The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.

The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.

The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.

The Great Work - the work of ensuring a just, healthy, beautiful, and sustainably life-giving world for future generations of all species.

For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth.

If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.

Of all the issues we are concerned with at present, the most basic issue, in my estimation, is that of human-earth relations.