Photograph Source: Jason Thompson – CC BY 2.0

My friend the late Very Rev. James R. Morton, Dean of the cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City, declared that “Ecology is the science of the body of Christ through which we of the earth community learn our sacred connections.”

These sacred connections, long recognized in native American Indian culture, have been broken, as the Climate and Extinction crises affirm. From a Christian mystical tradition, when we empathize deeply with the natural world, we receive the stigmata of an Earth crucified.

At least one scientist acknowledged these kinds of wounds. The late Aldo Leopold, a former government wolf exterminator who became America’s leading conservationist and natural philosopher, wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” (1)

But now a more ecologically-aware public, especially the youth, are suffering those wounds and without some direct action or other solution-seeking outlet feel despair, helplessness, and hopelessness. Climate grief, eco-anxiety, and other terms are being applied to people of all ages and from different cultures who are suffering emotionally from experiencing and knowing about the harmful consequences of climate change, many mourning the demise of other species more immediately harmed than most people, those in coastal, island and poorer communities being especially vulnerable. (2)

Young people in many countries are now rising in protest, establishing such networks as the Extinction Rebellion, fearing for their future which will never be secure until all nation states and political and religious leaders embrace equalitarianism, the antidote to anthropocentrism, by giving equal and fair consideration to all living beings. This is the justice and compassion-based foundation of One Health, of a sustainable economy, a healthy environment (the good of the Commons), world peace and the common good.

The Climate Crisis exacerbates the Extinction Crisis and vice versa and all are exacerbated by overpopulation and overconsumption, the loss of species, biodiversity and wild lands being the wounds also of those who care as well as being harmful to our health, air and water quality, food, and economic security.

Christianity’s Second Coming, from the perspectives of evolutionary biology and transformative psychology, can be seen in what St. Francis of Assisi called our Second Birth, awakening spiritually to the existential reality of the human condition that we are not powerless to address and heal, along with responsibility for “all our relations.” Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this the Omega point of Christogenesis in human evolution, Krishna-consciousness in Hinduism, Self-realization in Zen Buddhism. Biologically, it is our metamorphosis.

This realization is the apotheosis of the Vision Quest of native American Indian tradition, a rite of passage and initiation from egocentric adolescence into mature, eco-centric responsibility for other sentient beings, plant, and animal, in the life community: all our relations indeed. We humans, like all other sentient life forms, are spiritual beings experiencing life in one form or another which makes up our Life Community wherein we share so much with other species, from joy and suffering to fear and revelation. This realization extends from the Christian doctrine of “treating thy neighbor as thyself” to the nonhuman members of our communities. This is the essence of the Golden Rule, a core principle in the world’s major religions that is ultimately enlightened self-interest.

As a life unexamined is a life unlived, so is a culture where its ethics and morality are not examined and confronted when there are transgressions of the Covenant of Planetary Stewardship: to “dress and to keep” the Garden of Eden. The story of Adam in the Garden of Eden on Earth in the Quran is an object lesson in the cruciality of establishing harmonious interrelationships between human design/constructs in nature, that must be a part of, and not apart from, natural design based on the balance of nature (al-mizan) that is originated by a totally non anthropomorphic creator according to Nadeem Haque (3). This can best be achieved through practical and realistic actions that preserve this sacred balance.

The youth of today are experiencing such an awakening that may be ignited by fear but can only be sustained by loving concern for all of Earth’s creation, and respect and justice for all beings. Fear, anger, prejudice, and hatred, once caringly and courageously faced and informed, can become moral outrage and right action to apply the Golden Rule to all our relations and relationships.

To end crimes against Nature, humankind, and animal kind must call for the establishment of a United Environmental Nations to address that which the World Trade Organization and other international organizations have for too long ignored.

Perception is Reality

Fellow Englishman, poet, and statesman John Milton (1608-1674) in his poem “Paradise Lost” wrote, “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Indeed, the truism “perception is reality” calls for reflection in these times of disinformation and polarizing beliefs because it is how, rather than what or who we perceive, that determines the kind of world we create for ourselves and for others, human and nonhuman.

This is evident in abnormal human behavior, from the psychopath and sociopath to the pathological narcissist in all of whom cognitive processing is impaired. Genetics, early childhood mistreatment, nutrition and other epigenetic, environmental, and cultural factors are all contributory to impaired cognition and distorted perception.

Cognitive dissonance is endemic, disrupting our innate ability, evident in the behavior of other social animals, of being of one mind (except in moments of collective panic, hysteria, or entrancement at some musical concert or public rally). Cognitive dissonance disrupts empathy and concord, fuels discord and may lead to violence. Discord can stem from defective frontal lobe control of emotions as well as from toxic, stressful relationships, occupations, and diets associated with oxytocin depletion and deficiency.

Charismatic speakers, benevolent and malevolent, can entrance and captivate receptive audiences through the collective neural connectivity of the crowd becoming of one mind. The decline and fall of civilizations, as history informs, was caused, in many instances, by the rise of psychopathic leaders or a collective sociopathic society, or both.

To be so empathically closed to the life and beauty of the world and cause harm to others, human and nonhuman, plant and animal, pond, and woodland, is the tragedy of the human condition from age to age which can be rectified with greater understanding and compassion. As the history of shamanism affirms, humans have adopted many ways of inducing altered states of consciousness that continue today from Zen meditation and drumming circles to psilocybin micro-dosing and forest “bathing” to help balance our subjective and objective modes of perception and cognitive processing, and to restore our sacred connections.

The plasticity of the human brain and cognition, evidenced in synesthesia, and by savants and the neurodivergent, can take us beyond the limits of explanatory language and mathematical formulations into new realms of discovery, healing, and creativity through the universal and universalizing nature of consciousness in a sentient cosmos.

In my book 1980 book One Earth, One Mind (4) I documented how we are failing to mind the Earth because we are not yet of one mind, and today we bear witness to the climate and extinction crises and their socioeconomic and public health consequences.

Human liberation and animal liberation must go hand in hand with repairing what shamans and other healers and seers call our sacred connections spanning the Great Divide between self and other—you and me, us and them, human and nonhuman—setting us straight on the path of evolution rather than extinction. We are sentient beings experiencing life in human form. We should respect other animals who are also sentient beings experiencing life in different forms and many with sensory, perceptual, and cognitive abilities far exceeding our own.

We begin to recover our humanity when we connect with and celebrate what yet remains of the life and beauty on our planet Earth and with immediacy, engage in planetary CPR—Conservation, Protection, and Restoration. It is time for us to all to forgive, give, and join hands in mutual respect and loving kindness to embrace all sentient beings. Survival-enhancing empathy, evident in many other animal species, is our moral compass of conscience and compassion. It points us in every direction where our sacred connections, under the banner of One Health, need repair as I document in my 2025 book One Health: Veterinary Ethical and Environmental Perspectives. (5)

Reflecting on the following poem may help us all see the spiritual nature of the existential crisis that we, fellow creatures, and planet Mother Earth face today. The Second Coming was written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919 after World War 1.

The Second Coming

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”

“Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi** Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Our redemption, recovery of our humanity and ultimate well-being are in large part through our renunciation of a culture and economy of harm. Such liberating redemption is at the core of all the world’s religions and secular humanism when shorn of politics and human centeredness. Reverential respect for all our nonhuman relations is long overdue and is, ultimately, enlightened self-interest. Putting people first (which is the worldview of anthropocentrism) has helped bring on the climate, population, and extinction (biodiversity-loss) crises. The cultural and cultish influence of author and philosopher Ayn Rand in her 1964 book The Value of Selfishness that discusses a theory that she called “rational egoism,” regrettably helped sanctify this human-centered worldview of Western materialism and industrial imperialism. (6) Her rational objectivism is the flip side of irrational narcissism that together make the coin of common currency today.

Such evident anthropocentrism is the ultimate cognitive scotoma or blind spot that biologically leads to an evolutionary dead end. The “rough beast” of W. B. Yeats is us.

To walk in Grace and Peace is devoutly to be wished. This is possible through right action that comes from the right mindedness of an open heart, the core principle of Buddhism’s maitri and Hinduism’s ahimsa of non-harming. We face the rough beast lurking everywhere, as in India, the self-proclaimed “largest democracy in the world,” with its casteism, in the U.S., China and many other countries with racism and sexism, and so many countries where slavery, speciesism, and animal suffering are condoned.

Walking in Grace and Peace is possible when those who have the means to live simply, do so, so that others may simply live, and when they dedicate their lives to serve the common good and the good of the Commons. If Homos sapiens continues to multiply and overconsume, wars, droughts, famines, and pandemics will be the fate of future generations living on an increasingly defiled, depleted, and toxic planet Earth and will be victims and witnesses to Nature’s nemesis.

Of the now eight billion human population, already at least 79.5 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 26 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18. (7). According to Action Against Hunger, “Around the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the global population—but more than 690 million people still go hungry. After steadily declining for a decade, world hunger is on the rise, affecting 8.9% of people globally. From 2018 to 2019, the number of undernourished people grew by 10 million, and there are nearly 60 million more undernourished people now than in 2014. (8) These issues were considered by the US Government way back in 1974 but clearly, the science-based predictions and best intentions did not get very far. (9), The Trump administration’s closure of the office of USAID in January 2025 meant that the U.S. would cease its long, compassionate outreach to provide emergency care for people around the world suffering from famine, natural disasters, disease, and provide veterinary care for their animals. This administrative “efficiency” zar Elon Musk’s cost-cutting action is in full knowledge that without AID the human condition in many countries will rapidly deteriorate with massive population displacements and staggering mortality rates. This is symtomatic of empathy-deficit disorder.

St. Francis is the embodiment of Christian charity—the antithesis of America’s “Jesus Saved” White Supremacists—for he had seen the Light, became it and lived his truth for life’s sake. As G.K. Chesterton quipped, “The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult and left untried.” St. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic’s Patron Saint of the Environment, was one exception who tried and demonstrated, teaching benevolence, humility, and loving kindness toward all beings—the Buddha’s maitri, loving kindness being what Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, called the true religion. Both gathered with kindred followers to pray and celebrate the glory and wonder of Nature and all her creatures and creations, many being healed in spirit, mind, and body in the process. Both saw the trees as making temples and shrines and eschewed the virtual ones of Church, Temple and Synagogue, all gold and shining inside but not giving out, sheltering the poor. Christians recall the Biblical story of Lazarus the beggar, covered in the rotting sores of leprosy. Lazarus lay there longing for scraps from the rich man’s table, and the dogs would come and lick his rotting limbs. The dogs showed more compassion than the rich man, and their saliva healed. Albert Schweitzer, echoing Buddha, declared “Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.”

To walk in Grace and Peace is possible and as a veterinarian I see the first steps coming as more informed people are choosing plant-based diets, enjoying better health, employment security, many having fewer or no children or electing to adopt. These steps will help transform the business world. We only have one Earth, one economy and one health since all things are connected and these connections must be restored and protected for the good of all.

Dr. Jane Goodall has set up environmental and humane education programs (https://www.rootsandshoots.org/) in many schools around the world, as have others concerned about animals and the natural environment, notably the National Humane Education Society (https://nhes.org/education-2). It concerns me deeply that humane and environmental education are not in the curriculum of all schools, a deficiency that should be immediately rectified by teachers and parents and not blocked by local politics and prejudice. Some national, nonprofit animal and environmental protection organizations raise enormous funds given the capital for fundraising appeals via the media, and should put more of their earnings into humane and environmental education and not simply into perpetual rescue, prosecutions, and big salaries. Prevention is the best medicine and for animals and nature, that means humane and environmental education. This should include instructive time for children outdoors in natural settings to awaken their feral sensibilities and spiritual connections with the life and beauty in the woods, a meadow, or a stream as advocated by Richard Louv in his book Nature Deficit Disorder; Last Child in the Woods. (10). As the late songwriter and singer Tim Buckley wrote, “I wave goodbye to Mammon and smile hello to a stream.” (11)

We can all ask ourselves what kind of life-path are we on, and is it the right one in the world as we see it? Do we cause more harm than good toward others, human and nonhuman, and ultimately to ourselves, in our behavior, values, and consumer choices? For whom and what do we really care beyond immediate gratification? We can all find ways to reduce the carbon footprint of the energy use in our personal and professional lives. Our capitalistic, consumer-driven society, that has brought on climate change and accelerating extinction of indigenous species and peoples around the world, will ultimately consume itself.

Many people and nonprofit organizations, and some excellent writers are addressing this complex global crisis. We must redefine progress as currently being to increase the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) on a planet of dwindling and finite resources. There are no grounds for fatalism and pessimism, or acceptance and continued involvement in such nihilistic economics. The longer governments and corporations delay in addressing the serious consequences of climate change, beginning already with extreme weather events destroying crops leading to food insecurity and famine in many regions, the more the poor will suffer first, and eventually the perpetrators, the planetary traitors of Earth Care. This is the ethic of world religions and aboriginal wisdom, now under the assault of mammon. Without Earth Care there can be no Health Care.

Facing the existential crises of climate change and the extinction of species calls for international cooperation—a United Environmental Nations—not “America First” nationalism and isolationism: and for a World Health Organization and World Bank that includes more veterinarians, ecologists, organic farmers, conservationists, nutritionists, and indigenous people’s tribal leaders, and not staff with the like-minded fixated on vaccines and antibiotics and insecticides as the primary tools of disease prevention, offering little else. Big Pharma profits while the Big Ag Food Industry—including most pet food manufacturers—continue their sickening business as usual and push against USDA Organic Food Certification, GMO Free food and product labeling.

Nutrition education and whole food preparation classes, in addition to humane and environmental education, should be in the curriculum of all schools around the world. This is one basic survival skill, among others, that all students should be learning as they face the Anthropocene apocalypse. Thousands of young people are coming together to live “off the grid,” or live more frugally, mindfully, and are healthier physically and spiritually. As in the Hopi Message presented at a gathering of Anishinaabe at the United Nations in 1992, when we learn to live in harmony with Nature, Gaia, our living planet, we will live well and die well. Part of this Message states:

“This Hopi ceremonial rattle represents Mother Earth. The line running around it is a time line and indicates that we are in the final days of the prophecy. What have you, as individuals, as nations and as the world body been doing to take care of this Earth? In the Earth today, humans poison their own food, water, and air with pollution. Many of us, including children, are left to starve. Many wars are still being fought. Greed and concern for material things is a common disease……Nature, the First People and the spirit of our ancestors are giving you loud warnings. Today, December 10, 1992, you see increasing floods, more damaging hurricanes, hail storms, climate changes and earthquakes as our prophesies said would come. Even animals and birds are warning us with strange change in their behavior such as the beaching of whales. Why do animals act like they know about the earth’s problems and most humans act like they know nothing? If we humans do not wake up to the warnings, the great purification will come to destroy this world just as the previous worlds were destroyed……If we return to spiritual harmony and live from our hearts, we can experience a paradise in this world.” (12)

This is our final choice; evolve or make the whole world suffer, and possibly perish. There is ancestral memory passed on from generation to generation, as in the Hopi message of a pending Fourth Extinction for our species. They did not experience two earlier extinctions of much life on this planet as in Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. (13)

Racial ancestral memories in the Jungian collective subconscious of any given civilization shape the present and future. Dr. Carl G. Jung contended that this “collective unconscious” is a part of the unconscious mind that is shared by all humans, containing inherited archetypal symbols and images, essentially a reservoir of ancestral memories and patterns that influence our thoughts, behaviors, and dreams, distinct from the personal unconscious which is specific to each individual’s experiences. (14)

The universal and universalizing nature of consciousness in the quantum field entanglements of cosmogenesis becomes individuated in the creation of sentient life. Some sentient beings create the empathosphere through loving, caring, sympatric, symbiotic relationships.

Devout believers in reincarnation would not hurt any living creature because it could have been a mother or father or lover in a past life. Some such communities were strictly vegan or vegetarian, often monastic. A Gallup International survey found that 57% of respondents around the world believe in life after death. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Judaism accept reincarnation in their belief systems.

There is now scientific confirmation of reincarnation that should make us all take note as per researcher Dr. Ian Stevenson’s 2001 book Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation. (15, 16) Evidence of reincarnation and universality and transmigration of conscious souls should make us mindful of potential transmogrification within our own species and others when we harm rather than heal and love. Beloved companion animals who manifest visually (“ghosts”) and in other ways, as I document in my 2011 book Animals & Nature First, (17) provide further confirmation that more lies beyond our mortal comprehension, and we should respect and care for all the life around us because all are part of us: what the Ojibwe recognize and refer to as respectful regard for all our relatives, Indinawemaaganidog.

What is wrong with the perception of those who do not see and feel in this way and cause so much harm and suffering? What is the condition of their civilization, health, and economy? Following the path of Indinawemaaganidog, the recovery of civilization and our health and economy is feasible. There is no other sustainable path to take without restoring our spiritual connections with our sentient world.

Justice For All Beings and The End of Terrorism

The road to peace and the end of terrorism and torture converge with the road to the end of our torturing and terrorizing animals. The end will be reached with a radical shift on our collective consciousness and conscience. The nonhuman sentient beings who we unjustly exploit for pleasure and profit will no longer be victims of terrorism, systemic terrorization, crippling injuries, and slaughter while being exploited and their plight ignored by the corrupted politics of profit and pleasure.

This radical, transformative shift means what Dr. Albert Schweitzer called living in “reverence for life.” This is indeed a challenge, but one that calls on all of us to achieve and connect deeply the plight of our own children around the world to those of all other species, plant and animal, who contribute more to the life and beauty and functional integrity of planet Earth than we humans.

To not make this shift, which translates into addressing the best interests and first priorities of civil society and the Earth community, rather than to either ignore the tragedy of reality and our responsibilities, or focus just on our own children while neglecting those of other species, will simply worsen the state of the world. It will make the future ever bleaker for the health and wellbeing our children’s children and those of other species whose inherent rights and intrinsic and ecological value the judicial system has yet to fully acknowledge. Animals are treated as commodities, objects of property and commerce.

Such objectivism, which dehumanizes our relationships with each other, fosters the delusion of separateness (but no man is an island), and the hubris of superiority and control. Science runs the risk here, like religion before it, of committing such hubris especially when the ends justify the means as with interrogative human torture, invasive animal experimentation and indiscriminate and cruel methods of pest and animal control. The corporate sector, with its control of state and federal legislators and long history of ecological terrorism and of terrorizing animals, has succeed in establishing laws to protect the status quo and shield the livestock and other animal industries from public scrutiny and accountability.

It troubles me deeply that the innate empathic sensitivity and ethical sensibility of our children are being corrupted by the way in which society continues to condone the cruel exploitation of animals, as in factory farms, research laboratories, by fur trade trappers, circus or rodeo entertainment industries and other arenas of animal cruelty and exploitation. Children are led to believe, by adult example, that such mistreatment is morally acceptable. But this moral and civil foundation is anthropocentric—for the “greater good of humankind” primarily, and with a predominance of pecuniary interests. So we make our environment carcinogenic and then make animals suffer in the hopes of finding profitable cures rather than addressing the harmful consequences of pecuniary interests (mammonism).

The moral injury inflicted on those who care about other animals and the environment—our shared global commons—(as well as various direct harms as per the looming global economic, climate change, ocean acidification, population and public health crises created in large part by ignorance and planetary plunder rather than humane stewardship) has yet to be addressed by the judicial system and international courts of law and trade organizations of global commerce. Crimes against humanity and crimes against nature are coins of the same currency.

A few decades ago I received complaints from listeners of a radio interview in which I said that all creatures should be given equal and fair consideration as members of Earth’s life community, and that all children who eat animals should see how they are killed, or at least how most are raised. As long as we continue to hide these truths from the next generation, denying or justifying the polarities of treating some animals as pets and companion-family-members and others as pests to be exterminated or creatures to be consumed, killed for sport and for their fur and experimented upon to find cures for diseases we largely bring upon ourselves, we will continue to suffer the consequences of our communities, religions, nations and justice systems marginalizing environmental concerns and denying the rights and interests of indigenous species and peoples.

We need better laws and effective enforcement and justice for all beings. While we strive to end the child sex trade, organ trafficking, female genital mutilation and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples (genocide) the end of other forms of terrorizing and harming the children of other species, including whaling, trophy hunting, fur trapping, bull fighting, and dog fights, along with puppy breeding mills, factory farms, commercial laboratory animal testing, wildlife poaching, trafficking, trade and habitat destruction (ecocide) must also be addressed nationally and internationally. Progress on one front (the human) will not succeed without progress on the other front— animals and the environment— because respect for life is a boundless ethic that determines our ultimate well-being. It must be absolute, or it is not at all. Our indebtedness is to all life on Earth that helps sustain our own calls for trans-species egalitarianism and accepting the moral duty of responsible care for the health and well-being of that Earth community of which our own is an interdependent part.

Two opposing cultures do not make a society. Democracy turns into hypocrisy—what D.H. Lawrence called “the equality of dirt”—when it purports to support the conflicting interests of takers and transformers, healers, and leavers, those who exploit and those who protect, the cultures of commerce and consumerism and of service and frugality. The latter was the primary “greater good” ethos of social democratic philosophy and intent, embracing neither unbridled capitalism and imperialism nor unconditional altruism. This dichotomy of conflicting cultures will never be resolved until both cultures give equal and fair consideration to the rights of all indigenous species and the global commons, and abandon their respective self-limiting perspectives of materialism and anthropocentrism in the name of ecological and trans-species democracy to embrace the best interests of all species and communities, human and nonhuman. This includes pathogens and parasites, a better understanding of whom would help temper our own pathogenic, parasitic relationship with the Earth and all who dwell therein.

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