From Rev. LaMothe: Many people mistakenly believe we’ve accomplished our technological civilization with little help from Nature, which is often seen as a problem to be overcome. However, behind our ‘advance’ the vast backdrop of the biosphere guided our every step. All life is integrated to Earth and all life shares in the integrity of creation. This truth is made explicit thorough our Seventh Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part. Through this reliance, we are intimately connected to the past and the future. However, our relationship with the rest of nature has grown so wildly asymmetrical that we now challenge the basic law of life itself — exchange and reciprocity, giving and receiving. A new ethics is emerging that proclaims we cannot live as an ecologically segregated species, and that our dependence on the ongoing integrity of the whole realm of life is absolute.