October 24th is the International Day of Climate Action; a mere six weeks before COP15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Copenhagen December 7th through 18th. If we’ve been good and eaten our vegetables the world’s leaders just might approve a meaningful, binding and ambitious climate change treaty that restricts CO2 emissions to 350 parts per million. They currently stand at 390 ppm and are rising by 2ppm each year.
According to just about everybody who knows anything about this stuff, 350 ppm is the level beyond which life on earth becomes really uncomfortable, if not downright impossible. Some world leaders are toying with a ceiling of 450 ppms, which might be politically expedient, but only for those who like intolerable heat, continent wide droughts, killer floods, constant and colossal storms, the extinction of much of the planet’s wildlife, global pandemics and the whole-sale collapse of the planet’s life support systems.
For the record, I’m urging the adoption of 350.
(Hampi, in Karnatika, India, was the site of massive flooding recently that took many lives)
Today is Blog Action Day. It’s a little thing. There’s about 9,000 bloggers, in 149 countries around the world writing about climate change today. I’m doing my small part (for ideas on what you can do, go here).
It would be pretty easy for me to join them in the condemnation of global leaders for their failure to act on this most pressing issue facing humanity today. In particular, here in Canada, it would be easy to point to the spineless inaction of Stephen Harper’s conservative government as he positions us at the top of one list (highest green house gas emissions per capital – yes, we finally beat the Americans) and at the bottom of another (worst track record for action on climate change of all the G8 countries).
Easy, but redundant. Everybody else is writing that today.
For many years now, and with increasing intensity, I’ve been studying the teachings of Gotama Buddha. The looming catastrophe of climate change is enough to test anybodies spiritual resolve, as it has tested mine. I have found myself turning again and again to the wisdom of the Buddha for spiritual grounding during this progressively troubling period in human history.
A few things emerge from the Buddha’s teaching that have helped me, and might help others.
The underlying foundation of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths. They are 1) that life has suffering, 2) that suffering has an origin, 3) that suffering can be ended; and 4) that there is a path to end suffering and it is called the Noble Eightfold Path.
Suffering is a product of attachment; attachment to possessions, to relationships, to situations, to our own ego. Buddhism teaches us to find sanctuary in uncertainly; to become comfortable in the fundamental uncertainly of our everyday existence. These are the most uncertain of times; not since World War Two has the world faced so perilous a threat to our survival. The consequences of our failure to curtail green house gas emissions could be dire indeed.
If we are to summon the courage and compassion to face this global threat, we’re going to need to be secure with insecurity.
Within the Noble Eightfold Path are a number of wise and practical lessons that humanity might consider as it struggles to address climate change. Listening to author and scientist Tim Flannery on the radio two days ago made me think about this. Flannery, whose book The Weather Makers was a game changer for many who were struggling with climate change, has a new book out called Now or Never. In the CBC radio interview he said that “we need to make that moral shift. [We need to make a] commitment to each other as human beings that we want to make a better world.”
The interviewer asked Flannery about his definition of sustainability, in the context of climate change: “It’s a simple aspiration,” he said. “I want to leave the world a better place than what I was born into. Is the lifestyle I’m leading and what I’m doing, really adding up to that, or is it leading to something different?”
What Flannery is talking about is the similar as the Buddhist principle of Right Livelihood. In the teachings of Vipassana Mediation, a 2,500 year old tradition passed down from the Buddha, Right Livelihood is understood to mean that “neither directly nor indirectly should our means of livelihood involve injury to other beings.”
Think about that. Imagine a world where we sought to make our living without doing harm, or causing harm to be done.
I believe that part of what is driving us so recklessly towards self destruction is our unwillingness to become comfortable with uncertainty, and our need to placate ourselves with distractions that fuel livelihoods that are cause great harm and suffering around the world. We are fundamentally afraid of the true nature of life – temporary, uncertain, difficult yet heart-breakingly beautiful – so that we suffer deeply. Our suffering causes us to seek placation: we buy bigger, faster cars; we gobble up foods that are unhealthy and that are grown unsustainably (Twinkies are not grown organically); we live in massive houses that isolate us from each other and require enormous amounts of energy to heat and illuminate. The list of what we use to temporarily insolate us from the true nature of life is long and sad.
All of this distraction requires industries that cause deep, lasting harm in the form of ruined ecosystems and an atmosphere that has surpassed the safe level of CO2 emissions. We are killing life on this planet because we are afraid to face our own reality, and because there are those who are willing to reap profits from this preoccupation with comfort and false security.
There are many solutions to climate change, and it’s likely that 8,999 of my fellow 9,000 bloggers today will catalog them. Political action is most necessary, because trying to cajole behavioral change from a society that is so deeply invested in its own distractions will take far too long, with far too uncertain a prospect for success (and I’m just not comfortable with that). As the current thinking goes, we need a climate deal in Copenhagen that is ambitions, fair and binding.
But what we also need is a spiritual awakening. And whether we wake up to the Dharma path, to Tao Tzu’s teachings on the Way and its Power, to the sermons of Jesus Christ or Mohammad or any other of the worlds myriad interpretations of spirit, until we substitute genuine love, compassion, understanding and acceptance of our fragile, temporary and remarkable lives for the material distractions that blind us, we will continue to inflict immense harm on ourselves and the many creatures we share this fragile earth with.
