[woman vocalizing] [drumming] [cheering] Cindy Blackman Santana: Since I was a child, I sensed that music is a form of prayer, that all life on Earth is sacred, and that all life is connected.

And so I've asked myself, what does it mean to be human in the midst of 8 million species we have on this planet Earth?

What is this self we talk about?

What is our true role here?

Welcome to "Global Spirit."

I'm Cindy Blackman Santana.

And I'm Carlos Santana.

And in the end, this is about consciousness, our consciousness collectively in this planet, making this place a wonderful place to coexist.

Blackman Santana: In tonight's program, "Sacred Ecology," we'll meet people from East Oakland to the rainforests of Ecuador.

[woman vocalizing] Phil Cousineau: For many peoples, civilizations, and faiths, nature has been an important access point to the sacred.

And as we experience the wondrous spectrum of life forms that surround us here on Earth, perhaps the most urgent question of the 21st century is, how do we balance the biological needs of other species with our seemingly unending needs as humans?

How do we fit in?

Are we essentially all separate household masters of our own little plots of land, or are we part of a larger interdependent family?

To help us further these urgent questions, we've invited two deeply committed ecologists and scholars from different religious traditions to join us for what promises to be a most illuminating conversation.

Joanna Macy is an eco-philosopher, a scholar activist, and a practicing Buddhist whose work is rooted in general systems theory in the relatively new discipline of deep ecology.

Today she meets for the first time with Michael Tobias, a practicing Jain and author, ecologist, filmmaker, and passionate animal rights advocate.

Welcome to "Global Spirit's Sacred Ecology."

Joanna Macy, Michael Tobias, welcome to "Global Spirit."

Lovely to be here.

Thank you.

It's really a joy for us to have an opportunity to discuss such a wonderful topic like sacred ecology.

A few years ago, I interviewed the great anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, and she pointed out that ecology-- the word, the idea-- is not new.

We didn't invent it.

It goes all the way back to the Greek, and what it means is the study or the care of our home.

"Oikos," a great Greek word, and when I heard that, that changed the way that I looked at the earth.

Can we talk about that for a minute, the study of, the care of the earth as our home?

And particularly when we see it as alive, a living system, not a dead rock inert, not as the Industrial Growth Society would treat it as a supply house and a sewer for our waste, but a living body, then ecology helps us know that.

Ecology is about not finding the building blocks of stuff but seeing the weave of relationship.

And so it's beautiful to realize now that I-- I would say that ecology has become, instead of physics, the queen of the sciences.

Michael?

Yeah, there's no question about that.

I--I concur 100%.

If we can lend vitality, if we can give some sense of-- of sustainability to the health before us, that, too, is ecology, of course.

It's at the-- at the heart of what it's going to take to translate an ancient Greek word into a modern-day revisionist, practical, common sense, no-holds-barred, all-inclusive nurturance of this Earth.

It starts in the home, of course.

It starts in the heart, goes to the home, goes to the community, embraces the entire planet.

It is a system, as you just said, indeed.

So your words, uh, suggest that this is a basic need of the soul...

Absolutely.

...and, uh, also of-- an economy?

Of every--and every living creature I've ever--I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.

It's not just humans.

Ecology is every species, every individual.

According to our old friend, the religion historian Huston Smith, he said there was no culture that we've ever encountered that does not have a concept of the sacred, the holy.

And Huston has loosely defined it as having a connection with God or the gods, having a religious purpose, and having something in there that is worthy of our reverence, a phrase that I love.

So, Joanna, as a practicing Buddhist and an ecologist, what is sacred to you?

I would say the sacred living body of Earth.

An appreciative delight in the gift of life on the larger living body of exquisite beauty where everything I need and will ever have comes from that-- or I'll ever know.

It comes from that sacred whole.

So I would define the scared as a living whole.

Yes, thank you.

Michael, how about yourself?

As a practicing Jain, what's sacred?

What's holy to you?

Everything is holy.

Everything is sacred.

Every being is sacred.

I--I bring only gratitude to every moment that I'm alive, and that this miracle, which I've been entrusted with in myself, is--is something I can live with, work with, and see where it takes me.

But sacredness is-- is in the air.

It's what we breathe.

It's what we dream.

It's everything.

Joanna, often I've-- I've heard you describe in your analysis of the state of the world, so to speak, that we're at a crossroads.

If you study history, that word, that idea has been used frequently.

Often, we are on-- at the crossroads, at the precipice.

What is different about the crossroads we face today?

Well, of course it's true that every human existential decision has--carries great weight.

And there have been other moments in our journey of humanity when everything seemed at stake, that it could be the end of the world-- surely, the end of the first millennium, during the Black Plague in Europe.

I think the difference now is that we have the technology to--for the first time to view the whole planet.

To put--to pick up the rhythms to--to-- we can see the preparations for war or we can see the effects of desertification.

We can count and figure that--what's happening and the disappearance of the species.

So, because of what we are able to know thanks to our technology, we are in the, uh, awkward and horrifying position of being able to watch the f-falling away of life, the--what I call, along with economist David Korten, the Great Unraveling that's, uh, occurring now.

So we're at a crossroads where we can see what we--what story do we want to get behind?

Do we want to get behind the story of the Industrial Growth Society?

Those are the voices we mostly hear from our politicians and military and corporate heads.

Or do we want to, uh, just stand transfixed before the Great Unraveling, that second story we talk-- or there's a third story, and that's the story of a transition to a life-sustaining society.

Uh, you could call it a lot of things-- Ecological Revolution, Sustainability Revolution-- and a lot of us are just calling it the Great Turning.

That's--gives us a wonderful opportunity to turn to a video sequence that was shot of some work that you do.

Yeah, it's called the Work That Reconnects.

Cousineau, voice-over: I had the pleasure to visit Joanna recently at the Community Center in East Oakland where she teaches and leads workshops.

Canticle Farm was created when 5 houses on this one city block agreed to take down their backyard fences to create a single community garden.

Canticle Farm trains local youth and even gang members in organic gardening, then donates the harvested fruit and vegetables to neighbors in need.

[speaking Spanish] This is such an inspiring spot, Pancho.

What was Joanna Macy's influence on this?

Um, well, she is always talking about the Great Turning, right, that it is, uh-- we are moving from a Industrial Growth Society, a--a pollution, violence-based economy and system.

How do we move to a life-sustaining civilization, to a system that is based on love and courage and compassion and generosity?

[speaking Spanish] man: Wow.

And why the name "Canticle," "Canticle Farm"?

Because--because this is, uh, rooted in Franciscan-- Saint Francis.

You know, the latest thing that he-- last thing he did in his life, at the time of his death, as he was feeling abandoned by his hopes, in a way, he lay there and wrote "The Canticle of the Sun" in gratitude for life.

Mm-hmm.

So we're making a place here that we can feel glad for life, and glad and grateful for the promise of life.

Pancho: So, OK, why-- why don't you tell Brother Hermano Stephen-- what do you tell him why in the world you come here?

OK, I come here...

I come here to eat the good fruit and stuff.

Pancho: Uh-huh.

What were you eating-- what were you eating 30 minutes ago that you asked me for the knife and you were cutting it?

I was eating cabbage.

Cabbage!

Wow!

And raw cabbage?

Yeah.

Yes.

Pancho: Wow.

Stephen: You like it?

Pancho: You like it?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's good.

What's sacred to you about Canticle Farms, Joanna?

It's a ripening of the promise of Francis.

Hmm.

And it's a ripening of the promise of our humanity in a place that has been-- I mean, here, uh, in the night, for example, there were gunshots heard again.

Drive-by shootings.

Uh, people pushed to the edge.

And right here--it is right in the place of, uh, danger and suffering where the human spirit can open its eyes and-- and thrive.

Gracias, senorita.

Want some?

[man speaking Spanish] Pancho: So this is hyperlocal organic fruit from us.

It--it still remembers the tree.

Cousineau: It remembers the tree--I love that.

woman: Yeah.

And some of us here like Adelaja are living on the gift economy, and that's the future, too.

It's part of it.

It's part of the future.

A broad realm of--of exchange and of gifting as we try and transition out of this simply exchange-based economy.

Life's a gift.

Life is a gift, and there's real needs, so how do we balance them both, especially in this time of transition?

[barking] boy: He ate some cabbage, too.

Many songs making up one canticle.

Yes, yes.

[chuckling] Good.

That's right.

And there is Saint Francis hiding there.

[fountain running] Joanna, that was a deeply moving video sequence there.

And as I was watching it, I was thinking that it seems you're moving beyond the idea that just more talking is going to help with this shift of consciousness that you're describing, that we actually have to get our bodies into it.

That's right.

That's right.

We are part of this Earth.

We can--we've been through so much.

We've been through many birthings and dyings that we can trust, want to trust the life in us and respect each other that we can-- yes, we're in a scary situation, but I don't mind, be the fear, if I can be there with you, and with you, and we can face it together.

So a lot of this is for growing solidarity, solidarity, uh, with all of creation, which is why I so love the way you have modeled for us what it's like to feel all our kin.

So I want to bring forward that, help people realize that they don't have to be, uh, isolated and let fear--let fear isolate them, but rather, uh, let the scary situation be seen as, "Wow, what an adventure we're on!"

Yeah, and at the start of adventure, whether you're Frodo with the ring or anybody else, that you're glad for your companions.

So we have a chance.

Yes, it's not choosing something that has any guarantee to it.

And it's that lack of guarantee that makes it kind of interesting and scary.

Interesting and scary.

Gosh, you make me think of Woody Allen who once said, "We stand at a great crossroad.

"One road leads to peril and hopelessness, "and the other road leads to extinction.

Let us have the courage to decide wisely."

Yes!

I guess you have to laugh about it on some level because the stakes are so high, right?

That's exactly right.

Mike, how would you describe this crossroad?

Tobias: I Like--I like any-- in any conversation citing Woody Allen, is when he stared before the Jackson Pollock and went up to the woman next to him who caught his attention as much-- if not more so-- than the Pollack and asks her, "So what do you think of this painting?"

And she says, "Well..." in so many words, "...it's death.

"It's desolation.

"It's the end of the world.

"It's Armageddon.

It's the apocalypse."

And he says, "So what are you doing Saturday night?"

[laughter] And I think she says something to the effect, "Well, I'm planning to commit suicide."

And he pauses, as Woody Allen does so brilliantly, and looks at her and says, "What about Friday night?"

I mean, we're like that.

I mean, we-- this threshold, this threshold is both interesting and scary.

And, yes, we see the picture of the earth from the moon, and, yes, we calculate the number of species and populations that are disappearing by the second, and that number has increased from 10, 15, 20 species a day to thousands of species every day to 15 million discrete genetic populations going extinct every year.

That would mean a flock of birds, and if it's--if it's a certain bird in South Africa, for example, those flocks can number as much as a billion individuals.

Audubon said the passenger pigeon could not possibly go extinct, and Martha was the last of her kind in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

They went extinct.

So we are seeing something on a scale that is unprecedented in the annals of vertebrate biology, which means that the challenge spiritually...

It's a mess.

...it--it is absolutely breathtaking what we have before.

We have an opportunity to stop a planet from dying.

So I'm very focused, for example, on deep demography, the lessons of what 10 billion ungainly, largely carnivorous, bipedal Homo sapiens are going to do on a planet which is already stretched in every direction, whether it's water, food, shade-- the solace of the shade tree.

That was taken for granted even 50 years ago.

Today, shade is everything.

I mean, Joanna, I really feel, as you articulated, we are on an edge, and it can go either way.

And as Arnold Toynbee, one of his last books, "Mankind and Mother Earth," very beautifully and poignantly showed us, there were 22 civilizations we know of that went extinct because they overshot their carrying capacity, plain and simple.

There's no debate.

It's unambiguous.

Cousineau: Joanna, how would you describe "the good fight"?

Do you remember that phrase that came up in the Spanish Civil War?

"There is a good fight that we-- we all have to rally behind."

How would you describe what we're up against right now?

Well, I--I don't know if I would use the word "fight," but I see it, um, as an opportunity to wake up.

To wake up to who we really are, to take off the blinders, to open our ears, to taste life, to taste the birthright of being able to breathe and sing and be grateful for life, and open up all the chakras, including the base chakra, too, so we can feel our erotic awakening so we don't need pornography or anything to make us feel alive.

To just become animal again fully, an animal that can sing and an animal that can feel reverence.

This is our birthright.

Michael, what do you think about that word "birthright"?

Do--do you feel that?

Well, there is a living legacy, and it's sacred and it is in everyone, and it is a responsibility as well as a right.

It is a duty, and those what I take very seriously.

I'm grateful that I'm here.

I'm deathly afraid of what's happening, and I want to sound the alarm, but I want to do it in a way that's not so chilling, not so daunting that we undermine the--the revivification of-- of this generation, because that's what we need.

We need... To come alive.

We need to come alive as a generation together.

That doesn't mean we have to do it the same way.

Everyone has his and her own way to do it, and that's what we need.

We need this chorus, but it is symphonic, and it is musical.

And if we don't-- if we don't believe in it, if we don't believe in life, we'll lose it.

So we have to cherish it.

We have to think of this as a serious opportunity.

And not to be afraid of it.

Absolutely.

I'm so appalled at the, uh, efforts politically to, uh, instill fear, control the populace through fear, and it shrinks and it closes us off, and it makes us lonely.

And when we're lonely and isolated, we get mean.

Cantankerous, at least.

And--and ready to wipe things, other things, out.

So then people say, "We don't know what you mean by 'life.'"

Well, and it-- and it is life.

It's--it's deeper than the politics of this intimated exchange for sure.

It's not just about corporate personhood or--or money as speech and the politics behind the manipulation of all of us, the half a million advertisements that kids see by the time they're 12, the fact that your average teenager in America knows thousands of labels and names of video games and can list maybe 10 species if they're lucky.

That's ecological illiteracy, but beneath that is this purpose, this--this joy that can't be tainted, that can't be fettered, and that-- that's where I'm looking to.

This is the perfect moment for a segue, then, to a short segment from one of your earlier films on the Jain faith, one of the great faiths in the world but unfortunately also one of the least understood.

It's called "Ahimsa," which I understand is a Sanskrit term for do no injury, do no harm.

Commonly, "Non-Violence."

[Indian music playing] [man speaking in foreign language] narrator: India teems with life.

an animal sanctuary.

These refuges exists all over India wherever there are Jains.

Fundamental to Jain doctrine is the belief that all animal life is spiritual and endowed with a soul.

These stray animals are cared for, fed, nursed steadily to health, and loved by visitors.

The Jains believe that every organism in the universe is called jiva, harboring an independent soul capable of salvation that must be respected and allowed to evolve in its own way.

[cawing] It was along this river in Amdavad that the concept of ahimsa first took on dramatic new dimensions.

For it was here in this communal house that Mahatma Gandhi lived and worked between 1917 and 1933.

Gandhi had first come in contact with Jainism through his early friend Shrimad Rajchandra, a Jain poet and jeweler who, despite his fortunes, was to become an ascetic, and whose impact on Gandhi would serve to liberate India from England.

In his insistence upon nonviolence, Gandhi was to write, "Ahimsa is the only force in life, "the supreme law.

"If love or nonviolence be not the law of our being, the whole of my argument falls to pieces."

[gunfire] When, in fact, hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims massacred each other following India's partition, Gandhi was true to his beliefs up to the very moment of his own assassination.

He wrote, "Our nonviolence is as yet a mixed affair.

It limps, nevertheless it is the only way."

But the Jain impact upon Gandhi was only a recent manifestation of a much deeper and lasting influence, for Buddhism itself adopted the position of ahimsa.

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, leader of the Tibetan Buddhist community, obtained political asylum in northern India following the violent Chinese subordination of Tibet during the late 1950s.

Michael, I had no idea that Jainism was such a profound influence on Gandhi and His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.

How's--how did that happen?

Well, Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara for Jain, mendicant visionary-- he was an elder contemporary of Buddha, and it is said that Buddha studied from another teacher-- not from Mahavira, but a contemporary of Mahavira who was a Jain.

And many Buddhists at the time were speaking-- approximately the early sixth, late fifth century Before the Common Era--many of them found the Jain approach to life so severe, so difficult, so, uh, hard on oneself that Mahayana Buddhists, for example, took a middle path and--and did not create what in the Jain world is a sense of boundaries all around us-- a--a series of impediments, if you will-- to help remind us of restraint, of the importance of intention, of the importance of our-- of our words.

The difference with the Jains and one of the reasons it is a--a rather quiet spiritual tradition is that there's no priests out there proselytizing.

It's--it's inward dwelling.

It's poetic to the-- to the ultimate experience of oneself.

And so you don't have huge choirs singing the praises of Jainism.

You have individuals trying to behave responsibly.

A vegetarian spiritual tradition largely that recognizes that every living being deserves to have a chance, deserves to be itself, without interference by ourselves or by our wants or by our alleged needs.

So that is the heart of nonviolence for Jainism and had a huge impact on Gandhi.

It's had a huge impact on other world traditions.

Macy: As I watched that, I was thinking that nonviolence as an expression of an ecological awareness, and that the words of Dr. King-- uh, when Martin Luther King spoke more than once of being-- uh, holding sacred-- uh, he--of the inescapable network of mutuality.

And when you really get that, then of course, uh, your responses to violence is absurd.

Violence is hurting yourself, cutting off your own arm.

A tradition that's--it's Parasparopagraho Jivanam, which means all life is mutually interdependent.

And it is said-- much like we see in Catholic tradition with Saint Francis speaking with the birds and the wolves.

You see it in Isaiah where the lamb and the lions and tigers and the deers are all lying together in peace.

But you also see it in what the Jains call the samavasarana where you'd see a holy man surrounded-- or a holy woman-- surrounded by all the other animals, and they're on an equal playing field.

There's no distinction between a worm and a lion, between a great human genius and a great bird genius.

They're all equal.

At the same, is there a hierarchy of organisms in Jain cosmology?

There's a hierarchy, but only in the sense that we consume food to survive.

And here you get into the dietary world of Jain botanical science, which is an ancient science and a real science and has infused all of subcontinent India in this incredible, uh, understanding of a rice kernel, this beautiful constellation of cooking traditions.

Now, you could see it in Sicily.

You could say Greece, Turkey, Ireland, the Southern U.S.-- wherever you go, you're gonna find cooking traditions, but for the Jains, there is a hierarchy, and it's very important because it involves the number of senses which Jain philosophers attribute.

So a Jain will only consume one-sensed organisms, not five-sensed.

We're five-sensed organisms.

A one-sensed organism would be a piece of lettuce, a potato.

It wouldn't be a cockroach.

A cockroach is highly advanced.

You wouldn't consume the cockroach or not consume the cockroach because you think it's less or more intelligent than me.

You wouldn't consume it because it's equal to me.

Well, that's a relief.

I was just about to have a little cockroach for supper.

Cockroach stew-- no, you wouldn't go there.

So you'll just start laughing.

Ha ha ha!

Joanne, I--I'd like your response to something that His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, said in Michael's film clip, that ultimately, the urges towards both peace and violence are within rather than without.

What do you think?

When I heard that, and when I hear that, I think, "What isn't within?"

The whole world is within, too.

And when we set up a separate self that's me, and the rest is out there, uh, maybe that's the seeds of--of violence.

That that's the roots of greed, of fear, of aversion, of confusion.

So what I love in Buddhism and in systems science, too, which I've-- in my life loved weaving them together, is that, uh, the self is just a--a metaphor.

What you draw--where you draw the circle, I can decide that everything inside this bag of skin is Joanna, or within my family or within my nation.

But it's--the self is actually a metaphor around which you build your defenses, your needs to protect.

And what I love about deep ecology-- and I know that so much of what you say, Michael, resonates in my deep ecological soul-- is that we are invited to, uh, extend our self interest as large as we want, and you extend it to include all of life, and I think that's the nature of this time.

I think that is the exquisite challenge of this planetary crisis, is that we can choose to see that our basic identity is as a part of the earth.

We're unique.

There's nobody else like us-- each one is individual-- but we draw from and are interdependent with all the others in the whole Earth.

Mahavira pointed that out, and so did the Buddha--that was his main teaching.

To accomplish this, is this the shift of consciousness that you sometimes allude to, the Great Turning, which is such a beautiful image?

Macy: Yes, I think that that is one of the dimensions.

There are action dimensions of protecting life, slowing down the destruction.

But, uh, this shift of consciousness is to wake up to our basic inter-existence.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen master, calls it interbeing with all life.

What--what distinguishes us-- because there's life throughout-- is that humans in Buddhist path can change the karma.

We have a self-reflexive consciousness that makes choices, and now with the aid of t-terrific technology, we have a t-terrific impact on the earth.

I think of two great rivers flowing together, converging-- the spiritual religious traditions and propensities of our peoples, and the scientific mind, and they're coming together.

So this is a very exquisite time when there's not only the scientific and there was-- but this voice of the earth, this voice that's coming through, forgotten voices.

Cousineau: Thank you for bringing us onto your property here.

Pancho: That's what we're trying to do here, to honor the sacred-- any--every single being that is around here.

Why is it that they have access to drugs, to prostitution, to guns, uh, but they don't have access to healthy food?

Um, so we created a alternative a little bit with a shift, the inner shift, and then that creates a shift in consciousness.

Adelaja: In 2007, 2008, I was in business school, and I was also in the business of--of flipping-- buying and selling foreclosed homes.

And my intention was always to raise as much money as possible so that I could help to start a nonprofit down the line and help, particularly, migrant people like my mother, because I know so many migrant people who are working incredibly hard to provide for their children.

And so after a while, after buying my first house, what I got to see-- especially in 2007, 2008-- was the market collapse, and the people's faces who were being evicted out were--were brought into the news.

They're brought into, uh, visibility for me.

All I saw was an empty house and an auction.

I didn't see these people, and on these people's faces I got to see my mother, my mother's face, and that was incredibly painful for me to know that what I was doing in trying to earn this money to help was actually perpetuating a system of injustice.

I was--I was evicting these people, and that was a huge shift for me.

Did you feel it?

Did you feel yourself coming alive again when you made that decision?

Definitely felt it.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Then you're in the right place.

Cousineau: You can't help it-- Macy: People love to come here and learn.

So I guess you'll welcome, I think, a place of renewal.

I says "Welcome," and people are drawn to it.

That's the real web of life.

Yeah.

Like those lines from Rilke.

Uh, "All will come again into its strength; "the trees grown tall and the walls built low.

"And in the gardens, people as strong and varied as the land."

Many colors, many backgrounds, even many languages coming to weave again, reweave the threads of life.

You remind me of a-- a tape I just heard-- Coleman Barks, the great translator of Rumi, just sent me some recent translations.

And there's one line from R--Rumi: "What are you doing to move your story along?"

I thought, That's a wonderful way to think about it.

And also with this magnificent book that you've written and compiled called "Sanctuary," Michael.

More than a publishing endeavor, it seems like a vote of confidence that media can actually raise consciousness, that words and images, art itself, can help change things.

We are a media-driven, uh, civilization of-- of like-minded addicts to the image, because we love the image.

For some reason, we love the image.

We respond to it.

Now, it's--it's not just the image.

It's--it's what's inside that image, what's behind that image, of course.

And a vote of confidence is a nice phrase for "Sanctuary," because it's a very tenuous situation in terms of terrestrial and marine sanctuaries on this planet.

I mean, we have this situation where most of the earth is not protected, where most people's rights are not protected, where animals come at us at their peril because we're likely to kill them and eat them and consume them and wear them.

So these universal cries for solidarity are coming from everywhere.

They're raining down on us.

Recently you made a film about a sanctuary, which is literally a place that honors this kind of sacredness in the world-- in plant life, in animal life-- a film set in Ecuador called "Yasuni."

What is so important about a sanctuary?

Well, in the case of this clip, of "Yasuni," you're talking about the most biologically diverse spot on planet Earth that we know of.

In one hectare-- 2.4 acres-- as many as 100,000 species.

We've never seen anything like that.

That was documented in the early 1990s by entomologists from the Smithsonian.

It's been corroborated in peer-reviewed scientific literature.

We're talking about a place that is so rich biologically, it is truly a window on the workings of-- of this miraculous creation.

Let's look at a short segment from that film.

[insects buzzing, birds calling] [woman vocalizing on soundtrack] Watching your footage, the word that comes up again and again, obviously, is beautiful.

How can you not watch that footage and think "Beautiful"?

But often it's translated in a sentimental way.

I've been working on a story about beauty with the ancient Greeks and found out the origin of the word for the Greeks, "kallos, kalloni" means what is attractive and desirable but also that which provokes.

It--it provokes you to do something to move towards it.

You want to move towards the thing that is beautiful.

And that raises a really interesting way of looking at our work-- how much has working on-- creating films and books like this changed behavior and policy?

Have you felt that in your lifetime?

Oh, yeah!

Look, I did a film in 1987 called "Antarctica: The Last Continent" for PBS.

And we--I interviewed the chief science adviser for the National Science Foundation in Washington.

And I said, "Look.

Look at the filth that we "just filmed underwater at McMurdo Sound.

"Look at these open fire pits at McMurdo base operations."

And things have changed since then.

Things can change.

We--we've seen great change come from media.

We're seeing it, obviously, with the net.

And I--and I'm very conscious of our responsibilities, those of us who take a camera and aim it at something.

I hear you talking about consequences.

Each one of our choices, each one of our actions has consequences for the future.

And, Joanna, I know you have this captivating idea called future beings-- that if we widen our concept of time, we can actually think more respectfully about the past but also the future.

How does that work?

Macy: Yeah, well, the future generations were very important for our native, uh, forebears, too, particularly in the Hoh and the Shawnee with their taking into consideration the seventh generation.

But I found that coming right out of my preoccupation with nuclear waste and the immense time that it stays hazardous, that it can cause mutations and cancers and leukemias and birth defects and somatic damage, uh, that we are now through that and also through fracking and also through genetic modification of seeds, our karma--that is, the consequences of our actions-- suddenly last forever, cannot be undone.

Now, I think this is something new under the sun, and it invites us to, uh, expand our capacity to think about time and experience time.

We begin to experience our span of time as not just beginning with our birth in this life and our death in this life but the context--our context of temporal meaningfulness enlarges.

Now, when that happens, we enter into a rhythm that is longer, and we don't have to see that something must be completed in my lifetime for it to be worthwhile.

And then as we become less dependent or even free of needing to see the results of our own actions, because they'll take place in the future, well, what a freedom that is!

That's like a kind of, uh, poor man's enlightenment, you know?

To not be dependent on seeing the results of your actions.

It invites us to come alive in a new way.

Of course, a recent film that you've done called "Hot Spots" has one of the classic examples of ignoring these various signals.

And that's Easter Island and what happened with the Rapa Nui there, denuding their island of 6 million trees.

Can you tell us who we're about to see here?

Well, I would--yeah.

I would just point-- well, "Hot Spots" was a 2-hour movie that I did with my wife, Jane Morrison, and with the president of "Conservation International," Dr. Russell Mittermeier.

We shot it all over the world.

And-- and the hot spots are defined as those places on the planet that have the largest aggregates of endemic species left to lose.

Let's turn to the clip now.

[horses neighing] Man: It's really fascinating to try and, uh, imagine this place at about A.D. 900.

When the first--probably the single boatload of, uh, Polynesians arrived here, they must have found a-- a paradise on Earth.

There was a wealth of, uh, rain forests here, giant palm trees that had a diameter of 7 or 8 feet, and bountiful, uh, marine resources, uh, a lot of--of wildlife on the island itself.

And, uh, they really must have been amazed to see such a wonderful place after traveling 2 or 3 weeks at least over--over open ocean.

And the first couple of hundred years must have been truly wonderful.

But then somehow, they managed to destroy it.

They--whatever it was, uh, ego, uh, greed, the desire to compete with one another, they wound up building these moais, these sculptures, which are--are really wonderful cultural relics.

And yet in order to move them around, they had to cut down the entire forest.

The logs served as rollers.

The--they made, uh, rope from the tree bark.

And little by little, the environment was destroyed.

And now what you see around us is barren grassland for the most part.

Almost everything that was here has gone extinct.

So it's really a--an amazing example of, uh, human folly destroying the environment and ul--ultimately having the culture itself destroyed as well.

Imagine on Easter Island the person who cut down the last of the giant palm trees.

I mean, he must have known that it was the last.

Because you can stand on a hilltop here and you can virtually see the--the entire island.

And yet he went ahead and cut it down anyway.

His cultural context drove him to cut down this last tree, even though he knew probably that it was going to, uh, destroy his own potential for the future.

Different man: I came here to witness it because I'm hoping that maybe it will help me to explain t-- to people that I talk to better what the reality is of living in a world of limited resources, a world where unsustainable behaviors and conflicts can destroy our options for the future.

And I hope to somehow, as a result of having experienced this, to be able to play a role with it, communicating how important it is that we're making the right choices.

Joanna, it's hard to imagine a more dramatic place to hear that man say we actually have a choice.

What choice do we have?

Well, this film so--or opens us to immensities of time, which we need in such a hurried culture, as we're being pressured by nanosecond science and technologies and-- the pace of life today, and that what--what we have discovered, uh, in the work that reconnects, they're only separated from us in--through a sequential view of time.

But there are those, uh, approaches to life and to cultures and thoughts where the present is a moment that's surrounded by the past and future generations.

I'm thinking of Jared Diamond's phrase now: "A cautious optimism."

Knowing what we know, seeing what we're seeing, is it naive even to be a cautious optimist at this point in history?

Or do we have to take a stand?

I think we have a default button with a few seconds to go for it.

Uh, we can push that button, and that button is e-- is restoration ecology.

That button is compassion.

That button is expanding the circles of love and tolerance to all these different species.

In the case of Rapa Nui on Easter Island, the Chilean government, which occupied Easter Island, is restoring native flora and fauna, replanting seedlings.

Um, the people, o-- over 3,000 residents of Easter Island are taking part in restoration ecology 101.

And it derives from their ancestors.

It looks to the future.

It's youth.

It's the elders.

It's people working together in communities to restore the planet.

We were born in this generation, I think, to help in this cause of redeeming ourselves, of redeeming our ancestors of--of giving voice to those who are voiceless, of providing a helping hand, cliche as it may sound, to those who need us.

So I would take all of this science, all of the wisdom and roll it into this--this prayer for the earth, which I take it upon myself every morning in--in gratefulness to voice, like a--like a-- like a free bird unfettered, flying freely.

And, uh, if we can do that-- and we can--we have a chance.

And so cautious optimism, guarded optimism, look, I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe we have a chance.

I love your image of the bird flying free.

That's the image of the bodhisattva in Buddhism--the one who offers her life or his for the whole.

And the two wings are compassion and wisdom, as you know.

Eh, but, so it's a wonderful time to be alive.

And I would say, stop trying to take your pulse as to whether you're hopeful or hopeless.

Those are just passing feelings.

You know, because I'm not, "I'm optimistic by nature," or, "I'm not."

And now we're pessimistic?

Oh, for heaven's sakes!

It depends often on what you had for breakfast.

These are passing feelings.

Don't be a hostage to whether-- how you label yourself.

You see Frodo at the beginning with his ring heading off.

Frodo says, "Oh, wait a minute.

Am I hopeful?"

No!

On every-- you give up hope.

You can be lighter for it or you decide that hope is only in the next step you take.

Tobias: We have a lot of work to do, all of us.

And, um, we come from different places and different orientations.

And I want to be--I want to be cautious against fanaticism, against fear.

I want to respect pain because it tells us something that we need to know, but I want to do everything I can to ameliorate pain.

It's the core of Jain tradition.

It's the core of human tradition to help each other and to help others.

It's so basic that-- that it almost-- it's been said, but it's worth repeating.

We really need one another to make this work.

We have to work as a team here.

We--we really have to get our hearts and minds around this idea that individualism is spectacular, but if we don't apply ourselves together, nothing's going to work.

So we have this moment, and we have it together.

And we--and that's sacred.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Sacred with possibilities.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cousineau: What a grace note to end on.

Thank you very much.

This has been a healing, sacred conversation.

Thank you very much.

Macy: Great.

I appreciate it.

God bless.

Thank you.

Hi.

I'm Cindy Blackman Santana, and thank you for joining us.

And we hope you return to "Global Spirit," the first internal travel series.