So welcome everyone to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you so much for joining us. Today is number 11 of 100 conversations happening every Friday and this series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is climate change. In the context of this architectural artefact we will shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

Yiradhumarang mudyi, Rae Johnston youwin nahdee, Wiradjuri yinhaa baladoo. Hello friends, my name is Rae Johnston and I’m a Wiradjuri woman, born and raised on Darug and Gundungurra country where I have responsibilities to community and Country. And it is an honour to be here today with you on the unceded land of the Gadigal and I wish to pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present, and I extend that respect to any of my First Nations brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles that may be here with us today. Now, as we begin today’s conversation, it is important to remember that the world’s first scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians are the sovereign First Nations Peoples of this very continent, from the world’s oldest continuing cultures, despite all attempts to erase them.

With me today is Lesley Hughes, who is an ecologist, distinguished Professor of Biology at Macquarie University and founding climate counsellor at the Climate Council. We are so thrilled to have her join us today. Welcome, Leslie.

Now, you’ve been researching climate change since the 1990s. You began your scientific career, though, as a zoologist. What made you turn your focus to the impact of climate change on ecosystems and species?

Well, believe it or not, it was because I was bored with ants. I did my PhD on ants and ants are wonderful creatures, I have nothing against them at all, though I get annoyed with them in my kitchen like everybody else. But I spent four years following ants around the bush, and once I got my PhD, I was thinking, Well, I don’t want to do that for the rest of my life. And I was casting around for something else to work on, I wanted to write an application for a postdoc to actually get some money to live on and my then PhD supervisor actually said to me, ‘Well you know climate change might be thing, why don’t you maybe do something about that?’

So back in 1990, of course, climate change was just a sort of future intellectual, academic issue. It wasn’t the sort of social and political and economic issue that it is today. But I started to read about it. I thought, yeah, I might have a bit more of a chance getting a job working on something like this than following ants around for the rest of my life. So I got into it, and once you get into climate change, anything, be it research or advocacy or anything else, it is like being in the Hotel California, you can try and check out, but you cannot.

No. What is it that keeps you there?

Well, it becomes over time, absolutely the moral imperative of something to work on. I absolutely believe that climate change is the biggest existential threat facing all of us on the planet, species as well as humans. And in lots of ways, I’ve found it a real privilege to be able to make a living and spend my career working on what is the greatest problem of our time. I mean, what better thing to do than that, anything else would feel to me like a waste.

You’ve said before that there was no real light bulb moment for you when it came to the importance of climate action. You just gradually came to see the importance of keeping up with the science. So in this early part of your career, how much awareness of climate change was there among the general public and even among the scientific community as well?

Well, look, I think most people had heard of it, but that was about as far as it went. I think most people didn’t realise it was ever going to affect their lives. And even in the scientific community, when I started, I could actually physically read everything on climate change that was being published because it was maybe a couple of hundred papers a year, if that. I would have no hope of doing that now, there’s probably a couple of hundred papers published every day. So back then it was really, as I said, sort of an intellectual exercise.

There were a few people around, like James Hansen in the US who had talked to the US Senate about the impacts, the potential impacts of climate change and about the fact that he said, ‘We’ve got to stop waffling and realise that it’s happening now and we’ve got to do something about it,’ but he was really almost a lone voice in that space. And it was really just a gradual thing over time that people started to get to know more and once the impacts of climate change moved from being future impacts to things that we could observe right now, of course that’s when most other people kind of woke up to it.

So throughout these first conversations that we’ve had as part of 100 Climate Conversations, the IPCC, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the reports that they generate have been mentioned in almost every single one. It’s an extremely significant global initiative when it comes to taking action on climate and you were actually a lead author in the fourth and fifth IPCC assessment reports. What’s it like to be part of that?

It’s an enormous privilege. It’s very hard work, but it’s a wonderful thing to feel like even a very tiny cog and each lead author, there are many hundreds, so you know you’re only a little part of that. But actually working with another – with a big group of people towards a common goal and to feel part of something really big and really important internationally is fantastic, so it’s an absolute buzz to be part of it.

I can imagine. So how do you find working collaboratively with scientists across the globe? Do they have vastly different perspectives to us here?

Look mostly not. I mean, I think everybody – all the authors on an IPCC report have a shared agenda and that’s the exciting thing. You get people from all sorts of countries, it is truly international, all sorts of different backgrounds and expertise but everybody cares about the same thing, which is basically translating and synthesising what we know into what we’ve got to do. And being part of that huge enterprise is an amazing thing. And the thing about the IPCC reports is that they are the most rigorously put together and scrutinised documents in history. They go through multiple drafts, they synthesise hundreds of thousands of pieces of work. There are thousands of comments on those drafts and every single one of those comments has to be responded to in writing, publicly. There’s no other enterprise like it, no other documents that are so scrutinised and so carefully put together.

Tell me about your role in bringing these reports together. What are you specifically doing?

I was a lead author on the Australasian chapter in both of those reports in what’s called Working Group II. So the assessments come out about every seven years and there are three parts. So Working Group I is the physical science, Working Group II is the impacts and adaptation of vulnerability, Working Group III is all about the solutions. So the best way to distinguish them is that Working Group I is the what, Working Group II is the so what, and Working Group III is the what now. So I was in the so what section and the Australian part of the so what section. So I had carriage, there’s usually eight lead authors plus a lot of contributing authors, but I had basic carriage of the biodiversity sections, but also because there’s only eight of us and there’s a lot more topics than that, you also have to sort of step outside your comfort zone a bit and take carriage of other things. So I generally looked after the health sections as well as some of the adaptation section, but really all of the authors contribute to the whole chapter.

And how long does it take to bring together?

So the reports come out about every seven years. They’re worked on for about three to four years. And, you know, when I first went to my first meeting for the fourth assessment, one of the other authors and I had not done it before. And so we were chatting one night and this guy said to me, he said, ‘You know, we’ve only got 25 pages,’ because that was our word limit and that’s the most frustrating thing about the IPCC reports is you’ve got to condense an awful lot into a short space. He said, ‘You know, we’ve only got 24 pages. There’s eight of us, that’s, 25 pages, that’s only three and a bit pages each. How long can that possibly take to write?’ And the answer to that is about three years. So that’s what I mean, you start off with a chapter that’s about 100 pages long, and then you’ve got to whittle it down and whittle it down and whittle it down until absolutely every word counts.

Now, in 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to former USA Vice President Al Gore and the IPCC for contributions to furthering action on climate change. You were part of the IPCC at the time the award was handed out. What was the significance of the IPCC being acknowledged like this? How did it feel?

I was thrilled, actually, because I have huge admiration, as you can probably tell, for the institution and for the people that run it. So I thought the recognition from the Nobel Committee, it was unexpected, I had no idea. I don’t think any of us had any idea that the IPCC had even been nominated. But I thought, look, any attention on climate change is good attention. So I thought, well this is a great acknowledgement, both of Al Gore’s work and of the IPCC’s work. But this is a huge issue and it is actually a peace issue, so it’s a security issue. So at the time, a lot of people said, ‘Well, why have a whole bunch of climate change people got the Peace Prize?’ But when you think about the role of extreme climate events in global security, it’s very clear that climate change is a security issue, so it is a war and peace issue. So I felt it was entirely appropriate, but I was really thrilled vicariously at the recognition that the institution had got.

You are currently a Councillor on the Climate Council and the Board Director and prior to this you were a Climate Commissioner with the federal Climate Commission, which provided evidence-based information about climate change in Australia, and that was established in 2011 by the Gillard Labor government. Sadly, that commission was short lived and it was abolished by the Abbott Liberal government in 2013. To start, what was the significance of having a federal Climate Commission in the first place?

Well, when the Gillard government got into power they had a hung parliament. It’s interesting to think about that in the face of the election that’s coming up. So the hung parliament meant that the balance of power was held by some Greens members as well as some Independents. And Julia Gillard did, I think, a great thing in that she got everybody together. She was a great consensus builder and every month there was this committee called the Multi-Party Committee that consisted of some Labor people from the government, those Independents and a couple of Greens with an economist, Ross Garnaut, and with my fellow Climate Councillor, Will Steffen as a scientist. And they worked on this thing called the Clean Energy Package, which brought in the carbon price, so that was hugely important.

But one of the other things they did was they figured that in order to get broad acceptance of the carbon price and the need for action, there needed to be better communication to the Australian people. So they formed this thing called the Climate Commission. And as you said, our role was to get out there, explain the climate science to the Australian public, explain the implications of a carbon price to the Australian public because this was sort of new and so that’s what we did. So there were six of us and I was thrilled to be invited to be one of those commissioners and for me it was quite a life changing experience. We went to lots of different regional cities around – towns and cities around Australia, virtually every capital city. And what we would do, we would come up on a stage like this, but often in a big town hall, literally a town hall or an RSL club or a movie theatre, all sorts of venues all around the place. And we would have a facilitator, which is often a local journalist and we would sit there and we took questions from the audience. So it was this like massive Q&A for about an hour and a half to two hours. So it was, it was hard going.

It was pretty tense, especially the first couple when we hardly even knew each other, let alone what was going to happen. But we took questions from the audience and tried to answer them as best we could and so it really taught me how important good communication is. It really gave us all exposure to what everyday, average people in the street really thought about this, what they knew, importantly what they didn’t know, what they needed to know, what they wanted to know. And so we just had thousands and thousands of conversations over that two and a half years and I still think it was one of the biggest privileges I’ve ever had.

Now almost immediately after coming into power, the newly elected Abbott Liberal government abolished the Climate Commission in September 2013. But you and your fellow commissioners didn’t stay down for long because a week after the independent not-for-profit Climate Council was announced by the former commissioner Tim Flannery and Amanda McKenzie, who’s now the CEO. Can you take us back to that time? What was the public reaction to the abolishment of the Climate Commission?

Well, the public was hugely surprised. Now, we weren’t surprised because we got the message from the then opposition that if they came into power, and it looked like they would, they would abolish us. So we had the heads up from them. So we had a bit of time to sort of talk about it and I’ll never forget this meeting in this hotel in Melbourne where we were doing some town halls. Tim took us all into a room at this hotel and said, ‘Look, I want to talk to you about something. It’s very likely that in the next – come the election, we’ll get canned. If we can get the money together, would you be willing to keep going?’ And we all said, ‘Of course we would.’

We knew we were far from finished in the job. So Amanda started to put together a business plan and we registered the name Climate Council, and that was actually all ready to go before the election, in the event that the Abbott government got in and did abolish it. So it was funny though because even though we were expecting it when it finally did happen, it still felt like a punch in the guts, it really, really did, I sort of couldn’t quite believe it would happen until it did, but anyway, it did. But having the plan up our sleeves was a good thing. So it meant that, as you say, within I think it was, well, the Abbott government, it was their first act. So we were abolished on the second day of the Abbott government, which was the first actual thing the government did.

Did they give a reason at the time?

Well, they sort of said, ‘Well, look, we’ve got our own scientists. We don’t need to spend all this money on this group to do this stuff.’ But really, they were just very anti any form of talk about climate change. So what it meant, that sort of suddenness, what it meant was that people that did care about climate change and/or people that hadn’t voted for the Abbott government were furious, they were frustrated, they were angry, they were livid. And we were able to channel that frustration and anger into our support because we gave them an outlet for it. When people felt so hopeless about what had happened and we said, ‘Well, one thing you can do, you can give us some money and we will keep going.’ And so they did.

So Tim went on Dateline, it was on the ABC one night and said, ‘We’re starting this new organisation. It’s going to be absolutely independent and publicly funded. From midnight tonight, our website will be open to receive donations.’ And then we all sat back and sort of held our breath because it maybe would have got ten bucks and that would have been a disaster. But we got a lot more than ten bucks. So at about one minute past midnight, the first donation, which was about $15 or $20 from some guy in New South Wales, came in and by that afternoon we’d raised over $200,000. At one point there was 30,000 coming in every half hour. It just took off like a snowball. Long story short, after a week, we’d raise $1.2 million. And then, of course, we all sat around and there were five of us at this point, so five of the original six climate commissioners were in the room and we thought, ‘Oh, my God, what now? All of these Australians have given us their money.’

We felt the pressure of expectation on us because we’d got their money now, but of course because it only just started, we had nothing to give them, we had no product. Anyway, I said to them, look, it was shaping up to be a really hot summer, and I said, look, I’d like to write a report about the connection between bushfires and climate change, so I’ll get cracking on that. So there I was, actually starting to write it, of course we had no research team. I had one volunteer who was helping me and I’m sitting at my dining room table sort of frantically reading papers about bushfires and then the bushfires in the Blue Mountains started, which were absolutely devastating.

So we were already starting to get media attention, is there a link to climate change? And I’d be saying, ‘Look, I’m just writing this report. Can you hang on for a couple of months and I’ll be able to tell you.’ But of course, the media doesn’t work like that. So we actually got together with – and literally we put some points on a whiteboard, created a press release, and that was our sort of first major science press release, which got lots of attention because the media were just really after good scientific commentary about climate change and bushfires, because these bushfires were like nothing really that the Blue Mountains had ever seen.

It’s almost a decade after the Climate Council was founded, bet that’s gone quick. Tell us about the Council, how it works to be part of the solution on taking action on climate change. As an independent body, obviously that first round of funding came directly from the public but are you able to get more done compared to being a federally funded climate commission? Have your goals changed since you’ve moved into this format?

Look, our ultimate goal hasn’t changed, which is to work to inform the Australian public and beyond about the science because you need an informed public to make the right decisions, be they in their businesses or who they vote for or whatever. So that fundamental goal is still our goal. But of course, as we’ve grown what we’ve been able to do has expanded enormously. So I should say we’ve comprehensively outlasted the Abbott Prime Ministership, which we’re very proud of. So we now have, I lose track because it’s increasing all the time, we now have, I think, over 50 staff, starting from a staff of one to over 50, I think we’ve got 14 or 15 councillors now.

We’ve always had a terrific board and we’ve expanded, we’ve done – we’ve kept doing some of the same things like writing reports, making videos, we have huge social media content, which is how a lot of people engage with us. We do a lot of media commentary on all sorts of climate related topics, but we’ve also expanded into other areas. So we helped found ELCA, the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, which is all the former fire chiefs talking about the links between climate and climate change and bushfires. We started the Climate Media Centre which helps train people up, in all sorts of walks of life, to talk about climate change because one of the things we know about climate change communication is that the messenger is as important as the message. So training up firefighters to talk to firefighters about climate change and doctors and nurses to talk about the health impacts, etc, etc, the CMC has been really behind a lot of that. And we’ve also started a group called the Cities Power Partnership, which is a support for local governments that are taking climate change action and we’ve got over 150 local governments signed up in the Cities Power Partnership. So over time, as the money kept coming in, we’ve been able to expand the reach of our activities enormously.

But you asked me before what was different about working at the Climate Council versus the Climate Commission? And the difference evolved over time. So when we were on the Climate Commission, we were funded by the government, though never interfered with by the minister. So Greg Combet was our minister and he was extremely supportive but never once told us what we could or couldn’t say. So we were kind of independent, even though there might not have been the perception in the public that we were independent because our secretariat was paid for by the government. So we were very, very careful about any sort of political statements, etc. But once we became publicly funded, those shackles sort of gradually loosened and so these days we remain a nonpartisan organisation, we don’t come out and say, vote for this candidate, vote for that candidate. But we no longer are prevented from talking about the details of policy from different parties, so if a party has a policy that we don’t agree with, we will certainly say so.

As an ecologist, one of your interests is nature-based solutions to climate change. Can you tell us broadly what a nature-based solution actually is?

It’s really the concept that a healthy environment, and I like to talk about our environment as our life support system, we don’t exist separately from our environment, it provides everything we need. Nature-based solutions is really the concept that a healthy environment is good for people, as well as good for protecting us from the impacts of climate change. So if I think about it, a sort of obvious example would be mangroves. So mangroves that grow along the coast perform all sorts of functions, they provide nursery grounds for fish, they provide food for things, they store a lot of carbon in their sediment, they filter water from the land, all sorts of things. But what they also do, is they break up wave energy, so when there is a storm, they protect the land from the worst of that sort of energy. So we’ve lost a lot of mangroves around the world because they’ve been cleared for development or turned into firewood or whatever and when we – when that happens, we get a lot more storm damage on those coasts.

So by restoring mangroves, that’s a perfect nature-based solution, it’s actually a win-win. It’s protecting us and our communities from an extreme climate event, as well as being habitat and performing all of those other ecosystem services that we need. So that’s just one example. But it’s really the concept that nature is our protection and we need to put back nature where it’s been destroyed or protect what’s still there to not only have benefits for biodiversity, but actually to protect humans and our communities from the worst impacts of climate change.

How has the idea of conservation shifted over time because of human driven impacts, including climate change? What has changed and how has people’s thinking changed over the time that you’ve been involved?

Well, I have to say, people’s thinking is a bit slow on this. The root of the word conservation is conservare, which is Latin for staying the same. So we think of conservation as conserving in a place what was there, what we think was there, for all time. Of course, as the world has changed over time, ecosystems have also changed. So 50 million years ago, Australia was covered in rainforest because we were in a different part of the globe and we had a different climate. So the notion that things have always been the same is actually a false one on any timescale. But with climate change, of course, it’s absolutely not the case that anything is staying the same. So approaching conservation as we have to turn the clock back to what it was like when I was five, or what it was like in Australia when Captain Cook arrived and that’s the ideal, is actually not only a false notion, but it’s actually a futile notion.

So what I’ve been trying to do over a lot of my career is once you understand how rapidly the climate is changing and therefore our environment is changing because of that, you actually have to look forward rather than look back. And so my push has always been we need to certainly keep all the species that we’ve got and not lose them faster than we would normally lose them, species have always gone extinct but much more slowly than they’re going extinct now. We’ve got to try and keep them, but we don’t necessarily want to keep them in the same places where they’ve been for the last hundred or a thousand years, because the climate may be becoming so difficult for them in those places that they need to go somewhere else. So conservation, in my view, is now in some ways an outdated concept.

We can – I still call myself an environmentalist, but I would like to think that I’m looking forward rather than back and looking for new and innovative and creative ways to keep all the species doing what they need to do, but not necessarily in the same mixes of species, in the same places where they’ve been for the last few hundred years. But that involves being much more active and more interventionist in the natural environment and a lot of conservationists feel very, very uncomfortable about that, it’s not the way a lot of conservationists think. But I’m – I’ve been talking for 20 years about the need to translocate species to other places, for example, to pick species up and move them somewhere else if the place that they’re in now is going to be a place that they can’t survive in, in decades hence. Now, of course, it’s expensive to do that, there are risks involved, but for many species, the risks of leaving them where they are, are simply too great.

It’s sad, the idea of relocating animals from places that they’ve lived since they’ve existed.

Well, yes, though it is, but it’s practical. So Australia has a terrible record for extinction, we’ve lost more mammals in Australia than any other continent in the world. We also have the dubious record of actually having the first mammal to go extinct because of climate change. So a few years ago there was a little rodent called the Bramble Cay melomys, lived on the only one place in the entire planet, which is this tiny little sandy island up in the Torres Strait. Everybody knew it was in trouble, it was listed as endangered, there was a recovery plan written for it, which is, to be honest, pretty useless and it wasn’t enacted anyway. And the last one was seen in 2009, and when people went back to that island, they realised that the entire island had been inundated several times from storms because sea levels rising in the Torres Strait are about twice the global average. So basically, the last of the melomys simply drowned. Now if we moved a few of those individuals, even just to another island that was a bit higher above sea level, we would have avoided that, it was an entirely avoidable extinction. But despite knowing that species was in absolute dire straits, we didn’t do anything and we lost it. And that should be a lesson that we must never let that happen again.

You’re also a part of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists. It’s an independent group of scientists and professionals working to secure the long-term health of Australia’s land, water and biodiversity. One of the research projects that you’ve recently completed as a group, with the Wentworth Group, it looked at the costs and benefits of restoring Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems. What would it take to achieve this?

Less than a submarine.

Tell me more, tell me more.

Let me explain that. Okay. So we did an analysis of the terrestrial environment in Australia. We looked at all sorts of different types of ecosystems and looked at how much they’d become degraded and how much we would need to take to bring those ecosystems back. And we looked at where we could do that, and we focused on land that was already degraded, it had been overstocked or for some other reason. And we figured out how much land we would need to bring those, all of those ecosystems back to about 30 per cent of what they were, still only 30 per cent but a lot of those ecosystems are at 1 per cent or less than what they might have been 200 years ago. And then we looked at how much it would cost to do that either by replanting or buying back land, that sort of thing and we calculated that overall, it would cost about $2 billion a year for the next 30 years to get to that 30 per cent of virtually all of Australia’s terrestrial ecosystems. And $2 billion does sound like quite a bit of money, but it’s only 0.1 per cent of Australia’s GDP, so when you look at it like that, it’s a tiny, tiny amount of money really. And in doing that there’s all sorts of co-benefits, not just for biodiversity, but the sequestration of carbon, we could sequester by doing that about a billion tons of carbon and if you put even a fairly conservative price on that carbon, the carbon offset revenue would easily pay for the whole project and it’s a lot less than our current submarine project. So I do like to compare it to the submarine project. What’s more important?

If that project did go ahead, what kind of impacts would it have?

Well, it would be, it would turn around things. I think as conservationists and environmentalists, we’re really used to decline. You sort of get into this frame of mind where you know that everything’s declining and it’s a matter of just trying to slow it down. So you do get into a very kind of negative, pessimistic, fatalistic frame of mind. So I think as much as anything, disregarding the obvious biodiversity benefits, it would actually give people hope that we can actually turn around environmental degradation and end up with something much better than before. So psychologically, we could get out of this feeling that we’re just seeing the world collapse and decline everywhere and it’s just a matter of trying to slow it down to our inevitable demise by actually turning things around and bringing things back.

No, I completely agree. Now, what kind of barriers stand in the way, obviously, other than having a spare $2 billion lying around? To be able to actually do something like this. There seems like there’s so many different benefits for the environment, for the economy, for everything. Why isn’t it happening? Why aren’t we prioritising a project like this?

Look, if I knew the answer to that question, we’d be a lot better off. Partly, it’s the psychology, I think of not thinking we can do it. So not having that drive to think, yes, we can. Partly it’s that Australia has a very complex, interrelated set of three levels of government and so sometimes what you do in one place, you’re undoing in another place. Partly it’s money, partly it’s organisation, but we have been, since that work was published, we have been having some really fruitful discussions with some government departments, with some ministers, certainly with some farming groups and with many individuals and businesses. So I think the first, we’ve done the first thing, which is to say, it could be done, this is what it would take, this is how much it would cost. Of course the next thing is to work out is how we are going to do it and that’s harder but at least showing people that it could be done is a first step.

If this was a town hall meeting, like back in the day, and I was an audience member standing up and saying, ‘But what can I do? What can I do as an individual? How do I help?’ What would you tell me today? Knowing everything you know?

Well, first I’ll say that nobody can do everything and everybody can do something. And a lot of the things that you can do cost no money. So, number one, if you’re over 18, you’ve got a vote or even if you’re under 18, your parents have a vote, so try and influence them. So number one, let’s get political leaders that care about – whose views align with the Australian community’s views on climate because by far the majority of people in Australia are concerned about climate and want something more happening, so we need leaders that align with those views. So number one is a vote.

Number two, you can move your money. If you’ve got money, if you’ve got a superannuation policy, if you’ve got an insurance policy, there are all sorts of banks and companies that are not investing in fossil fuels, so find out who they are and you can move your money and that doesn’t cost you anything either. You can think about your diet, things like that. There was a fantastic review in Science a few years ago where they analysed the carbon footprint of hundreds of the most common food items eaten in the world and they said the most important thing that anybody can do is reduce their meat and dairy intake. Now, I’m not a vegetarian, I’m nearly a vegetarian, I do occasionally still eat meat and dairy, but I eat far less than I used to. So, thinking about your diet, thinking about where your food comes from.

If you can afford it, obviously producing your own energy on your roof is a fantastic thing to do. Electric vehicles are becoming more and more available and will hopefully get cheaper. And finally, I think the most important thing that anybody can do, if they’re concerned, is stop feeling hopeless and helpless and join a group of like-minded people that feel like you do. And there are now so many groups out there for virtually everybody, there are surfers for climate action, there are AFL players for climate action, there are parents for climate action, there are local groups. You can find your people and collective action is far more influential than individual action, so find your people and work together and that makes you feel better too.

Thank you so much for chatting with us today, Lesley. It’s been fantastic hearing from you.

Thanks, Rae.

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