I would say that to listen is to become aware. To become truly informed. You will discover whatever you do.

I'm in love with Earth. I truly am. And so listening is not work, to work toward a better future. It's joy. To not be able to work toward a better future would be work. That would be tough.

Often how you define the problem will determine whether or not you're able to find a real solution.

When we listen, it's not linear, it's 360, and it's in a time-space continuum, so you don't have to create a list of priorities, because it's all important. You can deal with everything at any given time. Not only that, but it happens very simply, without effort.

The most important thing for our species is, before it speaks, to listen to its environment. That has a higher priority in any species' survival. We need to be listening to our environment - in other words, restoring the quiet - not just to our natural areas, but also to towns like Portland, Maine.

Whenever you're in a natural system and you're making sound, you are putting yourself at risk. As you go up the evolutionary ladder, from insects to frogs to birds and on up into mammals, the higher intelligence recognizes that when you vocalize, you put yourself at risk. So mammals generally vocalize or make noise much more rarely than, let's say, insects or frogs. And when they do, and put themselves at risk, it has to be worth the risk, and have true meaning, such as signaling during a hunting party, calling in prey, some religious or spiritual ceremony, something like that.

We're all born listeners. And as a result of our modern lives, and living in a world that has less meaning than the natural world that we evolved to hear, we learn to think of listening not as taking in all the information with equal value, which is the definition of true listening. In our modern world, we tend to think of listening as focusing our attention on what is important and filtering out everything else.