As Richard Deertrack of Taos Pueblo once said here at Bioneers: “From the point of view of a plant, all people look pretty much the same.” From the point of view of the planet, we are one species. If nothing else has united humanity to see past our colliding cultural differences, the prospect of ecological collapse may be bringing us to our senses.

The recent UN Millennium Ecosystem report concluded this. We are simply “living beyond our means. Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. Nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature to humankind are found to be in decline worldwide.”

What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. And what we do to each other, we do to the earth. As Michael Lerner of Commonweal has said, the wounds we‘re inflicting on the Earth and on each other are the same wound. Restoring the Earth’s imperiled ecosystems requires that we heal our human communities.

At heart, we are in a crisis of relationship. It beckons us to act as if we are a part of – not apart from - the natural world on which our life depends. It beckons us to mend our relationships with each other, on which our life also depends.

The choice is clear: an Age of Restoration or an Age of Extinctions.

I believe the world reached a turning point this year. David Orr calls it a global ecological Enlightenment. People all over the world pulling back from the abyss. Paul Hawken describes this unprecedented global movement of movements as “humanity’s immune response.” It is already the biggest movement in the history of the world, and it is growing rapidly. Together we are changing the story – from fear to hope, from extinction to restoration.

The practical solutions to our most pressing environmental challenges are largely present. With focused effort, we can likely figure out much of the rest. Over these three days, we will see, hear and experience reports from the front lines of hope.

Drawing on four billion years of evolutionary intelligence, the bioneers are applying nature’s operating instructions to serve human ends harmlessly.  By mimicking how nature does it, brilliant innovators are showing how we can harmonize human infrastructures with nature’s infrastructure. Based on what we already know, we can reduce the negative human footprint by 90 percent. At the same time that we restore the land, we will rejuventate our economies and dramatically improve our quality of life.

The challenge we face is not primarily technological. It’s political, cultural and deeply personal. The environmental crisis is more accurately a human crisis. To succeed in this momentous transition, we‘re being called upon to cooperate on a grand scale. It requires the equivalent of a wartime mobilization, yet its purpose is precisely the opposite: to create peace. To get to the other side, we‘re going to have to face and heal the deep wounds in our societies and in ourselves.

This revolution from the heart of nature is also a revolution of the human heart. People everywhere are rising up in waves of caring and conscience. We are creating innovative social strategies to restore community, justice and democracy. Peacemaker Aqeeela Sherrills calls it a Reverence Movement. It’s about what we what we love and hold sacred: life itself.

Just as the web of life is inextricably interdependent, so too are all the social issues we face. At the end of the day, they are one issue. We’re witnessing the endgame of a civilization at war with the natural world and with ourselves. It is not a winnable war. The overriding issue is how we make peace - with the land, each other and ourselves.

We have a lot of history to overcome. War is a scarlet river flooding across the ages. Psychologist James Hillman suggests war is so deeply embedded in our psyche that we worship it as divine. We have made a religion of war, holy war.

Tribe against tribe. Nation against nation. War against the Earth. War against the poor. War against religious beliefs. War against the indigenous. War against peoples of color. War against women. War against the Other.

The industrialized warfare of the 20th Century was the bloodiest ever. Fear and rumors of war have led us to build vast military-industrial complexes that have caused environmental harm whose magnitude will shadow us for generations. The supreme irony is that our security anxiety has made the world perilously insecure.

Today at the dawn of the 21st century, modern techno-war could lead to the virtual annihilation of human civilization. Even global warming meets its match in the face of nuclear winter. We are all prisoners of war.

How do we get out of this alive? We are not the first to ask that question.

Seneca historian John Mohawk reminds us that the Iroquois Confederacy was forged out of cataclysmic war. John tells the story this way.

There was an individual born among the Hurons in the Great Lakes who grew up in a society that was each against all. Blood feuds left not only villages fighting villages, but individual households fighting individual households. Violence ruled the day. It was a time, not unlike the 21st century, of absolute horror and degradation of the human soul.

A young man not yet twenty had an insight. He said violence is a really bad idea. He went to the people, and he said, “You have to stop these cycles of violence.” The cycles of violence were embedded deep in the laws and customs of the Indian people. They were about revenge, for real and imagined injuries.

This young man, who became known as the Peacemaker, said that war makes people crazy. When people are at war, they’re not thinking clearly.

His argument was this: “We don’t need to live this way. We have the power in our collective minds to create a world in which people do not use violence, but rather use thinking.” He went from village to village and persuaded people that we have to have a pact against violence.

Of course, when you walk into a village and say, “We have to put down our weapons of war and have peace,” they’re going to say, “Not till the other guys do.” To which you say, “Okay, let’s go talk to the other guys.” Until someone says, “Can’t talk to them. They’re all crazy.”

So the Peacemaker responded, “When you tell yourself your enemy can’t think, you destroy your own power to make peace with him. In order to use our minds to solve problems, we have to first acknowledge that the people on the other side of the negotiation probably want their people to live, and probably want a lot of the same things you do.” So it starts by looking for common ground with the enemy.

People said, “We’re at war with these people because they’ve harmed us. They’ve done wrong to us.” The Peacemaker replied that the pursuit of peace is not merely the pursuit of the absence of violence. Peace is never achieved until justice is achieved. Justice is not achieved until everyone’s interests are addressed. So, he said, you will never actually finish addressing everyone’s issues. You can’t achieve peace unless it’s accompanied by constant striving to address justice. It means your job will never end.

He said we have to build an institution to represent this. He brought together the chiefs of the five nations, who formed the Iroquois Confederacy. Its purpose was, and still is, to practice clear thinking, address justice and sustain peace. Its highly sophisticated government was in fact one of the central inspirations for our American democracy.

The Peacemaker did not say we’d kill each other off with weapons. He said that in the end, unless we achieve peace among ourselves, the people of the planet will be eliminated.

The time the Peacemaker foresaw is with us. Our warring ways now threaten the very basis of our sustainability as a species and countless others we’re already extinguishing.

Memory is really about the future. The ancient wisdom of First Peoples reminds us of the deepest values of this American land. The Indigenous Environmental Network puts it this way: “The health and wellbeing of our grandchildren are worth more than all the wealth that can be taken from these lands. The first mandate is to ensure that our decision-making is guided by consideration of the welfare and well being of the seventh generation to come.”

To carry us forward, we have this and other rich underlying values in this country: a democratic government of, by and for the people; ingenious innovation; and rich multi-cultural diversity. These are precisely what we need to succeed in a global cooperative mobilization to create a truly just and sustainable civilization.

This year the Pentagon will spend $463 billion dollars of our taxes, more than all of the rest of the world combined. That does not even include the accrued cost of $363 billion dollars for the shooting war we‘re fighting in Iraq. With about $30 billion dollars, we could protect and conserve all the great remaining threatened centers of biological diversity in the world, and pay the people living there to do that. As Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities points out, with $60 billion dollars we could: put every child in America in Head Start, guarantee health care for every child, rebuild every single American school, and establish complete energy independence for the country using renewable fuels. And more. We could start with the war zones of our inner cities.

As human  beings, we have one very important trait going for us at this historic turning point. We excel at cooperation. It has been one of our greatest evolutionary advantages as a species. For about 99 percent of our history, we lived in small, stable bands of very closely related hunter-gatherers. It was an optimal setting for cultivating close cooperation.

The catch is that we limited our cooperation to our own small groups. Outsiders beware, because we can also be ruthlessly efficient cooperative killing machines. As Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky observes, a primal xenophobia – a fear of the Other – is hardwired deep in our brain. Brain imaging studies show that the amygdala – the location of our ancient fight-or-flight survival response - is easily stimulated into fear and aggression - for instance by seeing pictures of another race. However, tests show that, in people who have substantial experience with people of different races, the amygdala simply does not become activated. The amygdala also remains quiet when we come to see people as individuals rather than as members of a group.

There are additional proven ways to mitigate our instinctive fear of The Other. One is trade. Another is to maintain porous borders and flows among groups. Sapolsky concludes, “Humans may be hardwired to get edgy around the Other, but our views on who falls into that category are remarkably malleable.”

The challenge we face is whether we can soften our clannish cultural borders – in fact expand those borders beyond our very human-ness – to cooperate on a global scale and embrace a culturally diverse and biologically interdependent world.

And what will happen if we take the road to extinction? As Bob Holmes wrote in “Imagine the Earth Without People”: “It will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilization ever lived here.”

Our wounds are deep, like old bad habits. There is much we need to forget. There is also much we need to remember. Above all, we need to remember the future.

In the wound also lies the gift. Since the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the quest of the past half-century has been to make peace - not by force of military might - but by rational mutual interest and ethical principles. By clear thinking, and by addressing justice.

Vietnam is the most studied example of recent techno-wars where we used fewer soldiers but lethally advanced weaponry to do maximum damage to people and the environment. Babies are still being born deformed from pervasive Agent Orange poisoning from extensive chemical warfare.

Vietnam is begging the rest of the world to come study its experience. Its official policy is this: We have been the most hurt by recent wars. We’re not angry. We just want you to see what war does, so we can all stop it together.

Ed Tick is a psychotherapist who began working in the 1970s with Viet Nam vets who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Most were taking multiple drugs to suppress the personal hell haunting their lives. Tick realized that post-traumatic stress disorder was not about stress; it was about trauma. He learned that the Greek word “travma” actually meant a puncture, a hole, a wound. For the Greeks, it was also a spiritual wound: a hole in the soul.

Tick began taking vets back to the scene of the trauma, to face and embrace the Other, to seek redemption in forgiveness. They began to heal the wounds to their soul. They became true warriors. Knowing the horror, now they try to talk people out of war.

On one of these truth and reconciliation journeys to Viet Nam, Ed Tick and the veterans visited My Lai. Today Mi Lai is a beautiful peace garden like Hiroshima where people from all over the world come to learn. Before that, it was the infamous scene of the slaughter of an unarmed village by US soldiers.

At My Lai, Ed Tick and the vets met a woman of seventy-five, the only member of her family to survive the dreadful massacre. She lost her husband, her parents and all her children. These are Ed Tick’s story and words:

“She expressed her terrible pain at living. I said to her, ‘Grandmother, we’re so sorry for you and your losses. How do you feel about us Americans coming to visit you and see this place when we took so much from you?’

She said: ‘My pain doesn’t matter. It is so important that you come.’

And I said, ‘Grandmother, I can understand that ‘thank you.’ But how do you feel about our veterans coming back? Maybe they were here. Maybe they took the lives of your family or other Vietnamese people.’

“She said: ‘Oh no, no. You misunderstand. It is most important that your veterans come back here, so that I can take their hands and look into their eyes, and forgive them and help them heal.’

“There is a place in Vietnam called Marble Mountain. It’s very sacred. There is an ancient Buddhist temple in it. The Viet Cong used it as a field hospital. We bombed it twice. But the temple is still intact and it wears its scars. Outside that temple on Marble Mountain, there is a simple wooden sign that proclaims in both Vietnamese and English these words, an ancient Buddhist precept:

Hatreds never cease by hatreds in this world.
By love they cease.
This is an ancient law.

The wounds we‘re inflicting on the Earth and on each other are the same wound.
Blessed are the peacemakers.