So when did the rainforest to you stop becoming something like an external that you might have wanted to protect or felt like it was this thing that we needed to worry about, and, and start to become more of something you felt like you belonged to or a part of? Do you mind going through that for me? [laughs]

No, uh, I'm happy to do that.

Um, it was one of the...

You know, like, if you had to point to half a dozen key moments in your life from the age of 80, that would definitely be one of them, which was a certain Monday in August of 1979 when, um, the day before I'd been at the Channon Market, a hippie market up on the north coast of New South Wales where we would go once a month.

And, um, when the band stopped playing at a certain point, uh, a neighbor, uh, Dudley Leggett, got on the stage and appealed for help, saying that, uh, the Forestry Commission were coming in tomorrow to log the rainforest at the end of Terania Creek Road, and we had to stop them.

Uh, could people please come and help? And so I'd never been to the end of Terania Creek Road.

I didn't know what a rainforest was.

How do you feel about that?

If we saw what we're doing as not saving the planet, but actually saving ourselves, what does that actually look like when you work with people in your workshops and when they start to get this kind of way of thinking, this deep ecology way of thinking?

Well, the way of thinking, as I said, stemmed from Arnie Ness's work, but it was only four or five years after I discovered this that I met my next teacher, Joanna Macy, who provided the missing link between the ideas of deep ecology, which, as Arnie Ness pointed out, are of no use without turning into identity.

And she had the, I would say, the psychological tools, the spiritual tools that allow the ideas of ecology to turn into the ecological identity that Arnie Ness was calling for.

And Joanna was working with...

When I met her in 1985, she was doing a workshop called Despair and Empowerment.

And the key was that the answer was hidden in all of the emotions and feelings that we've been taught to suppress and taught to fear.

And that she showed us that by creating a safe container where we could express and share with each other and hear, all of the anguish and rage and dread and terror that underlies all of us who are looking closely at the world, but that there's never the invitation, there's never the opportunity to honour these feelings and to put them in the forefront.

What are the implications for a deep ecological mindset for our predicament today where things are in a lot of trouble? Does this mean we just kind of accept it and go down with nature? Or how do we use all of this to activate and use the right kind of activation muscle?

I'll talk to you at the other end.

The late 1960s, when I'm a young man, I got married.

I went to London.

I spent five years in London.

I was a systems engineer for IBM.

And then in... 1973, my wife and I traveled overland through India, coming back to Australia after I'd been away for five years.

And in India, ran into Buddhist meditation, India and Nepal.

Yeah.