Our guest lecturer tonight is not an ordinary man.
 A few hours ago I saw him doing a very beautiful spiritual meditation dance with about 50 people.
 Alan Watts is a prolific writer whose works are both incisive and delightful to read.
 Through the years he has moved through many different professions, having served as a minister,
 professor, a research associate, editor, and probably many other things that I don't know about.
 [laughter]
 As most of you know, his writings relate to many different fields,
 but he is perhaps best known for having taken the profound spiritual wisdom of the East
 and after having probed and experienced it himself, made it available to us of the Western heritage.
 As would be expected of anyone who speaks as openly and as directly as Alan Watts does,
 there have been critics and detractors.
 As best I can observe, his response to those criticisms has been simply to do what he talks about doing,
 is to stand in the world and to be himself.
 The workshop this weekend and this lecture this evening are among the programs of the Laos Health
 which are designed to open up various aspects of the human potential.
 Dr. Watts' subject tonight is ecology and religion.
 I know that long before ecology became a popular public issue,
 Dr. Watts was speaking about the relation of man and nature as being the central aspect of life,
 and I'm sure that he will open up many creative and adventurous responses in us here tonight.
 Alan, we welcome you and look forward to hearing you.
 [Applause]
 I suppose most people now know what ecology is,
 but just in case there are some people in the audience who don't,
 I should explain that ecology is that branch of science which deals with the relationship between organisms and their environments.
 The word is, of course, Greek,
 "eikos" meaning the house or the household, "loyos" meaning the rationale of it,
 as in economics, which is a similar word.
 Ecology arose in Western science for this simple reason,
 that when you try to describe completely the behavior of any living organism,
 you find that you cannot describe the organism without at the same time describing its environment.
 And that led to a very interesting thought, that the idea of a separate organism is false.
 And that, however, is an idea implanted in everyone's common sense.
 One thinks of oneself as a separate being,
 and not merely as a separate body, but it goes, it gets worse than that,
 as a separate ego inside a body.
 And so, in common speech, we are apt to say, "I have a body" rather than "I am a body."
 In fact, we look upon our bodies rather contemptuously,
 because we know they're going to fall apart.
 The body, the material, the physical aspect is always in some way considered inferior
 to the mental, the spiritual, the psychological aspect.
 And so we feel, we are brought up to feel, divided into two parts,
 the mind on the one hand, or the soul,
 and on the other hand, the body, the corpus, the corpse.
 And our whole ecological crisis results from this kind of schizophrenic attitude towards our identity.
 Now what is the ecological crisis?
 It is this.
 We'll just add it up by title.
 The human world is dangerously overpopulated.
 And this overpopulation is the result to some considerable degree of our progress in medical sciences.
 We are not so easily wiped out by plagues.
 At the same time, our overpopulated and technological society is eating up the earth at a fantastic pace,
 so that people who study, scientists who study food problems predict that by the year 1975,
 there will be a worldwide famine unless we can increase the production of food by 25%.
 It will be possible, but quite difficult, to increase the food production by 2%.
 We are at the same time fouling our own nest.
 We are polluting the atmosphere, and we are polluting the water.
 And water, incidentally, is the element necessary for life that is most necessary and in lowest supply.
 We are tearing the forests off our hills for building purposes, and even more so for making paper,
 upon which to print information, so that every literate person today is practically suffocated in mountains of paper.
 And think also of your supermarket, the paper bags in which you carry out your groceries
 instead of following the old-fashioned custom of taking a market basket to the store.
 Paper wrapping everywhere, all of it destroyed trees.
 And it isn't as simple as that.
 For every pound of paper, and compare a pound of plastic, it seems that plastic might be the solution.
 But whereas the pound of paper will require, say, 5 gallons of water to manufacture it, the pound of plastic will require 30.
 And that water is all discarded.
 Let's go on.
 For military reasons, we have created nuclear energy, and there are also nuclear wastes.
 And these wastes have to be disposed of, not to mention the existence of nuclear warheads,
 which of course could destroy all life on this planet at any time.
 But what to do with the wastes?
 They are being put in enormous underground and sometimes underwater concrete vats.
 And these vats will wear out before the substances they contain cease to be radioactive.
 The problem with the nuclear weapons is not how to avoid their use in war, but how to get them off the planet.
 Then we will go on to consider the various chemicals that have been prepared for biological and chemical warfare.
 And again the problem is how to get rid of them, not how to avoid using them.
 [The man in the white shirt is a man who has been in the war for over a century.]
 Now any one of these problems that I've mentioned, taken alone, would be a serious threat to human survival.
 But taken all together, where are we?
 We're insane.
 And this problem of man in relation to his environment overshadows every other political problem.
 It isn't just that, as you might say, a president of the United States suddenly gets alarmed
 about man's relationship to his environment and uses it as a political gimmick
 to divert attention from racial relations.
 It isn't like that.
 It's like when Teedle Gum and Tweedle Dee agreed to have a battle.
 Just by then flew a monstrous crow as black as a tar barrel,
 which frightened both those heroes so they quite forgot their quarrel.
 That's what's happening.
 In other words, all the traditional political problems as to whether you're a Republican or a Democrat,
 a right-winger or a left-winger, a capitalist or a communist,
 a pale pink person or a dark brown person, are absolutely obsolete.
 Because it is highly possible that the human race will not survive beyond the year 2000.
 They'll wake up if survival is important.
 Maybe it isn't.
 Maybe all stars were originally planets,
 whereon their developed intelligent life which discovered the nucleus and its secrets and just blew itself up.
 Maybe that's how things go.
 It's like saying a chicken is one egg's way of becoming other eggs.
 But if you are interested in survival,
 and not mere survival, but in elegant survival,
 it's necessary to be very wide awake to the ecological problem.
 There is a historian of science by the name of Lynn White,
 who is a professor of history at UCLA.
 And he said recently, "The roots of our ecological crisis are religious,
 and therefore the solution must also be religious, even if not called by that name."
 And I would like to go first into the reasons why the roots of this crisis are religious.
 Technology as we know it has emerged out of a certain philosophy of life.
 And the foundation of that philosophy is a distinction between symbols on the one hand,
 and reality on the other.
 You might say words and events, map and territory, money and wealth.
 Now isn't it obvious that a word is not what it represents?
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