty one hundred so if we think about there's two aspects of that that i want to cover one for us it's obvious here in the northwest it's easy with this audience we understand what glaciers mean for our ground water for drinking water and for irrigation for growing crops without glaciers much of that goes away i mean when twenty fifteen when jay inslee declared state wide drought on the fifteen of that year in the olympics we had six percent of our snow pack farmers on the peninsula were suffering there were water rationing in port townsend we had wildfires in the rain forest of western olympic national park so imagine if there's no glaciers what this  means bigger scale the hindu kush region of the himalaya another study came out recently it was actually an update on one that i had a previous study i had cited in the book this is a region where seven of asia's major rivers  their head waters because it's one of the largest ice sheets in the world outside of the poles and those that ice it current trajectory up to ninety nine percent of it will be gone by twenty one hundred and one point five billion people rely on those waters for drinking water and irrigation so extrapolate you have to think about it for about fifteen seconds where do those people go and then what happens to the areas where they go and where where does all that water and food come from so you can see where this is going it's i could talk the rest in the rest of the talk just talking about what it you know some of the human ramifications when we kind of extrapolate and play those scenarios out but another one that i think doesn't get talked about enough and i wasn't aware of it until i hung out with dr fakery and some of the s scientists i went out with on glaciers up in alaska it's the ecological impacts so some broad brushstrokes if you have a glacier in a valley that the streams coming out of that obviously are going to be c the temperature the ambient temperature of the valley is going to be kept down because of the glacier and there's going to be certain fish in the skin mosquitoes but in other insects in the runoff streams from those glaciers in as those glaciers go away then the fish insects that live in those streams are going to go away as are all the animals that rely upon the the ground water is going to change so certain trees that are there other kinds of vegetation and then everything living in those and everything dependent upon the things that are living in those all of that's going to change and much of it's going to go away so there's tremendous ecological impacts to all the other species as well when glaciers go away it's not just this thing that is going to affect humans and it's not just this is that thing oh there's no more beautiful glaciers on mt rainier to look at but but lots of other species are going to be gone the next place that i would like to take you is the amazon briefly i was really tremendously lucky to get to go there and some brief statistics many of you probably know some of this but just for context it's the last single largest rainforest on the planet it's two thirds the size of the contiguous united states the amazon basin it generates half of its own rainfall and contains twenty percent of the world's rivers the amazon river alone has eleven hundred tributaries seventeen of them longer than one thousand miles each there's thousands of species of trees two point five million species of insects thousands of species of birds and three thousand species of fish in the rio negra alone i spoke with one scientist who is part of an expedition twenty five scientists they went out for thirty days to a remote region of the amazon and in that one expedition alone they discovered more than eighty new species fish insects birds frogs  species is to this day being discovered in the amazon at least every two days the average is actually a little bit more than that so we know a lot about it we know enough about it to know how much we don't know about it so i was privileged to get to go there with dr thomas lovejoy he's also referred to often as the godfather of biodiversity he has been studying the amazon since  was head of the world wildlife fund for fourteen years he was a white house science council and his resume it would it would take you a little time to read his full resume he's a leading expert on bio diversity on the planet so we met up with dr lovejoy in the big city of about two and a half million people in the middle of the brazilian amazon piled into jeeps took a very long windy bumpy ride deep into the jungle and then we arrived at this little trail head and he hopped out grabbed his backpack and high tailed down this trail the rest of us get out you know kind of slowly stretch and grab our backpacks and started hiking down this trail and he's down there meeting us this steam scientists he was actually quite quiet and very very humble and he went down there quickly so that he could greet each one of us and shake our hand and look at our eye and think us for taking the time out of our busy schedules to visit his camp that's the kind of person he is and that's why he's dedicated his whole life to studying this area that he cares so much about so you get into the camp it's camp forty one it's the most famous of several other camps that are set up to study these different fragments of the rain forest and there's no walls over on one side of the camp there's a big tin roof with hammocks strong up and so you go grab your hammock they have mosquito netting over them and you know your backpack there and then in the other area there's some picnic tables in the kitchen and then over on the other side a camp is where the scientists are camped out in there they're ha s for anyone who hasn't been to the amazon it's in this was my first and only time to go there it was a really really remarkable experience i mean you can read about it and see photo books and documentaries but to go there was an entirely different experience i mean it was obvious to me from the first night that something was happening that it literally came into my dreams i started literally having dreams the first night about the jungle it was as though i could like feel myself being pulled into it some of the dreams really shook me up others were quite enlightening and then we would wake up in the mornings with the roar of troops  monkeys drifting through camp birdsong coming at first light and then getting to go out on these walks in the jungle with these experts learning about vines and trees and insects and then as the longer we stay there this group of us this kind of disparate group from around the world people from all kinds of different countries speaking different languages but even just after a couple of days we found ourselves acting like a family just really coming together sharing meals really curious about each other kind of stories feeding off each other and really coming together as a group and in the same experience with all these different scientists also from around the world and when i was there it was obvious like this is the jungle this is what it does it's just like pure lifeforce that was just like pulling us all into it and together you know all one thing and that was that was you know that's really the best way i can describe that experience and it was truly remarkable and so one of the scientists that i met there his name's he's from the czech republic and he had worked at the time and at least eleven different wildlife research positions around the globe and he was there currently getting his times literally working alongside dr lovejoy and he was very excited talking about that and talking about some of the things he was studying but i want to read a brief bit from one of our conversations once we started talking about the impacts of climate disruption and what he was seeing he assumes a somber tone when we talk about his research quote island biogeography is no longer an offshore enterprise it has come to the mainland it's everywhere the problems of animal and plant populations left marooned within various fragments under circumstances that are untenable for the long term has begun showing up all over the land surface of the planet the familiar questions arise how many mountain gorillas inhabit the forested slopes of the volcanoes along the shared boundaries of the democratic republic of the and rwanda how many tigers live in the tiger reserve north of northwestern india how many are left how long can they survive now there is anger in his voice how many grizzly bears occupy the north cascades eco system a discrete patch of mountain forest along the northern border of the state of washington not enough how many european brown bears are there in not enough and so on the world is broken into pieces now just before going to camp forty one as i mentioned we were in manassas and it was there i met another amazing scientist who also had been working with dr lovejoy for a long time and she of all the scientists that i interviewed for in the book definitely has the best name particularly given her study her name's dr she's a biologist and researcher with the largest research institute in the amazon and so she when she was in the now she worked there was a forest fragment right inside the city with nature paths through it and she would take people through it on educational walks very excited you know rattling off all kinds of districts about species and their habits and all these things and again kind of like the experience with the tech you know it was amazing this year very bubbly and excited and and just information just flowing out of her like a river but then after walking out and looking at the jungle and being educated buyer she took us into a back room and sat down and we had serious one on one interview and i'd like to read you part of that she explained why it's so important to take care of the amazon basin it is the  heart of the world she says all the major air flows come through here air travels all the way from europe and africa and conferred as as it enters the central amazon but she sees the world questioning conservation and jeopardizing all the victories that have been achieved in setting aside land i work hard for conservation she says but i lose sleep over wondering if i'm wasting my life am i wasting my life is this a lost cause i keep doing it because it's the only thing i know to do she says she doesn't believe she and her colleagues are doing their jobs with the urgency needed we're not telling the general public what is really going on she sa having co edited a book with love joy and authored many peer reviewed scientific papers the skeet is a force to be reckoned with but she personally feels inadequate when looking at the bigger picture it is clear to her that we are nowhere near where we need to be i have zero pride in all my papers because we are preaching to the converted she says what i want to do is talk to the outside world i want to be able to just talk to people and tell them what is actually happening we need to educate people about what is really going on with climate disruption like so many of the experts i've spoken with for this book mosquito believes the root cause of climate disruption is humanity's lack of connection to the planet even  here kids don't understand that they live in the amazon she says so there is no connection at all with anything and that is the problem there is sadness in her voice as she tells me this i made a personal decision to not have kids because i don't have a future to offer them i don't think we're going to win this battle i think we're really done the last thing before we leave the amazon is i need to mention i want to read a short bit from a conversation i had with d lovejoy the amazon and tropical rain forests around the world are already so degraded that instead of absorbing emissions they're now releasing more carbon annually than all of the traffic in the united states in tw amazon drought released as much c o two as the total annual emissions of russia and china combined there is one point five acres of rain forest lost every second at some point in the not so distant future the amazon will regularly emit more carbon then it absorbs yet another critical tipping point for earth so dr lovejoy like i said before he's very measured quiet stoic at times and he wouldn't talk a whole lot he chose his words bearing lee and there was only one time of all the days in there that we were together that i saw him really expressed strong emotion and i was sat down with him it was it was during this interview that i'm going to read you this page from and he had penned an op ed for the new york times a long time ago i mean it was i think almost twenty years ago warning that we needed to keep earth's temperature from not going above i think it was one c at the time we're at one point two now and he so he you know we were talking about that and i started talking about these other studies and projections talking about what happens when we go to to see three c four c and i think it was right around he slammed his her hand on the table and he said people have no idea what's going to happen when we hit to see their reasons other than moral concerns for protecting the amazon including self interest we go to the doctor in the pharmacy and we have no clue where our drugs came from lovejoy says more of that is from nature than we realize lovejoy mentions a poison found in the amazon that led to the project production of the pharmaceutical capped approval which in turn became one of the first ace inhibitors and is now used by hundreds of millions of people to control their blood pressure and heart conditions wines blood vessels making it easier for the heart to pump blood through them most of the people taking it have no idea that this drug responsible for their health is from the amazon he mentions another example of vine found by indigenous people there when they threw it in a lake all the fish came up to the surface gasping for air which made their fishing much easier the name of the substance that causes this is crew are a it is used today as a muscle relaxant during major abdominal surgeries his point is that if we continue to destroy the amazon at our current pace we may never know how it could help save millions or possibly billions of human lives in the future lovejoy believes that this is one of the least appreciated aspects of biodiversity the amazon is a gigantic library of the life sciences which is continually acquiring new volumes he says we are discovering new species of birds all the time and wrapped up in all of that is incredible adaptation capacity it's important to remember each species represents a set of can a set of solutions to a set of biological problems and any one of those can turn out to revolutionize how we understand biological science lovejoy pauses and gazes admiringly at the jungle surrounding the camp then turns back to me we are so stuck on ourselves we don't think we need any of it he says we think we are some godlike thing it's now far too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe two thousand and eighteen was the fourth warmest year ever recorded with the only warmer years being tw twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen we're currently in the middle of what is on track to be the warmest decade ever we are in the six mass extinction event that industrial civilization has caused were injecting c o two in the atmosphere at a rate ten times faster than what occurred during the permian mass extinction event two hundred fifty two million years ago that annihilated ninety percent of life on earth our current extinction rate is one thousand times faster than normal and is faster than that of the permian mass extinction but today similar to what i experience reporting from iraq people don't want to know how deep the truth goes the business as usual economic paradigm continues and there's nothing to indicate that this is going to change in the radical way necessary to even bring about some medication but the denialism is not just on the right it's not just fossil fueled on the left we have plenty of our own iterations last fall the i p c c the intergovernmental panel on climate change released a report saying we had twelve years to avert global climate catastrophe there was nothing new in that report and in fact last week a study came out by several universities showing that the i p c c consistently saw selve the crisis that's upon us this on top of us knowing for a long time in this coming from several i p c c authors i interviewed myself some of them are in this book who told me off record that it's heavily politicized it's lowest common denominator science i e it's not actually scientific process at all and by the time the assessments come out which is only every seven years much of that information in them  at least ten years old one i learned from one i p c c contributor recently who said that you can essentially take the i p c c as worst case projections and double them but people pretend like we have twelve years still then there is the new green deal again let's switch everything over within ten years that we can maintain some iteration of this economic paradigm jobs industry growth etc etc and let me interject and say i am not be i'm being critical of the sentiment behind these of the idea that there is still time i am not being disparaging that these things shouldn't happen like the new green deal anything is good and helpful at this time but i bring this up to just point out that the idea that we still have time or that we can still booted out of the white house that that's going to help with the climate crisis you know the fact that a lot of these projections go to twenty one hundred as though some horrific impacts are already already are not already upon us geo engineering there's going to be some techno fix you know there's there's been a lot of recent literature recently even saying that there are some of the authors are hopeful because there can be some sort of a g engineering fix to this geo engineering crisis which is specifically what it is all of these i think are various forms of denialism that are steeped in not really seeing clearly and honestly what's happening because none of these really take into account the fact that we are generally off the cliff in every one of them is an attempt to fix something that's not fixable already the oceans have absorbed ninety three percent of all the heat that humans have added to the atmosphere to date to give you an idea of how much energy that is if they had not done so our atmosphere temperature right now would be ninety seven degrees fahrenheit hotter we'd be well on our way to venus today's carbon dioxide levels at four hundred twelve parts per million c o two are already in accordance with what historically brought about a steady state temperature of seven c higher we're just waiting for the planet to catch up to the injury that's been done though sions are now literally overheating the oxygenating in acidifying insects are essential for the proper functioning of all of earth's eco systems as their food for other creatures pollinators and recyclers of nutrients without insects to put it simply humans can survive a recent series of studies informs us that at the current trajectory we're losing two point four percent of their biomass annually at the current trajectory assuming there is no acceleration that's a false assumption but let's just assume there is no excel aeration there will be no insects in one hundred years since just one nine hundred seventy sixty percent of all mammals fish birds and reptiles are gone what we call it if there had been a sixty percent reduction of the entire human population is worst case temperature scenario is four to five sea warming by twenty one hundred the international energy agency stated that preserving our current economic paradigm virtually guarantees a sixty rise in earth's average temperature before twenty fifty shell and b p analysts expect the globe to be as much as five c war five c warmer than it is now by the middle of the e during which time i connected all the dots and really understood how far off the precipice we already were and even then it was clear but today six years later after having pin that ar sober reading of all the latest climate change science indicates that we are now virtually in freefall we're in a nonlinear sytycd situation of climatic disruptions and their effects were locked into a course of uncontrollable levels of climate disruption bringing starvation destruction mass migration disease and war there can be no longer any question that life as we know it so this feeling in the room right now after hearing all of that what do we do with this how are we going to be going into this facing the real possibility of our own extinction i think one of the biggest privileges of writing this book is the people that it brought me in the contact with and one of them was a native american elder a cherokee medicine man named stan rush worth and he reminded me of a very important distinction that has at least up until today become a beacon of light for me and something that i hold onto when i am writing my dispatches or giving a talk and come into this feeling of hearing all of that extremely intense information and he pointed out how a very important distinction between rights and obligations that western colonialist mindset is that we have rights what are my rights but in indigenous thinking they believe that we are born on to the planet with two primary obligations one an obligation to serve in the good stewards of and take care of the planet excuse me the second obligation is to make all decisions with the greatest care in order to take care of future generations of all species so when i get up each day and look at what can be done i find s now in orienting myself what are my obligations and how can i best serve those how can i best carry those out so are we not morally a blockage now to do everything possible to serve and protect the earth no matter what no matter how bleak things appear no matter how intense challenging and difficult it's going to become checked dissident writer and states hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is were doing no matter how it turns out it is genuinely hard for me to see how humans make it through this we but we don't know nobody knows nobody can make any hard predictions on any of this but what we do know is that we are in a hospice situation with much of life on earth including possibly our own species yet like i said given that we've never been here we don't know for sure what is going to happen hence again no matter how bleak it might appear are we morally obliged to do everything that we can to be good stewards of the planet and to protect and serve and safeguard future generations of all species i believe that each one of us our own calling i'm not here to tell you what to do i think anyone who tries to tell you they think they know for sure what to do should probably not listen to them i think that each of our answers have to come from deep inside of ourselves i so one of the orienting facts for me that has helped me reaching this point in knowing what's happening to the situation it actually came from one of the stories that rushworth who i mentioned shared with me which is in the book and i want to read it it's about a page because i want to be very very specific and accurate about this it's an old story that was told to him by writer and storyteller in indigenous elder dr darrell babe wilson who was born into the river nation tribe of northeastern california wilson tells of nice a small but powerful spirit that inhabits aku yet what white people call me located in the southern end of the cascade range in north central california is a spirit force that balances the earth with the universe and the universe with the earth wilson says that i q yet is quote the most necessary of all the mountains upon earth for me keeps the earth the proper distance from the sun and keeps everything in its proper place when wonder and power stirred the universe with a giant yet invisible canoe paddle missed me sick keeps the earth from wandering away from the rest of the universe it maintains the proper seasons in the proper atmosphere for life to florida as earth  changes seasons on its journey around the sun the mountain the story tells us must be worshiped because me so me said wells deep within it to climb the mountain with a pure heart and with real resolve and to communicate with quote all of the light in all of the darkness of the universe is to place your spirit in a direct line from the songs of me to the heart of the universe while in this posture the spirit of man woman is in perfect balance  harmony for as long as me sneezes instructions are followed with sincerity society will be maintained its inhabitants will survive for the long term quote the most important of all of the lessons it is said is to be so quiet in your being that you constantly hear the soft singing of meese misa however the story also warns that by not listening to me some isas song the song will fade me so will depart and the earth and all of the societies upon earth will be out of balance and the life there in vulnerable to extinction i always wondered why a guy from houston texas who made his way up to alaska just to be in the mountains why i had always been drawn by the siren song up into these places and so i met stan at the very end of working on the manuscript of this book literally ten days before the deadline and he told me this story and then i knew i've always gone up into the mountains because that's where i go to listen to the earth and that's where i go to listen to me sneeze and before i conclude i'd like to read a prayer for the earth written by stan rushworth let us just see it simply enough to drink in spring's radiance the yellow scotch broom against green fields allow our eyes to reach into the morning like fingers into wet grass our tears falling into april's rain we've been too long away in the need is huge our desire unsteady in this time let the invisible wanting burst to the surface of our skin where we may know this world who holds us so dearly even in the middle of our blindness in the beginnings of our awakening let us life face down in her beauty feeling her with our gratitude she is waiting and so i want to conclude with leaving you with two questions where do you go to listen to me sneeze and when was the last time that you went there to listen thank you thank you very much for that there isn't a chef my name is jane i'm with town hall we're going to have about fifteen minutes to do a brief q and a session we have two microphones on the other side of the stage if you have a question feel free to come down and line up we do ask that you we are recording this evening and so between the recording and the audience if you can just make sure you're standing in front of my can speak clearly so everyone can hear your question we also ask that you keep your question short and concise if you have a statement if you can just make room for others who might have a question and if we have time at the end we can perhaps have you make a statement but just be aware that there might be lots of folks who have questions this evening and we only have about fifteen minutes  you how do you pronounce your first name dark star ok are you familiar with the work i am because that's what's inspired me the last couple of months he uses a different word  climate tragedy you know deep taishan a map for navigating climate tragedy and he says i mean i haven't read enough detail to know but i don't think what he says is very much different from what you have been saying that's right so jim bendel is doing very important work he's talking about he's written a paper called deep adaptation that i would highly recommend people download and read because he's talking about the inevitable collapse of western civilization and that rather than trying to fix what's happening or try to mitigate it both things you know can have some value he talks about adaptation to what is already baked into the system so i definitely would highly recommend reading that spectrum and show is that of having a choice between something is good and something that's bad or entering into an era where no matter where you are in the spectrum we're going to be making a choice between what's bad and what's worse and i'm concerned that we don't have the ethical or moral philosophy to deal with these issues and i wonder if this is a topic that you've thought about what you have to say about it and we have like ninety minutes left it's well i'll cut to the chase the best i can it's clear i mean this government of this country is agreed just in so far as how could you be having a worse response slash non response to the crisis but even in the better countries if you look at the scope of the crisis and what i shared with you today tonight how would governments look if they were actually responding accordingly you know it would be full scale alert let me just use a little micro example so in the sea level rise chapter of the book i interviewed dr harold wanless a leading expert at university of miami who again i'm just going to cut to the chase he basically said it appears as though we have one hundred thirty feet of sea level rise baked into the system right now so goodbye south florida not parts of it all of it so in his perspective any government any any lawmaker that's not ordering full scale evacuations the government's funding at the government's running in decommissioning the turkey point nuclear plant that's just south of miami at six feet elevation instead they're adding another reactor to it right now remediating toxic waste  relocating museums and archives and hospitals and millions and millions and millions of people in finding different places for them to live on higher ground further up into the country any any politician that's not pushing that is being criminally negligent and so any government any government that's not reacting that way to this overall crisis i think you could say the same thing so that brings us to again it's on us what are we going to do individually and what can we do in our own and individual communities and right now we do have some time here if you're in paradise california you don't know if you're in the panhandle of florida you don't but we still have some time here to start working towards adaptation so how am i going to adapt personally how can i am my own little immediate community start working to opt in then if i'm lucky get out into the city where i live i think that's where we're at and that's something that we can do and that's something that we have agency over in that we can all do literally right now and again because if i look at the bigger picture yeah you might as well just throw your hands up if it you know the student marches the student lo i have to pause every time i just say that because i cry because if that doesn't wake you up and have you thinking in cooking about what am i going to do if nothing else to support these kids then you know you need to go to the hospital and get you know something done with your heart because that that is true inspiration and you know these kids are fearlessly doing what they can to tell the truth and to force the issue so sorry for that tangent but i just want to i'm sure i didn't not bring that up tonight i understand about no hope and that but i have to keep working at it and i run citizens climate lobby in seattle and we have i partisan bill in the u s house to put a price on carbon and the dividends go directly back to the people and they and we can cut the carbon according to some our studies by forty percent in twelve years and do you think that's possible i don't care if it's possible but we have to try that's where i'm  just concerned what the right way to go but you know this i've been doing this for ten years i started with three groups we now have five hundred all over the united states canada and that is no good is not doing anything i mean i literally think you know and i think it's easy for people to get bogged down like well i'm not directly involved in you know something related to the climate or you know being a hardcore enough activists but it's easy to forget but whatever you do we need doctors we need gardeners we need we need people doing everything that they do and it all counts and i think the key is for me is you know what is my intention and how how is that taking care of these obligations that we were born into this world with so thanks for that