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In this very first episode of the Force of Life podcast series, Mik Aidt sits down with Danish author and science communicator Tor Nørretranders to explore what it means to act in service to life on Earth.

The Danish author calls for an elders’ revolt, a senior uprise – a movement where older generations use their memory, wisdom and time to defend life on Earth. Tor points to awe as a vital source of motivation, and explains what we can learn from the cooperative spirit of Danish history, and why communities flourish when they share responsibility for the commons.

For more than four decades, Tor has been one of Denmark’s most original voices on science, culture and sustainability. He has written over 40 books, including The User Illusion (on consciousness and “exformation”), The Generous Man (on altruism and cooperation), and more recently a call for an “elders’ revolt” in the book Alderdomsoprør, Senior Uprise.

Tor’s lifelong project has been to understand what it means to be human in a vast universe and how we can pass life on in ways that sustain both our societies and our planet.

“Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living…”
~ MacKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, speaking during the Second World War, youtube-clip

Elders as change-makers

Now in his seventies, Tor argues that elders have a new and urgent role to play. They carry memories of what the world once was – edible plants in gardens, traditions of sharing knowledge – and can counteract what scientists call the shifting baseline syndrome. Their lived experience can help society recognise what has been lost and imagine how life might again be richer, more diverse and more meaningful.

Tor suggests that, just as the ‘youth revolt’ shaped culture in the 1960s and 1970s, the 21st century needs an elders’ revolt. Older generations have the time, the wisdom, and the motivation to fight for a better world, refusing to leave behind a planet in ruins.

Awe and the defence of life

A key theme in this conversation is awe. Tor stresses that feelings of wonder – whether at a sunset, a generous act, or the changing seasons on a daily walk – are not luxuries, but essential. The more we experience awe, the more we want to protect what inspires it. This creates a snowball effect: awe leads to protection, which preserves what will in turn inspire more awe.

This is about resonance: feeling that we vibrate with the world around us. In his view, cultivating this sense of “wow” is a vital step towards motivating climate and biodiversity action.

Community, commons and the cooperative spirit

The conversation also turns to Danish history and the “andelstanken” – the cooperative sharing principle. Tor Nørretranders describes how 19th-century farmers, faced with economic crisis, pooled resources and knowledge in shared machine stations and community halls. This cooperative movement, shaped by the poet-pastor N.F.S. Grundtvig, lifted education, culture and solidarity among ordinary people.

That legacy lives on in places like Samsø, the Danish island that became the world’s first to power itself entirely with renewable energy. Here, wind turbines were not imposed from above but owned together by locals, creating pride and participation. As Tor points out, communities flourish not in theory but when they share responsibility for something tangible – a commons such as land, language, or clean energy.

Reinventing politics and society

In today’s crisis atmosphere with climate instability, biodiversity loss, globalisation’s fragility, and even the return of authoritarian politics, Tor argues that change will not come primarily from leaders or institutions, but from local bubbles of self-sufficiency that spread and expand, just as water boils first in small bubbles.

He warns that community is not always romantic – it can be messy and frustrating – but insists it is through the sharing of commons and accepting the “annoyance” of other people that we can build resilience.

On politics, he notes that even flawed figures like Trump and Putin have re-introduced ‘politics’ into public life. The danger is obvious, but the energy of politics is also necessary for real change. What matters is ensuring that the answers we find are the right ones.

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About Tor Nørretranders

• Danish science writer and thinker, born 1955 in Copenhagen.
• Holds a master’s in environmental planning; former journalist, broadcaster, and professor of philosophy of science.
• Author of more than 40 books on consciousness, culture, environment, and community.
• Known internationally for The User Illusion (1991) and in Denmark for his work on fællesskab (community, commons) and sustainability.
• Currently focused on the role of elders in shaping a sustainable and meaningful future.

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“You never change things by figting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”
~ Richard Buckminster Fuller, in his 1981 book ‘Critical Path’ on page 7.

Reflections

Tor Nørretranders reminds us that wisdom comes not only from science or leaders but from lived experience, awe, and shared responsibility. Whether we look to the past, to our communities, or to reinvented politics, our choices today shape the story we pass on.

This episode premieres a new song, Force of Life, and closes with the song Return Again, written by Mik – in service to life on Earth.

Join: If you’d like to be part of the Force of Life meetings and conversations, email mik@forceoflife.earth.

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Overview of the interview with Tor Nørretranders

The interview has five parts, each focusing on a theme that runs through Tor’s work: the role of elders, the importance of awe, local resilience, shared commons, and the renewal of politics.

• Interview Part 1: Turning 70, shifting baselines, call for an “old age revolt”
Tor Nørretranders reflects on turning 70 and on a lifetime of writing about science, society, and nature. He shares why he now believes older generations have a vital role to play in shaping our future – perhaps even leading an ‘old age revolt.’”

• Interview Part 2: Awe, beauty, Kant’s ethic, Kierkegaard
Tor turns to something deeper – the power of awe. He explains how wonder, beauty, and ethics can guide us, and why living in a way we can be proud of may be the key to both happiness and sustainability.”

• Interview Part 3: The crisis of 2025, local bubbles, self-sufficiency
Tor addresses today’s crises – climate disruption, war, and insecurity – and why waiting for world leaders isn’t enough. Instead, he points to the importance of local self-sufficiency, small bubbles of resilience that can spread across society.”

• Interview Part 4: Grundtvig, Andelstanken, Samsø, and commons
Tor looks back to Danish history – to Grundtvig, the cooperative movement, and the island of Samsø. He shows how traditions of sharing the commons can inspire new forms of community and collective action today.”

• Interview Part 5: Politics, Trump, inequality, re-energising democracy
Tor talks politics. From Trump to inequality, he explains how destructive leaders still manage to re-energise democracy – and why true change depends less on politicians and more on people themselves.”

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Excerpts from Tor’s book ‘Senior Uprise’

“The deeper truth we face is this: the world we live in cannot go on as it is. It’s no longer possible to pretend the planet can stay unharmed by the way we produce food and goods. Agriculture and industry are wrecking our world – driving climate crisis, monotony, and a loss of life’s richness. Cheap chicken and endless motorways once felt like progress, but the smile has hardened as the costs have become undeniable.

Without a radical shift in both direction and speed, we’re headed straight into the ditch. Our world cannot continue like this. We must change course.

Yet too often we give up. We feel powerless in the hands of leaders who plunder nature and people’s souls. Alone, as consumers, we can’t simply opt out of the system while our meals, our flights, our habits keep destroying the world we love. And so we resign.

But must we? Isn’t it time to rise up, to walk away from the sinking ship and choose a way of living that doesn’t destroy the future? An uprising where we decide – together – that a rotten food industry collapses if we stop buying its products. That exploitative social media platforms vanish if we refuse to feed them our time, our data, and our clicks. That politicians stop paving over life if we deny them our votes.

If we all chose, at once, to change direction and accept the struggle it takes, we could reclaim power. That is uprising. And it can’t wait.” (…)

An agent of the good
“Rebellion, or uprising, is not just about complaining that others are destroying the world and dragging your friends through injustice. True rebellion is about taking responsibility.

It means choosing to be an agent of the good – to insist that another way is possible, and to catch a glimpse of its outline. To rebel is to move towards something better than what we have now, to admit that things could be different.

And it means this: the world only changes when we ourselves change. The problem is not only out there with others – it is also within us. What’s required is a fundamental, all-encompassing reckoning, including with ourselves and the very way we rebel.”

The word “old age” often feels harsh and unfitting. “Elder” or “senior” sounds kinder. But interestingly, [in the Danish language] old age rhymes with youth – and in many ways, it carries the same qualities we usually associate with being young: time to spare, joy for life, quick wit, and far fewer obligations to produce or raise children.

The “Senior Uprising” is about recognising that in today’s modern societies, there is a vast group of people who hold exactly what the world needs if we want to save the planet and reclaim our joy of living. They have abundant resources and deep wisdom, yet they often lack a clear, urgent sense of purpose – because they are no longer asked to produce or reproduce.” (…)

True rebellion
“The greatest uprising we can create today isn’t about sharpening weapons we don’t even have. It’s about seeking peace of mind.

The moment we recognise that holding hands, walking in nature, or watching a beetle crawl across bark matters more than a new stereo, a trending video, or the latest kitchen gadget – that’s when consumerism begins to lose its grip. True rebellion is stepping away from their acceleration, their consumer frenzy, their blind chase for efficiency that ends up destroying nature.

To rebel is to break free from dependency. Anyone who’s ever quit cigarettes knows: at first it feels impossible, but in truth, it isn’t. For two weeks your mind obsesses, then suddenly you discover that what the cigarette once gave you was already within you.

Addiction is just the cycle of filling an absence of absence. Smoke a cigarette, and the craving vanishes – for a moment. But after 14 days without, the absence of absence returns naturally. You don’t miss smoking anymore – except maybe the social ritual. And even that can be replaced… say, with a piece of salty liquorice.” (…)

Act, Belong, Commit
“Australia has a great tradition for boosting mental health: ABC. Three things make life good and keep your mind strong: be active, belong, and commit. Act, Belong, Commit. That’s the ABC. Take action, find your people, get involved.

Step out into the world and do something. That’s how you start feeling better. Do things with others, feel that you belong, join in and commit yourself. Hold your head high!

In the end, it’s all about taking action – throwing yourself into life. It works. In so many ways. In so many forms. Get up and get moving!” (…)

“Seek peace of mind, pride, self-respect, and honesty. This is what matters.”

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Tor Nørretranders’ book ‘Alderdomsoprør’ is available in Danish language on his website, www.tor.dk

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DIG DEEPER

“Climate, biodiversity, democracy are in decline. 72 per cent of the world now lives under autocracy. We have passed peak oil and will soon pass peak population, after which billions may vanish over the next century.

The question becomes: how long do we have? Nobody knows. That’s how complex systems collapse: slowly at first, then rapidly. Should we build bunkers? Only if we are prepared to defend them with guns when starving neighbours arrive – I am not.

Collapse forces us to ask different, more beautiful questions. If we lose it all, what truly matters? Love, nature, relationships? For me, it is all of these. Most of all: who do I want to be in all this?

That question calls us into adulthood, elderhood, leadership. We are no longer four-year-olds waiting for rescue; we are the adults born for these troubled times.

Collapse may even be a simplification, an undoing of the excessive complexity that has destroyed our planet. It forces us back to community, collaboration, growing food together, reconnecting. It is a kind of homecoming, bringing us back into sync with the flow of life, with nature, and with our true nature.

My mother once asked why, after three years in such a dark place, I seemed so happy. I told her I feel more alive and connected than ever. The urgency has forced me into living fully, now. I climb trees again, run through forests, dance, and grieve openly on the floor of my flat. It is raw, but it is real. And sometimes I wonder if, in her formidable wisdom, Mother Nature is not waiting to be saved by us – but is, in fact, saving us.”
~ Sarah Wilson, author, podcaster, social philosopher and renegade

Political and social echoes of the 1930s

“I think that what is happening now politically and socially is analogous to what happened around the world in the 1930-40 period because, like in the 1930 to 40 period, the gaps in wealth, gaps in values, and views about what policy should be have become more extreme – and the willingness to compromise, lose elections because of voting results, and trust in the system have dwindled.  I think most people are silent because they are afraid of retaliation if they speak up.”

Is the real threat to American capitalism coming from the far left – or from Trump’s brand of interventionism?

“It is coming from the same five forces that have always driven big cycle changes. They are

1. the big debt cycle that will likely lead to big debt problems that will threaten the existing monetary order,
2. big political problems within countries that are threatening existing political orders,
3. big geopolitical problems between countries that are threatening the existing world geopolitical order,
4. big acts of nature such as drought, floods and pandemics (most importantly climate change), and
5. mankind’s creating big impact through new technologies, most importantly artificial intelligence.

The interaction of these five forces will lead to huge and unimaginable changes over the next 5 years.”

~ Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, a billionaire businessman, hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and author – on 3 September 2025

Millions of people identified as ‘a cancer’

→ Medium – 19 March 2025:
Why Growth Is Driving the Collapse We Need
“Achieving rising GDP leads to increasing environmental impacts — they are intertwined. A post-growth economy offers something new.”

→ World Resources Institute – 9 September 2025:
Climate Action Has a Messaging Problem
“Climate solutions don’t just cut emissions. Around the world, they’re improving people’s lives in real and immediate ways — creating new jobs, cleaning the air, boosting food supplies, growing economies and so much more. So why have we failed to amass political support for climate action at the scale needed to halt the crisis? Messaging is part of the problem. We need to stop framing climate solutions solely as a means to reduce emissions and safeguard the future, and start talking about the countless ways they’re making people’s lives better today.”

→ The Independent – 10 September 2025:
One in four heatwaves would have been impossible without climate change, study finds
“Researchers found that top 14 major carbon polluters – including Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Gazprom and state coal industries in China and India – account for nearly a third of global heating”

The interconnections that bind all living systems

“Paul Hawken invites us into a richer awareness of complexity, carbon, and consciousness, and explores how life and mind are deeply entwined. What emerges is a call to unlearn outdated ways of knowing and to cultivate new practices of attuning to the intelligence of nature. This episode offers profound insights into regenerative action, ecological resilience, and how shifting our perception can help us live in reciprocity with the planet and one another.”

“Climate change needs to break us out of that way of thinking, to imagine the breakdowns in the world that we will see in the coming years, and to act to stop them.”
~ Matt Orsagh

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Transcript

MacKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, speaking in the 1940s:
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living.

Jingle:
Force of Life.

Tor Nørretranders: (00:18)
The old age uprising. We need old people. Now there’s a new role for old people and they’re intensely important for society because they have the time and the experience. So this, think, is a new kind of agenda and it’s very much about the fact that the environment is in a bad shape, that we have climate problems, that we have a loss of biodiversity, we have a loss of knowledge and skills and living, have a loss of awe in experiencing nature, we have a loss of the simple observation that life is worth living.

Donald Trump, American President, speaking to the UN Assembly in New York on 24 September 2025: (01:00)
So I have a little standing order in the White House: Never use the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?

Mik Aidt:
We live in this world now full of noise and aggression and polarised politics, pollution and destruction. But who says it has to be that way? What if kindness and trust and honesty suddenly began getting more interest in our communities and more votes in our elections? What if we actually had a movement like a reckoning, a revolution of values? The good news is that movement is already here. It just doesn’t have a name yet but it’s got one keyword and that’s life protecting life and making life worth living.

Jingle:
Force of Life

Mik:
So welcome to the Force of Life podcast series. My name is Mik, and I’m someone who’s been on the lookout – you could say searching high and low – for how we solve the climate crisis for quite some time.

Monty Python movie clip: (02:04)
You seek the holy grail?
That is our quest. Our quest is to find the holy grail. Yes.
It is. And so we’re looking for it. Yes, we have been some time. Ages!

Mik:
In a series of 10 ‘Climate Revolution’ interviews, I’ve been talking with people with good ideas from Australia and from around the world about how we create change, how we find that climate grail that’s going to change everything, how we get organised so that our governments will actually begin to work for us, the people, and not just for industry and where the money is.

And in the tenth episode of this Climate Revolution series, I talked with the British sustainability strategist Joseph Gelfer, who suggested that we scrap the way that we are doing things and actually build a new model:

Joseph Gelfer:
Historically unprecedented change. That is what is required. And the phrase I like to use is, you in service to life on earth. If you’re not in service to life on Earth, you don’t deserve to be in business.

Mik:
He was thinking, I think, quite far out of the box. We need to stop even talking about climate, he said. We need to start talking about politics that are rooted in service to life on Earth.

So today it’s a real pleasure now to be opening a new season, you could call it, of revolutionary series no longer under the ‘climate’ umbrella, but that ‘service to life’-banner that Joseph Gelfer introduced to us in the tenth episode of The Climate Revolution.

Jingle:
Force of life.

Mik:
We are enrolling now in the Australian Force of Life. And that means for myself that I’ll be putting down my hat as a climate activist. And I will not any longer be available as a volunteer in the climate action movement. Instead, I want to focus all my energy on the change at the service to life level. On the building of a new model in service to life on Earth.

MacKenzie King (1874-1950):
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living.

Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983):
Build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Margareth Thatcher, UK Prime Minister in 1979-1990:
Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.

Mik: (04:37)
It should be a gentle, kind and trustworthy model. So for inspiration, I looked to my home country, Denmark. I actually went on a bit of a mission there recently, jumping on board a small ferry that only takes passengers and bicycles. And then, hey, I was on my bicycle there, riding over the energy independent island of Samsø, looking at the wind turbines.

And then I got the privilege of meeting the Danish author Tor Nørretranders. Tor Nørretranders… for more than four decades, he’s been one of, I think, Denmark’s most original voices on science and culture and our place as human beings in this big universe. He’s an excellent writer, but he’s also someone worth listening to, as you will hear in the podcast episode here today.

Tor has got some ideas about how we can reinvent the world. And he’s got some experiences as well about how societies can find new ways of living together in times of crisis.

Monty Pyhton movie clip:
I have seen the grail!
Good for you.
I have seen it! I have seen it!
But there is one small problem.

Mik:
And according to Tor, an important element in this change, in this new model, could be an Elders Revolution.

Tor:
My name is Tor. I’m a 70-year-old writer. I’ve been writing about science, environment, energy, society and stuff like that for most of my life. I have an education in environmental planning, originally academic, but I’ve mostly been working in the media and producing books outside the media world for many, many years. It’s… I don’t know, it’s 40+ books or something. And my main interest has been ‘What is it like to be a human being?’ ‘How much of what you experience as a human being can you share with other human beings? And what should you share with other human beings? And how do we open our eyes to nature and the world and the universe?’

I’m an old amateur astronomer. I’m very interested in the stars. And how do we open up and and actually acknowledge the fact that we are living in this fantastic universe and this fantastic planet and that we also live in a society that has a lot of nice features and a lot of warmth between human beings, but also is suffering from all these mechanisms that take over the economy and the way societies run.

And so you can say my life has been one long walk of trying to understand what we can and should do as human beings to make sure that life will go on, that the show will go on.

The phenomenon of life is all about giving to the world a copy of yourself via sexual reproduction combined with a copy of someone else. But life is all about the ability to pass on that ability to live to someone else, to kids. And in a wider context to pass on a way of managing the environment or living in the environment that will make certain that people and animals and flowers and plants can go on living there. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

And then now as I turn 70, I start thinking, okay, I’m an old guy now. I was very much a child of the youth revolt, of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. But now I’m an old chap. And how would that fit into that picture? Because it’s obviously not a student revolt or anything like that anymore.

And so my latest book, which I published at my 70th birthday, is about the role of the old guys, the old women, and the old people in society. And much to my own surprise, it turns out that they, in my view, have a key role in how we should go about creating a better future. There are major reasons for that.

One is that there’s a phenomenon discovered in the 1970s in the science of fishing by a Canadian, a French Canadian fishing scientist, Daniel Pauli, who made a simple observation which he called the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ that every time a new generation of fishery scientists come about, they believe that the number of fish in the ocean that’s there when they arrived as professionals is the true number of fish in the oceans. And so they create a baseline which is this is what there is. And this is the baseline and we see if fish disappear compared to that baseline.

But you can show from the literature that the actual number of fish is falling all the time. So the shifting baseline is that you tend to believe that what was there when you came is the natural number, so to speak. So that the big changes you will never discover, because you assume that the world, as you came to know it, is the real world, so to speak.

And this simple idea of shifting baseline syndrome has now spread to a lot of sciences, far away from fishery, because it turns out to be the case in almost all walks of life that people tend to forget that the world that they learned about when they were young is not the actual world, but the world as it was at that time. And maybe there’s a lot of, for instance, in society, there’s a lot of hanging together forces, a lot of attracting forces that brought people together that have now disappeared. Nobody can remember because everyone growing up these days never knew about this.

There was a lot of phenomena in nature that we were familiar with a few hundred years ago, and any peasant would know the name of all these wild plants you could eat, for instance. They’re forgotten now. And you can even show the studies in Africa showing that for each generation there’s a big chunk of knowledge of the edibility of the wild plants that disappears. So it seems that we adjust our idea of how the world could be from observing how the world is when we start looking at it. And so we changed the baseline so that we never understand that there was something that was, in old times, was something that was more rich, there was a bigger variety, a bigger diversity of plans, of human relations, of features in society and so on. We tend to forget that.

And I think old people, people with experience are very important now because they can remember that there used to be snow on the roads in Denmark. We don’t have much snow anymore. When I was a kid, many, many, many years ago, it was every year there was snow in the roads. We used to have a lot of edible stuff in our gardens. We don’t have that anymore. We used to have a lot of stuff that… and ways of going about other people in society that have disappeared.

Old people are very important because they can say there are other ways than what we do now. instance, everybody is now consumed by the screens on their smartphones or their television screen or the computer screen. And does anyone remember the fact that you could read a book? …and it was not noisy and didn’t necessitate that you charge your battery all the time. I mean, the old people know things that are very useful.

Also, of course, old people know things old people don’t know and that younger people are better at. But the simple observation that old people have a knowledge that is very valuable to society and in particular to the environment is I think very heartening.

I grew up in a culture that would say, old people have no use basically. ‘They’re just stupid. We don’t need them.’ ‘They have all this wisdom crap that you heard about in primitive cultures is not relevant, is not interesting.’

So old people are just, I mean, we should support them and give them something to eat and nurse them and all that, but basically they’re of no use. And this I think has to change radically because there is a use for experience. The other thing that’s very important is to, if you look at the life of someone from a country like Denmark or Australia, these days, you could say life is split up in three parts. The first 20 years, the middle 50 years, and the last 20 years. The first 20 years is about being a child and a youngster.

And that’s where we usually assume all the change will come from and all the novelties will come from and all the trouble will come from and all the noise will come from. And then you have 50 years of production and reproduction. You take a job, you raise your kids, you do your stuff, you’re a grown up in society and all that. But nowadays, the story doesn’t end there after 20 plus 50 years.

Because the prognosis for someone like me being 70 is that statistically I will survive 20 years. Of course, the mean age, living age, lifespan in Denmark is not 90 years, but it’s 80 years. So you could say I would only have 10 years left. Yes, but that’s when you include all the people who die as kids or as youngsters.

For anyone who’s actually reached the age of 70, the prognosis is 20 more years to go. And that’s a long time. It’s as a long time I used as being a kid and as a youngster. And boy, did I learn a lot during those first 20 years. Did I do a lot? Did I make a lot of mistakes? Did I have a lot of fun?

Did I change stuff? I call for new agendas? Did I make noise and problems for institutions? Yes, I did. I was kicked out of school. was grading at Astronomy Club and the Astronomical Union in Scandinavia. I was doing politics. was doing all kinds of weird stuff in those first 20 years. And why shouldn’t I be doing that in the last 20 years? Because now, like anyone,

At this age, I have a lot of time, I have a lot of experience, and I have a lot of feeling of something going wrong. I have this feeling that this is not good, there’s something wrong here. I don’t want to leave this planet in a messy state if I can in any way work against that. I want to be proud of myself and the environment that I leave behind. So that’s why I wrote this book calling for an old age revolt, if you like. In Denmark, we call it ‘ungdomsoprør’, the revolt of the young people, what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. So now it should be the old age revolt or the old age uprising.

Another way of saying it is a good old people. need good old people also in these times of artificial intelligence and all that. We need old people. And that to me is news in the sense that I didn’t think that way 20 or 30 years ago. That now there’s a new role for old people and they’re intensely important for society because they have the time and the experience. So this I think is a new kind of agenda.

And it’s very much about the fact that the environment is in a bad shape, that we have climate problems, that we a loss of biodiversity, we have a loss of knowledge and skills in living, we have a loss of awe in experiencing nature, we have a loss of the simple observation that life is worth living. And I think that’s very important. And I think we can learn a lot from very old people.

I’ve learned a lot from friends who were very close to dying. Some of them actually died, some of them survived the verdict of the medical doctors. But there’s a surprising fact, which I think has been well known for many, many years, but it’s not spoken very much about, that people who very close to death suddenly get the ability to see the world as a beautiful and fantastic and very, very rich thing. And they suddenly start enjoying the color of a flower or the extent of the sky or a gentle act by another human being. They suddenly appreciate that in a new way. And you can put this in many ways, but you can say,

When you are younger and death is an abstraction far away, you tend to ask yourself, what kind of movie is that that I’m part of? Is this a good movie or a bad movie? Is something happening in this movie or not? And so you evaluate and judge the movie you feel part of. When you’re very close to death, you don’t really worry about, is this a good movie or a bad movie? you worry about is this a movie or is this not a movie? And so you take another approach, you suddenly take what is there as what it is instead of judging and comparing or… Could I have been a professional football player or could I have been an opera singer or could I have had blah blah blah blah.

All of this crap that we tend to think and especially people over 60 tend to think about their life in terms of but if I had chosen that profession or that woman or that country or that something I would have had a much more interesting life.

And that’s big danger that people start thinking in parallel universes or if only I had done this or that then everything would be nice and so on. And it turns out of course that this is silly because if you think about it in terms of life partners on a depressed afternoon you can think oh if only I had chosen her or her or her and then you come up with 17 interesting women you could have chosen. If you have chosen one of them, you would be very happy. Each of them you would be very happy. But then you can end your little meditation of depression by asking yourself, yes, but I couldn’t have had all of them anyway. No way I could have gone through 17 marriages or 17 jobs or 17 countries. So you have to choose and you have to accept that I’ve chosen this.

I’m no longer young enough to start again. So I have to accept myself and the world as it is and see what problems should I address, what should I do something about and look how beautiful it is. And I think you can learn that from people who are very close to death. And one of the things I’ve been interested in is are there techniques that we could use to bring this very strong kind of state of presence that you find amongst people close to death or believing themselves to be close to death, can we take that and sort of roll it backwards into life so you don’t have to be close to death to get this immediate observation of the beauty of the world?

And I think that’s in many ways a key to how to make people more aware of stuff like environmental problems, biodiversity, climate and stuff, is to help us understand the beauty and also the problem of the world in this very direct sense. And I have no simple answer, but there’s no question that many techniques used in many cultures like meditation will help you observe the world as it is. That going spending more time in nature will help you understand stuff like this. Walking more, I have a daily one hour walk that I do. And too many people surprise along the same route in the landscape. And people say, that’s weird. Why don’t you take another route every day? No, because I want to see the seasons and the daily weather change. The more you do stuff like that, the closer you get to some kind of awareness of wow.

This is just fantastic. So I think awe and the feeling of wow and the feeling of wow is what we need to share. And that is really appreciating life and stuff. And I think old people have a lot to teach younger people about that. Just sit down and observe and take it in and enjoy.

PART 2

Tor: (23:52)
The English word awe is very important here. There’s a number of psychologists studying over the past few decades to study this phenomenon of this awe feeling of meeting something in nature or society that fills you with this sense of it’s very big, it’s very fantastic, and it forces you to change your view of many things. And that can be… or it can be a sunset or it can be an act of generosity you see amongst human beings. can be many different things but it will just give you this feeling of wow and also your hair you will have your hair is raising on your skin and so on goosebumps and I think that is very important because it it’s something we all want and we all feel very strongly when we have it not very often but you can seek it and it turns out that the more you feel ore, the more you want to protect that which fills you with ore, like nature. So it’s almost a snowball effect that nature will fill you with ore. Ore will want you to protect nature, which then will persist and therefore fill you with more ore.

The more you feel this awe thing, the more you want to protect what feeds it and so it becomes like a snowball. And I think that’s a very important thing that everybody should experience the beauty of life. And I’m not sure you find that on a screen, on a smartphone. You find directions to it.

I use smartphones and computers a lot and it helps me find the places that will fill me with awe, but not necessarily itself do it. And I think we need to find more of that and we need to have this feeling of resonance as Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist calls it, this feeling of resonance with the environment where we can sense that I’m vibrating together with the world. I think that’s very important.

Of course you have to then to do something and to do something together with other human beings. But I’m just saying we should be very interested in what will make us feel at home in the world. And then of course we should be eager to protect the world that we feel at home with. And the reason I believe that the right thing to do is to start locally is that you don’t have to ask anyone.

You don’t have to look at what other people do. You can just say, how about us in our little community here trying to be more self-sufficient? So it’s not something that you have to wait for other people to allow you to do. And if we go on the level of philosophy, of ethics and stuff like that, there’s a very famous philosopher, the most famous of modern philosophers perhaps.

Emmanuel Kant, a German guy from the 1700s, who came up with this very simple idea which unfortunately has a very silly name, the Categorial Imperative, which everybody thinks, that’s not for me, and that’s very German and impossible to understand. But the idea is extremely simple. The idea that Kant has is that whenever you want to do something, ask yourself, would I be happy if other people in the same situation as I am in, was doing the same thing. And then if you feel, I wouldn’t be happy if other people did what I’m about to do, then you shouldn’t do it. If you feel I would be happy if other people did this, then you should do it. And you could say, what’s the point in that? The point is that you don’t direct what other people should do. You only say, I want to act in such a way that I would like other people to act in the same way if they were in the same situation.

I would be happy if they did so, but I’m not trying to direct them to do so. And the point in this is that you see yourself as someone who represents the good way of doing stuff. Now, why would I not be happy if other people were doing what I was about to do? For instance, if I was lying, I wouldn’t be happy if everybody was lying, because that would mean that nobody would believe each other, so I couldn’t lie either.

So it sort of falsifies itself the idea of lying. Kant uses this example himself. Another modern example would be if everybody was flying all the time to Southeast Asia for vacation, we know that the climate would change in such a way that Southeast Asia would be not a very pleasant place to be on a vacation. So in a sense you can ask yourself…

If I want to go on this trip with an airline along the way just to have a week of holiday, would I be happy if everybody did that? No, I would not be happy because then the climate would change and it wouldn’t be pleasant to be there. So maybe I shouldn’t do it either. So it’s way of not of directing what other people should do, but just of seeing yourself as someone who does things that you would like also other people to do if they wanted to.

And that is another way of seeing the whole problem with the environment and the climate and everything that is very simple in the sense that you should be proud of your own life. You should be proud of what you’re doing. You shouldn’t be ashamed. You shouldn’t try to hide what you’re doing because honestly you would like other people not to know and not to do what you are doing. But that you are doing things that you believe in and that you’re proud of.

And I think it’s very important, and now since I’m interested in the elder people, it’s very important that we do stuff that we’re proud of, that we’re not ashamed of. We don’t try to hide stuff. And I think much of modern life is actually something that people want to hide. They want to be private about it. They don’t want to share it with other people.

And that’s not a good recipe for a good life. And it wasn’t the way it used to be. Just a few hundred years ago, you couldn’t really hide from other people. So I think be sort of be brave and be proud and be happy and choose what you’re doing as something that you want to choose. You’re proud of your life.

And the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, mostly known for all of this stuff with angst and dread and fear and trembling and all that, he says that the old age is where you realise the dreams of your youth. That’s where you do the things you would always hope you could do. And now there’s the time, there’s the experience, there’s the freedom to do what you hope to do as a young person. And now we should all do it. And I’m sure the young people will come up with new dreams and new hopes and they will realise that.

. . .

SONG:
‘Force of Life’ – audio mp3

Verse 1:
There is a way to calm the noise
And realise we have a choice
As waters rise and forests burn
When we’re rooted, we stand firm

Pre-Chorus:
We got the key to start again
Learn to live as Earth’s own kin
Every breath is a gift we share
Every touch is a vow of care

Chorus:
It’s Life! Full of wonder, wonder and awe
It’s Life! It takes courage, courage and strength
It’s Life! With purpose, purpose and love
Life is a Force – and you’re invited to join

Verse 2:
Elders hold the memory
Youth the dreams and energy
Together weaving threads of time
Equal, inclusive and kind

Pre-Chorus:
From the soil, from the commons
From the stories from the heart
a reckoning against greed and corruption
a gentle revolt in service to life

Chorus:
It’s Life! Full of wonder, wonder and awe
It’s Life! It takes courage, courage and strength
It’s Life! With purpose, purpose and love
Life is a Force – and you’re invited to join

[Instrumental intermission]

Bridge:
The new world doesn’t need to be complete
It will still make the old model obsolete

Final Chorus:
It’s Life! Full of wonder, wonder and awe
It’s Life! It takes courage, courage and strength
It’s Life! With purpose, purpose and love
Life is a Force – and you’re invited to join

Outro:
Force of Life
For all the things that make life worth living

. . .

Audio statements:
MacKenzie King: (31:40)
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living.

Voice 1:
The old carry memory of what has been lost; the young carry dreams of what could be. Together they form a circle of guidance.

Joseph Gelfer:
Historically unprecedented change is what is required. If you’re not in service life on earth, you don’t deserve to be in business.

Buckminster Fuller:
It is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.

. . .

Tor: (34:36)
The first thing we have to deal with now that there is this atmosphere of crisis, that we have the environmental problems, have the loss of diversity, loss of climate stability, we have the loss of the sense of security that we’ve had at least for two or three decades in terms of military situations, and so on.

Lot of things have been changing and I think the year of 2025 has been a year of of lot of innocence. That suddenly we realise that war isn’t that far away, that even if people were saying like 10 years ago that they doubted that there was a real climate effect, I mean it’s so obvious now not only that it’s there but also that it’s very unpleasant and ruins many aspects of our lives and so on. There’s this very deep sense that we really have to do something. And I think we can wait for then declarations in the United Nations and we can wait for the top leaders of the world to meet and all that. And we’ve basically been waiting for that for a very long time.

Another thing we can do is more like… say, how does water start boiling? It’s not that water boils all over at the same time and all becomes steam at the same time. It’s more like water gets hot and you have bubbles of steam and they expand and they go to the surface of the water and it starts bubbling and it’s boiling. It’s a local effect generated by a global change in temperature that will eventually lead to all the water becoming steam. Now, I think the way societies will change is more that we will have local bubbles of self-sustainability, of self-dependence, and that they will grow because people understand I have an ethical problem with being part of this shitty world development and the direction the world is taking.

But also I have a very, very simple and very, very basic protection of myself and my family and my kids and my village on the agenda, which is all about maybe suddenly there’s no more food to come with the ferry to our island of Samsø. Maybe there’s no more water easily available. Maybe electricity will stop for a while and stuff like that. Maybe all this going to the theater in the larger cities will be not possible for a period of time and so on. So maybe we will have to be able to go about our lives based more on local resources than we used to.

We’ve been through decades of globalisation and this idea that everything should be produced on another continent and that not a simple shoe could be produced without five different continents contributing to the shoe. We’ve been used to all this globalisation, industrialisation, which we are realising now makes us extremely vulnerable because nobody knows how to repair a shoe.

100 years ago everybody who could make a shoe could also repair shoe. Nowadays nobody can make a shoe on their own and nobody can repair a shoe on their own. So it’s difficult for us to do anything on our own anymore. And that makes us very, very vulnerable because if these big ocean ships cannot come with the soles for the shoes from one continent and the laces from another continent, nobody can make a shoe anymore. So we have to think more in terms of self-sustainability and self-sufficiency so that we can create bubbles that will allow for people to live even in a world of crisis and that slowly these bubbles will expand and cover the whole planet. I think that’s more efficient than if we wait for some political agenda being made.

Then of course these small bubbles will have to fight with the people in power who want to have this division of labor and division of production. But then we have to take that fight. If you look at agriculture today, the global agricultural situation, it’s very close to collapsing. And we have to go back to the old virtues of being able to produce on one farm basically everything.

Mik:
Is there something we can learn from the Danish history, like from the cooperative movement, for instance, which has really become so embedded in Danish culture?

Tor:
Danish culture is very influenced by a guy living in the 1800s called Grundtvig, Niels Frederik Severin Grundtvig. He was a priest and he was a politician and he was a poet, but mostly he was the voice of the enlightenment-like change that was amongst Danish peasants in the late 1800s.

And that change came about due to a crisis. Maybe most changes in the world come about due to crisis. That’s what the word ‘crisis’ actually means in Greek: Something that changes. Now, there was a crisis because the prices were dropping drastically on corn or on grains, on wheat and rye or whatever.

Mostly because huge areas in what is now Eastern Europe and Russia were suddenly contributing to the world market and so the prices fell. And Danish peasants couldn’t get the money they wanted for their produce and so they discovered they had to change more to animals, pigs, cows and whatever.

Nowadays we are more skeptical about animals than there was a reason to be at that time because that was in the old agricultural style where the animals were actually integrated into the small farm and a small farm would have a cow and a few horses and a few pigs and a lot of hens and chicken and whatever and it was ecologically sound, there was a closed loop there of matter going around, very different from modern agriculture. But at that time, there were two things missing for the farmers to change their style. One was knowledge, and the other was machinery. And what they did together in something called Andelsbevægelsen, which is owning a together movement. The owning a together movement, Andelsbevægelsen, came up with two strategic features. One was the Forsamlingshus, which was the place where people would meet and discuss stuff, sing songs, many of them written by this guy Grundtvig, discuss how to understand the universe and sort of the average peasant was lifted in his knowledge of the world because he needed to change his way of being a peasant.

And the other thing was the machine station, which was the machine station, the place where you could borrow these modern machines you needed to do agriculture. People could share them. They didn’t need them all the time. And so they could go to this machine station and get what they wanted for a short period. So peasants had to collaborate to change and they had to educate to change.

And this movement was very influential in Denmark. It created the high school, the high school or the sort of adult high school movement. And it created a wonderful culture of poetry and songs and literature that was all about what is the meaning of life, what is the meaning of being a peasant and so on.

And that was a very beautiful thing. And one of the things that it really helped was governing the commons. There was a tradition amongst Danish peasants that there would be a common outside the village, a grass field that everybody would use and could put their cattle or whatever on to grass. And nobody would own it. Everybody would share it. It would be governed together there was this common role of governing the commons as it has been expressed many years later. And the point was that you had to share this and you had to learn how to live together with it. And so this idea of sharing commons was essential many years later when this island where we’re sitting now, the island of Samsø in Denmark, became pretty well known all around the world because it was the first island in the world that decided to be self-sufficient with renewable energy. Basically windmills and also a little biomass energy production. And Samsø have these windmills and they have an enormous amount of visitors from all over the world who come and look at the windmills and say ‘Very nice windmills, but we basically have windmills ourselves. What is so special about this?’

And Søren Hermansen, who is director of Samsø Energiakademi, the Energy Academy here, he had this problem that he had difficulty explaining foreigners what it meant that they did it together. Samsø created these windmills by sharing them very often by Andele – that is: owning it together. And that was a different story from the windmills you see many other places where people are unhappy that there are windmills in their neighborhood because they look big and in old days they also were noisy and so on. But on this island, the population was very happy with the windmills. Basically because they were part of it. They partly owned the windmills or at least some of them.

And so, Søren Hermansen came to me and said, how can we tell this story about doing it together? And this is long before I lived on Samsø. I’ve lived here now for seven years, but that’s partly comes from this process of trying to explain to an international audience, what is this sharing the windmills all about? And so we wrote a book about doing it together.

It does exist in English. It’s called ‘Commodities’. It’s available on Kindle. Commodities is a book saying sharing the common resources like the wind energy is what makes communities interesting. Because there’s a lot of… Even at that time when we wrote the book 15 years ago, was already a lot of interest in communities. Nowadays there’s a huge interest in communities. And the problem is that I see this interest as very often very romantic. People think, oh, if we just, when we do things together, everybody will be happy. But the problem is that there’s a lot of friction and a lot of trouble in doing things together. And you get annoyed by these other people who are involved in this project and you get more more annoyed every Thursday when you have this meeting and they still complain about the same silly little detail.

And so there’s this problem that people lose interest in doing things together because it’s actually not as nice as you would have thought when you just think of, whoa, community, everybody wants to be part of community. There’s someone who once made the observation that of all the words used in social science, like state and market and union and whatever. There’s only one word, community, that is always used in a positive sense but never in the same way. So it’s sort of everybody likes community, nobody knows what it is, and most people don’t like it when they experience it for more than a few weeks. So our argument was, communities are like children. It’s the best thing in the world and nothing can make you more happier than dealing with children.

But it’s also the worst thing in the world. Nothing can make you more unhappy and impatient than children. It’s the same stuff with communities. Now why can you love your children? Because it’s a biological necessity. There’s no question about it. Why can you love a community of grown-ups that annoy each other? Because you have a mission together. And what could that mission be? That could be to govern a commons.

that is to share a big resource that nobody owns but can only be utilised if you do it together. Like the wind energy at Samsø, you had to build these windmills, you had to run them, you had to create a network of electricity and stuff. You have to do all this and for that you need other people.

And you need to accept the fact that other people differ from yourself, have their own opinions about the world, which is a very annoying feature of other people. And they go about making their own plans. Very annoying. But you have to share with them because you have something important to do. And so the idea is with this commodity concept that if a community wants to be well functioning, it should have some kind of common that it is dealing with and sharing, everybody in the community is sharing this common. And that can be of course the wind, but it could also be land, it could also be the ocean and the fish in the ocean, or it could be the language, we speak together, nobody owns that, but everybody contributes, it could be the culture, it could be many things, it could be outer space, that are things we share in common.

Nobody owns it, but you can only really use it if you use it together with other people. And so the recipe we come up with by observation, it’s not a thought, it’s more like an observation, is that what communities need is something to share. If you share something, it’s meaningful to be in a community. If you don’t share anything, it’s just a pestilence.

And you must accept the fact that other people are other people, they are different and they have different ideas and plans and values than yourself, which is annoying. And like I say to my wife, the big problem with you is that you are another person with your own ideas and your own value judgments and stuff like that. I find that very annoying that you are another person. And she looks at me and she says, okay, how about yourself then?

And of course, I’m another person too. So I think to take out the romantic part of the community and say, we have to start saying other people are very annoying and very beautiful, just like kids.

Movie clip: (51:18)
This is your life. Live it by your truth.

Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Choose life. Conquer your mind. You can do it.

Jingle:
Force of Life

MacKenzie King:
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction all that makes life itself worth living.

Bill McKibben:
This is as dark a moment as there’s ever been in our democracy and our planet is overheating fast.

They don’t know what they’re playing with.
Sorry?

ABC News reader: (52:05)
A decade of inaction and climate culture wars had left Australia exposed to the effects of climate change.

Mik:
The world is on fire. Or rather, some parts are burning, while other parts are being flooded or they’re melting. And food prices are rising, some people can’t even afford to eat, so hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets protesting and so on. Some of us, I for one, begin to feel like we’re being taken back to the 1930s.

Youtube-video clip – Life Under Adolf Hitler: The First Years Of Nazi Germany:
Hitler’s first radio address in 1933: It is experienced in the entire history of the country. There are hundreds of thousands of people homeless.
The misery of our people is horrible to behold. Millions are unemployed and starving. The task ahead is massive. Germany is suffering from the most severe crisis in the standard of living.

Mik:
All the signs are there. We’re seeing the aggression built and the slide towards fascism and authoritarian leaders. And that’s when I’m reminded once again about the old quote from the American architect and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller, who talked about how we change things. He said:

Richard Buckminster Fuller:
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Mik: (53:52)
But if we are serious about creating change, which we certainly are, then don’t we also need some kind of revolution in politics as well? Like revolutionary politics rooted in service to life on earth, as Joseph Gelfer said.

Tor:
One thing that I noted in what he was talking about was that he insisted on saying that there was good stuff in Donald Trump and Putin and whatever people that are nowadays seen as very bad guys. And indeed they are bad guys, but they’re also interesting bad guys because they’re bad guys in a new way or in a way that we haven’t seen for like half a century. And that is that they’re reintroducing politics.

They have very weird and bad political ideas, but they have political ideas. And what we’ve seen in the past half century or more is that politics sort of collapsed into some kind of advanced form of administration. That it was all about sort of what is the economical consequence of this or that act or… How can we in a more rational way run the state institutions and so on? How can the state help private enterprise make more money? How can we deal with the immigration problem so that we get the immigrants we need when we need them but not when we don’t need them and all this weird stuff which is basically administration, which is not politics.

And in a sense, with all these stupid ideas, Donald Trump reintroduces the simple thing that a politician is a guy with some ideas that he wants to use to change society. Now, of course, it’s the wrong ideas and it’s the bad ideas and so on, but it is the old-style politician coming back with a vision and a direction for things to go. And you can say that’s very dangerous, but you could also say: Yes, but it’s also opening up new possibilities.

And it’s a little bit like the 1930s, a hundred years ago, where you had fascism, which on the one hand sort of made politics very real and very close to people and addressed their inner emotional and even sexual needs in a way that politics hadn’t done for a long time. But on the other hand, it also crippled politics and society into something that was very very unpleasant.

So with fascism for instance you get you energise the political discussion in society in a very very dangerous way and the question is can you get energy into the political discussion without the risk of the wrong outcome like fascism or Trump or Putin.

And I think the answer is no, you cannot get that. You have to accept that we are now in such a huge transformation of society in a direction that I’m sure will end with a green revolution, with a new way of producing stuff, with everything being reinvented, societal structures, technological structures, our way of using the environment, everything will be reinvented. And now there’s this struggle, it is: Should we be greener or less green? And we have to go through that struggle and that unpleasant discussion to get to where we want to go, that is reinventing the world.

And so in a sense, one of my friends said that a guy like Donald Trump is raising all the right questions but giving all the wrong answers. And I think that that is the essence of it being political.

And I think that’s good in a way, but of course we have to then fight to get the right answers. Remember what it was like a decade or two ago that everybody was, there was consensus amongst everybody about this is the rational thing to do and this is not the rational thing to do. Politics wasn’t there and it felt very secure and very sort of, we were all very sort of well-educated and sophisticated than the United States, would say Boston-like. Everybody agreed on the right things and did the right things and so on. And it was very nice, but it didn’t address the real problems like the enormous inequality in society or the enormous problems with the environment. And now we have to face all these issues, including the inequality in society, including the fact that half the American population believes that they need a guy like Trump to protect their interests.

I think they’re wrong about it, but you have to accept the fact that there is a true problem here. And I think the same goes for Britain, the same goes for many European countries now, that the population is very unhappy and that’s what democracy is for. We have to address this. But I think mostly it’s, I’ve always had the idea that you shouldn’t try to influence, for instance, politicians, or for that matter politics, you should try to influence the population. Because the only thing that politicians listen to is the population, the voters.

If the voters won’t vote for them, that makes a difference. But if you try to please the politicians and show them this very interesting option, they will ignore you. The only thing they will not ignore is if the voters won’t vote for them. And so: Forget about the politicians, forget about the men in power.

I would even say forget about the business leaders because the moment they understand that, for instance, the way agriculture is run today does not have a future and there’s therefore no money in it in the long run. There might be money in the next five years or 10 years, but in the long run it’s dead. Industry is dead in the long run as it’s run today.

But there’s a lot of opportunity they can seek, but they have to change. So in a sense, I think it’s more important to create this change and to create awareness of this change than to change the particular politicians or the particular business leaders. They’ll be kicked out anyway. I don’t find any satisfaction. I don’t find a revolutionary satisfaction in killing the men and ladies in power, I think they’ll just go obsolete.

I think it’s more interesting to make them obsolete than to necessarily to kill them. I have no personal aggression, but I think that there’s a problem with them and we should kick them out of office.

MacKenzie King:
Unite in a national effort to save from destruction…

Mik:
Tor Nørretrandes reminds us that wisdom comes not only from books and leaders, but from lived experience, from wonder, from community, and from the courage to face change. Whether we look to the past, to our local communities, or to the new possibilities of politics, our choices today shape the world we leave behind for the next generation. #FindYourRole. Find your own role in this ongoing story about how we reinvent and change the world.

Mik: (01:01:58)
If you’ve been inspired by this episode and you’ve seen a door opening maybe, use the inspiration to write a song about it or a poem or a theatre play or maybe that book you always thought that you were going to write or simply prompt AI to do something by giving it a surprising unexpected twist in what you ask for.

Sir David Attenborough:
There just could be a change in moral attitude from people worldwide, politicians worldwide, to see that self-interest is for the past, common interest is for the future.

Mik: (01:02:43)
So expect more Force of Life episodes on their way. And in the meantime, we’ll be holding meetings in Zoom online, teaming up with good people, change makers, service to life custodians from all over the world, actually. And you can join us in that group of Zoom-meeters if you send me an email on: mik @ forceoflife.earth. My name is Mik Aidt, and you’ve been listening to the first episode of The Force of Life.

. . .

SONG (01:03:21)

“Return again”

[Verse 1]
I hear you, Mother Earth, not in words
but in the silence beneath the trees.
A heartbeat in the soil,
a whisper carried by wind

The soil breathes
The trees remember
Tending the Earth
as she has tended us.

[Bridge]
We came from you,
and to you, we will return.
Every breath we take is a gift
Every drop of rain, is kindness of Planet Earth

[Chorus]
Return again, to the land of fertility
Return again, to what we once knew
It’s how we listen, it’s how we care

[Verse 2]
We are not separate.
We are not above.
We are the air,
the birdsong,
the trembling leaf.

[Bridge]
There is still time
To touch the ground
with bare feet.
To teach again
the language of kindness,
of courage,
of enough.

[Chorus]
Return again, to the land of fertility
Return again, to what we once knew
It’s how we listen, it’s how we care

. . .

---