Dharma Teaching and Dharma Values in the Age of Climate Change: 
An Open Letter and Proposal to all who are involved in the Dharma 

April 2011

It's obvious that there is such an abundance and depth of good will in the Dharma world and in those who work in one form or another for the Dharma, and the expression of this goodwill is visible in countless ways large and small. Yet it also seems that in one area in particular - our actual responses to the Global Climate Emergency - we are falling short of what it is possible for us as a community to manifest. And I feel that as a matter of urgency we all need to discuss this issue thoroughly together. My sense is not that we are merely somewhat apathetic, as some might think, but that deep down, we, like most human beings, do care greatly about it, and very much want to address it. Somehow though, that care doesn't always manifest, get communicated, or get felt even, as fully as it could, and indeed, needs to be.

What exactly happens to stop us? It is clear the responses and reactions of the heart and mind here have become very complex. Probably, and understandably, we have all at times felt a sense of impotence, for example, in the face of this looming crisis, draining energy from both our inner and outer responses to it. But many of the unhelpful and confused movements of mind in relation to this issue may not be so obvious. They may be a good deal more hidden from immediate view. Clarity, integrity and real care then can feel hard to find and sustain.

But if the Dharma is to remain really relevant in the world, a beacon of wisdom and compassion for humanity, it seems to me we all need to understand our responses more fully. And we need to be putting out a different message, modelling something different than we are at present. I feel it behoves all of us to inquire more searchingly into all this, to shine the light of awareness and investigation here, and ask some potentially difficult questions, individually and as a Sangha, and to see if a fuller, deeper, more adequate response is possible from us. To see, 'what else is possible for us'? That's what this article is about.

I propose that we need to find a way to overhaul and transform the present system of retreats and Dharma activity to one that contributes significantly less to Climate Change and to the avijja (ignorance) and the mind-sets that contribute to Climate Change, while still ensuring adequate financial viability for both teachers and Centres. And I believe it is actually probable, for a number of reasons, that such a change will more enable students to develop, deepen and thrive as much as possible, in Dharma environments that are potentially more creative, and in Sanghas that provide more possibility for meaningful long-term relationships - between Sangha members and, equally, between Teachers and Students.

I'd be grateful if you would take some time to read and reflect on these critiques, questions and proposals in the article below.


That those of us involved in teaching the Dharma or in the governance in any way of Dharma Centres of different kinds bear a profound responsibility is, I imagine, obvious. What that responsibility entails, its exact nature and its range, is clearly not widely agreed upon at all.

If we purport to teach 'suffering and the end (or at least the lessening) of suffering' the messages we put out there, to both the Dharma world and the non-Dharma world, through our teaching and through our choices as individuals, as organisations and as a network of organisations, need to support this claim.

There are some ways of thinking and organizing things at present that seem to have very adverse and limiting effects on a) the biosphere and its ability to sustain a healthy human civilization; and, equally, b) the depth, fullness, and effectiveness of the Dharma being taught and practised. Though the interconnected set of conditions keeping this system and mind-set in place are very complex, I would like to consider briefly both of these effects, and inquire if another way is possible.


At present, the way the Dharma scene in general, and much of the Insight Meditation scene in particular, is set up involves and seems to require, invite and support a great deal of travel by air, both by many teachers and also by many yogis. For some, the choices to fly or to support flying, have been, and continue to be, very carefully scrutinised and scrupulously 'weighed up', involving much ongoing soul-searching and questioning, and decisions to fly then consciously made. (I will return to this weighing up later.) But the degree of conscious wrestling with this 'weighing up' can of course be much less, or wane quickly to the point where flying has become just a kind of habitual way of doing things. And with that, there cannot but be, whether conscious or unconscious or somewhere in between, the ignoring or denial of the consequences of flying in contributing both directly and indirectly to actual suffering in the world. Directly, through the disproportionately high amount of carbon emissions in flying (one return flight from London to Boston emits almost one fifth the total amount of CO2 that the average European is currently responsible for from all activities put together in a year), and short-haul flights are relatively even worse, as most emissions are generated in take-off and landing); and indirectly, by inadvertently perpetuating, and indeed being part of, a normalisation of flying, and a widespread and dominant cultural mind-set of denial, disconnected or unfelt despair, apathy, dis-empowerment, disengagement, and de-politicisation.

Of course, with the price of oil rising and the prospect of Peak Oil seemingly looming, it may well turn out anyway that it is simply not cost effective to have a Dharma scene so reliant on, and indulgent of, flying. Either Dharma centres would be ruined financially or the cost of retreats would preclude any but the most wealthy from attending. Clearly neither is a scenario any of us would be happy about.

And surely it is only a matter of time before this scenario of so much flying to teach or sit retreats comes to be regarded as something ridiculous from an ethical point of view. Even now, an onlooker might be forgiven for sensing a certain lack of integrity in the messages we are putting out. How can one talk about understanding 'the causes of suffering', and ignore this? Unnecessary flying is a cause of suffering - plain and simple. (And not just as a future effect. The World Health Organization states that climate change claimed more than 150,000 lives per year in the last 30 years, most of them in poor countries (1), and that number is likely to rise dramatically in the coming years and decades.)

Will Buddhism and the Dharma even appear credible or respectable to the wider world as a force and movement for good when it finally becomes obvious to everyone that we humans need to change our behaviour for the welfare of all? In the future, will the Dharma as it is even be regarded as seriously contributing to the alleviation of the suffering of humanity and other species? Or will it seem absurd that there is (or was!) a belief, a 'religion', that talks about 'compassion' and 'insight into suffering' without connecting it to outer action and commitment to change? If, as seems likely according to most Climate scientists, there are times of very challenging global crisis ahead, will Buddhists and Buddhist Teachers and Institutions be looked to as models, exemplars of wisdom and compassion? Or as over-introverted 'contemplatives' with nothing really relevant to say or to offer a world in pain and chaos? As the waters slowly rise around us and those less fortunate far-away are losing their homes, their livelihoods and their lives, there is a foreseeable danger that Buddhists come to be regarded as 'out-of-touch navel-gazers'. And we may come to be judged, along with so many others, of being guilty of ignoring and not adequately responding to what is perhaps the most crucial issue of our time. It's a difficult question, but: Is the world, on balance, becoming 'better' through Buddhism?

Whether it is the impending financial stress on the Dharma system or the loss of ethical credibility and respectability, will we be on the back foot, behind the times, victims of the sea-change (!pun intended), or more visionary, anticipating ahead, at the vanguard, modelling a comprehensive and real compassion and insight that has a fuller integrity?


If I am a Teacher, what am I teaching, explicitly and implicitly, about the causes of suffering and how to address them? That suffering comes from craving? That it is born of our early childhood wounds from the family? Certainly both are part of the whole truth, and any competent Dharma Teacher will address both in practice and in Teaching, but what might I be missing out? And what are the full implications if I stop there? Have I thought this through thoroughly? (It's hard not to fall back on a belief in a kind of deterministic karma, for instance.) If I haven't completely thought this through for myself..., why not? And what am I modelling as a relationship with the investigation into the Second Noble Truth?


One of the reasons we humans are being so inappropriately slow to adequately address the immense challenges of Global Climate Change, even when supplied with enough information, is that it actually cannot realistically be addressed as a crisis solely through the combination of trying to change our behaviour, either individually or even society-wide, and technological fixes. With world population pushing 7 billion and rising, and most wanting a first-world life-style, there is a formidable juggernaut of underlying momentum fuelling Anthropogenic Climate Change. And it is this that must also be addressed. The technical, political, economic and social transformations necessary to avert runaway global warming are impossible without a profound re-evaluation of our underlying value systems.

I wonder if this is one of the things that makes the Climate Challenge somewhat different than some of the other more celebrated social justice movements of, say, the last century. The primary thrusts of Martin Luther King's and Gandhi's non-violent campaigns were demands for a change in laws, conditions and behaviour, and only implicitly and indirectly in the underlying values of the wider society. They were both preaching to mass audiences already convinced of the values underpinning their campaigns. In the case of trying to meet the challenge of the Climate emergency, there is a dominant value-system that has now pervaded the whole world (been 'globalised'), and at present only a very small minority even of those who would see themselves as wanting something to be done about Climate Change would consider that a world-wide deep shift in values is needed.

As Buddhists, and particularly if one is a Teacher, it can be easy to assume that one is 'in the business of lessening suffering in the world' because one is endeavouring to address its root causes – greed, aversion and delusion –in accordance with the Buddha's Teachings. But how much tangible and significant effect is this really having, on balance, in reducing greed etc....in the world? And are we, as Teachers and Buddhists, unwittingly actually causing more suffering in the world, on balance, through our actions, what messages we do and do not put out, and what we model?

Certainly if my own greed has not decreased through my Dharma practice enough to prevent me choosing to fly to go on vacation even, despite awareness of its destructive effects on the Climate and thus on humanity too, how real can my assumed contribution to lessening greed, and so suffering in the world, be?

What values have we taken on from the dominant culture without even fully realizing? What assumptions from the prevalent Zeitgeist are we resting on? These, of course, are the sorts of views it's difficult to realize are views. One is so habituated to them, one takes them for granted, and, after all, everyone seems to see and assume similarly. And what values am I then broadcasting to others, through my Teaching and through my choices?

We really need to ask these questions, not least to keep the Dharma really alive and authentic. Have we become caught up in the general cultural 'cognitive dissonance' regarding Climate Change? Are we, through our own confusion, giving students confused and confusing messages? How full is our mindfulness and are we in a kind of denial?

We are all probably familiar with the important and widely acknowledged concept of ‘spiritual bypassing’ – using meditation and spirituality to ignore and avoid the difficult areas of our humanity and psychology that one would rather not feel or deal with. But as practitioners there is also the possibility of falling into what might be termed ‘the psychomyopic fallacy’ or ‘psychocentric denial’. This is a mind-set or set of incompletely investigated views and assumptions, often semi-conscious or only dimly-articulated (though not always), that is characterised by:

excessive focus on one's own spiritual and psychological 'process'


a tendency to ascribe the causes of suffering almost exclusively to either purely intra-psychic factors or to sets of patterns originating in childhood trauma and family dynamics.

Its effect is to render one to some degree more oblivious to:

social and environmental distress and destruction in the world

its causes (socially, environmentally, politically and psychologically), and even

the impacts, in the present, of these environmental conditions on one's own being.

Like Narcissus staring endlessly, transfixed and besotted with his own reflection in the pond, one simply deems other sufferings 'not as important'.

 about the wider social and environmental suffering

 in exploring those kinds of suffering and causes of suffering in oneself and others.

Of course it will then also be characterised by:

 to try to address these kinds of suffering.

One remains unmindful of this state of denial, and unaware of the pain, disconnection and profound dis-ease wrought by the way we as a species are treating the planet and each other. Moreover this condition is not always immediately obvious to others from the outside, because a person may be very open, 'soft', connected and caring with respect to certain emotions (and their implicit underlying ideas), and yet simultaneously utterly disconnected, uninterested and in denial with respect to a whole range and nexus of other emotions and perceptions.

[Of course, the obverse exists too, manifesting, for example, in the activist who is very well-informed about the issue(s) and clearly has a lot of emotion (though often mostly anger), yet seems unable to contact or allow too many other emotional states, and may well be projecting old anger from childhood and their personal past out onto society and 'the system' etc....]


So what is your response to all this? Recent psychological research (2) has begun to investigate and document the complex, and indeed, cunning ways that the minds of human beings can and do perpetuate a state of denial and disengagement when faced with the overwhelming scientific consensus of evidence of Anthropogenic Climate Change. And, alas, it is humbling to admit that it seems we as Buddhist meditators and Dharma Teachers, teachers of mindfulness, investigation and compassion are not immune to these psychological defence mechanisms with their ultimately risky and unhelpful strategies of denial. Our practices do not seem so far to have made us much more invulnerable to the multiple snares and subtle seductions of 

If a situation, action, event or experience is 'normalised' because everyone is doing it and very few question it, it is easy to be unmindful of the feelings, emotions, thoughts and assumptions that go with it, and so of course, harder to investigate and inquire into them. If we were in a wider Sangha context where people almost never flew because of Anthropogenic Climate Change, or where it was very much alive as a topic of discourse and discussion, this alone would lead to an inevitable increase in most people's mindfulness and investigation of the whole issue. So we have to ask another difficult question: Is the Dharma culture presently perpetuating a collective and individual denial in regard to life-style effects on global suffering?

I myself, on a couple of occasions, have encountered the so-called 'Spinach Tart Phenomenon', even among groups of Teachers. (The 'Spinach Tart Phenomenon' was first reported, it is said, by someone at a dinner party who, mid-meal, made a comment about their concerns about Climate Change, only to be met with an uncomfortable silence by all at the table, until another guest 'rescued' the situation by commenting how wonderful the spinach tart was, to the obvious relief of nearly all present, collectively and summarily drowning the subject with their eagerly echoed murmurs of gastronomic praise.) And that was regarding Climate Change, let alone the subject of whether we should fly...

There is no doubt that our reactions as human beings to this situation are complex. Recent sociological and psychological research (3) has revealed that, mostly, people do not respond to the issue of Climate Change based rationally on the information they are receiving, but rather choose a kind of ‘package deal’ based on their pre-existing value systems coupled with the life-style wishes and ‘identity-style’ wishes they might have for themselves. This is sad, but again, there is a genuine question whether we, as Dharma Teachers and Dharma Institutions, have escaped this tangle of delusion?

Recently I heard of several teachers who, when asked about the impact of their frequent flying, replied that they had "decided not to think about all that." Some of us may claim or try to reason that, because we had 'long' periods of renunciation in the past, that balances out our life-style choices and carbon footprint now. But a moment's investigation will quickly reveal that the arithmetic just doesn't balance. As stated earlier, one transatlantic return flight has the carbon emissions equivalent to roughly one fifth of total emissions for a whole year for a 

 average European lifestyle. And this current average is pretty universally accepted as having to come down 

 of one fifth of present emissions) to even have a hope of adequately avoiding catastrophic and extensive devastation from Global Climate Destabilisation. Clearly then, even with just one such flight a year, I will quickly use up my 'renunciation carbon credit' in a few short years, or less, depending on how late we decide to delay making serious reductions in greenhouse emissions – in itself, an extremely dangerous collective gamble. (This 'strategy of denial', by the way, is a classic example of a kind of well-documented psychological defence mechanism, 'the bargaining response', one of a number of maladaptive responses to differing sorts of impending loss that psychologists have enumerated in recent years (4). Here, the losses dimly sensed as looming would be the environmental ones and the losses of perceived 'personal freedom' and teaching opportunities that go with flying. In some cases, there will be sensed also the potential loss of opportunities to travel and to visit distant friends and acquaintances that flying to teach can also provide.) I also heard of a Teacher a while ago who, when asked by a yogi in an interview about their attitude and thinking regarding flying so much, simply refused to discuss it. Others, when asked in other contexts, reported that they simply 

 
If any of these is my response, how exactly will I justify it? How much real wrestling with the issue has there been, 

? How much has it been on the radar of my conscience?



Yet even a cursory look at the planetary situation regarding Climate Change and the intricate and far-flung web of conditions that cause it will reveal that individually lowering our carbon footprint, while necessary and laudable, will be essentially ineffectual in adequately addressing the gravity of the global predicament. Unless there are deep and far-ranging essential changes in the policies of governments and corporations, and concomitant major shifts in the dominant, and now globalised, culture of consumerism, the prospect of catastrophic runaway Climate Change, and all that that means for human civilization and for other species, is inevitable.

The scale and complexity of it all is difficult. Simply by being alive today, we are all implicated in this situation of contributing to Climate Change, and this, as much as the whole situation and even a limited awareness of its intricate causal web, will give rise to difficult and conflicting feelings, that will be hard to bear and hard to confront and to question. None of us is perfect and none has the perfect answer. But we have to feel, we have to be aware, and we have to inquire.

So... if, as individual Dharma Teachers or Practitioners we are not bothering too much to lower our personal carbon footprint, our 'personal contribution to Anthropogenic Climate Change', are we actively lobbying for serious political change? It seems that the answer is: 'probably not'. Or are we teaching and encouraging students to lobby for such major political re-evaluation? Again, it seems 'probably not'. So what then are we doing? If I am an 'Anthropogenic Climate Change Denier' or an 'Agnostic', how much time and trouble have I actually taken to research the scientific literature (and the various sources of funding of climate scientists of differing opinions) before reaching my position of denier or agnostic? If I simply say 'I don't care', how will I justify that, to myself and to others? And if I fall back on a position that says "I actually don't see teaching the Dharma as in the service of alleviating suffering," how 

 I see it?(!), and is it still the Dharma then?

Disengagement, de-politicisation, and the Dharma


As mentioned earlier, the juggernaut of conditions impelling Climate Change has the dominant value system as its base. This value system and its assumptions feed consumer culture, in its inner manifestations, for instance as the desire for 'more', more pleasure, comfort, convenience; and in its outer manifestations, for instance, in the assumptions of the global economic system. And this dominant economic and consumer culture of course feeds back in turn to cajole, bully and influence the underlying values of human beings, in a thousand ways, but most glaringly in the deliberate and freely admitted manipulation of values that are standard and endemic in modern marketing strategies. As is often the case with personal suffering, suffering on this scale involves multiple vicious feedback loops.

So that, for instance, the feedback loop just referred to above is also part of feeding, in the larger society, a widespread disengagement, dis-empowerment and de-politicisation with respect to Climate Change, and to many of the wider economic, political, social and life-style factors that contribute to it. Together all this seems to hold humanity spellbound, locked into continuing to contribute to it, even in the face of the bald and sobering truth. There are other factors too contributing to this disengagement, dis-empowerment and de-politicisation. Certainly, for example, globalisation, the profound rise in power of corporations and giant financial institutions, and the related decline in democratic efficacy and transparency are significant factors. As is the erosion of a sense of 'common endeavour' in societies that the ascent of consumerism causes (5). All of these are inextricably woven together in fact, as either a cause or an effect (or both) of an economic system hooked on the idea of 'growth' (6); and all these, and more, contribute to this more general disengagement and de-politicisation.

But, as James Hillman, a leading psychoanalytic thinker, has pointed out for the field of contemporary psychotherapy (7), one may also wonder if, at present, 

the Dharma and its related 'sub-disciplines'

 (for instance, the psychotherapeutic approaches and assumptions many of us draw on in our work with students, either explicitly or implicitly and sometimes without even realizing), 

feed this disengagement and de-politicisation too

, partly as a result of the 'psychocentric denial' discussed earlier.

And while our minds and intentions may be de-politicised and disengaged, everything we do or don't do, all the choices, actions and life-styles that spring from our minds have their far-reaching effects of course, and, as such, are in reality both political and engaged. Whether we like it or not, even our de-politicisation is a political stance and even our non-actions are action with effects. It could well be argued that we as Teachers need to end the prevalent de-politicisation of the Dharma and of most current psychotherapeutic approaches, that we have a responsibility to teach the necessity too of the heart's active caring about the wider causes of suffering in the world.


It's wonderful to see that the Dharma is growing in the West and becoming more popular, and that 'mindfulness', for instance, is becoming a mainstream idea. But of course this may have other consequences too. In the UK, it's interesting to observe that as the Churches generally seem to be losing their widespread support, it seems that gradually more priests and other leaders within the Church are becoming emboldened to be more radical in their voice of concern for social and environmental justice. It's as if they no longer have to try and keep 'the congregation' on board because 'the congregation' has dwindled significantly, and the Churches have become almost a fringe movement, freeing the message to be more radical, much as Jesus was radical in his message and did not care for his widespread 'popularity'. And I sometimes wonder - is the opposite movement happening in the Dharma world? As it becomes more popular, more 'mainstream', is it becoming less radical, less challenging, less 'upsetting' to greed, aversion and delusion? And is this perhaps in part because the demographic of Dharma practitioners has slowly shifted over the years, becoming more 'mainstream'? Might it be the case that, very easily, there has been and continues to be, consciously or unconsciously, a kind of 'slide' in the Teaching - to cater to the wants of the mainstream culture, and not to upset those sensibilities, views, desires and aversions (which are often seen as 'needs')? I would say the Dharma will always be radical in its position relative to mainstream values, and indeed that it has an obligation to be so.

And though I have felt strongly committed it, and touched deeply by the beauty of its spirit, what it stands for and what it makes possible, I have recently been wondering if it is also not inconceivable that one of the many factors that may unwittingly support such a slide is the 

 system, as radical and profoundly heart-opening in its potential as it is. Though counter-cultural at its core, it might at times subtly foster situations where, because of financial pressures or incentives, teachers, consciously or unconsciously, may end up saying what is easier for most yogis to hear, less challenging, more popular, or at least shaping their message with those tendencies. I am not sure if this is the case, but I feel we must all ask ourselves if it's possible it creeps in at times. It actually saddens me to even consider an end to the 

 system, and I don't know if it's the right thing at this point, but I do think we need to be open to questioning it and the totality of its effects. What is probably more significant than the 

 arrangement anyway is the fact that, for most, it might simply feel too hard and uncomfortable to tell a group of 50 or 100 people what they don't want to hear, to risk not being liked, even if one 


If we all put our minds to it together, it is surely possible to set up a general and widespread system where both teachers and retreatants actually travelled much less by air and in general, and that this would impact the possibilities within Dharma Teaching in a number of positive ways. It would mean that Teachers had more continuous contact with their (more local) Sanghas and Students, allowing the possibility of a notion and expectation of 'development of the teaching and practice', both in depth and in breadth, to become standard. It may, in so doing, enable the opportunity for teachers and teachings to become more creative than otherwise. (One would simply have to come up with new material!) It would also foster a shift to a model where more long-term, and thus deeper, relationships between Students and Teachers are the norm, with all the potential benefits that would come with that.

In some ways, the dominant model that we have right now evolved understandably from a sort of 'missionary mode' that went with the initial movement of the Dharma into the West, particularly from the 1970s. And of course, so much tremendous good came from that. But for the most part, we have moved beyond those needs now. There are a few countries that are still in a 'birthing' process, but we need to think about how to help establish them as soon as possible in an 'independence of flying foreign teachers'.


At present, I wonder if the prevalence of the common approach may breed certain attitudes and expectations on the part of yogis and Teachers. Many retreat centres and even sitting groups have come to expect a rotating menu of variety of teachers (and, hopefully 'celebrity'!) in their annual programme of retreats and teachings. Indeed, have we, for instance at Gaia House, come to regard the attraction of a variety of international, and hopefully 'famous', teachers a measure of the success of the institution? There seem to be a number of drawbacks to this:

First, of course, as already stated, it involves a lot of unnecessary travelling by air, with all the consequences and implications already discussed. Personally, I used to try to weigh up whether the benefits from my flying to teach and serve the Dharma outweighed the negative effects of flying. But more recently I started to ask myself (and now others): What, really, is the point of someone travelling hundreds, or even thousands, of miles to say something that would not have been said that differently by someone who lives just down the road?

Some teachers, I know, will consider their offering to be more 'unique' or 'original', and so more 'needed' than others, and so attempt to justify their frequent flying in that way. (If so, please explain how that is to all of us at a Teacher Meeting!) I would actually question whether such a self-perception is true in almost every case. If you think that it is so, perhaps you should take some more time to explore a more wide-ranging selection of the Dharma Talks and writings that are available on the web these days, or the books in print. There is a very good chance that someone is delivering a similar message not too far from your travel destination! And indeed with the advent of so much possibility on the web, and so much available on CD, is your actual physical presence there really necessary? Won't people 'get it' from a book or a CD or a web-cast or through Skype? (The large and thriving Sangha of London Insight Meditation has been experimenting very successfully with Skype Teaching in recent years, as have other non-Insight Meditation Sanghas.) Of course, if there is a very particular way of working with very unusual practices that very few others know how to teach and that require a lot of careful back-and-forth direct interaction between Teacher and Student, one could argue the case. But we may also have to simply let go of trying to have it all. And that may not be easy, even for those for whom 'letting go' is a central practice and teaching in their life.


To share a little from my personal situation: There are a number of students who come regularly to Gaia House from all over the world to practice under my guidance of whom I am very fond, who are very dear to me, and there will be a grief in the ending of that form of relating to them. There is a loss here. We should not pretend that, just because we are Dharma Teachers, we will not have feelings about the various losses involved in a transition to a new model. There will probably be a lot of very understandable feelings for all those involved in the wider Sangha. There may well be grief, for both Teacher and Student, at the loss of immediate and frequent connection in relationships that have become deeply meaningful, usually to both, over years; there may be fears over the possibility of financial loss and loss of some degree of accustomed (or projected) standard of living; and certainly those responsible for the fiscal health of Dharma institutions may also have such fears; there may even be, for some, a fear or discomfort at the prospective loss of certain identities that have formed around travelling so much here and there as a sought-after Dharma Teacher; there may also be fear of loss of the identities that, though we may not like to admit it, have become woven into the consumer culture, whereby we define, 'express' and feel ourselves dependent on various aspects of what we consume, and on the life-styles we have become accustomed to. (This is complex, and, I think, a good deal more subtle than it might at first seem (8).) And it is quite likely that, at times, there will also be emotions of despair, overwhelm, confusion, guilt, frustration, anger etc... We may well need to support each other in working through these feelings.


And of course, there will be obvious felt benefits to a decrease in flying. If it's long-distance, flying and jet lag are simply tiring!

And at least financially, there is no reason why a new way of doing things need be inferior. But to make it work, everyone will have to be on board – Institutions, Retreat Centres and Teachers rethinking and re-working their whole programmes to make it sustainable and viable for everyone. And we must put a similar message out to the yogis. Why not? It may involve a temporary dip in income for some teachers or institutions, but even that is not necessarily the case, and in many cases, even if it were, it could be ridden-out if it is short-lived. In addition, it may be that, with less of a culture of 'expectation of variety', there will be less of a pressure on Teachers to be 'popular', and less of the concomitant financial pressure through the dana system that might go with that.

Second, the general mode of doing things at present creates a situation where yogis may well end up hearing pretty much the same thing from slightly different faces (and accents) over and over again, for years. As such, their practice and understanding may well tend not to deepen as much as it might were the same teacher to be present more consistently, and with the opportunity to weave something different to support the growth of the yogis' practice and understanding. For those of you who are parents – how would you feel if your children went to school and heard the same lessons over and over for years, their classes in tenth grade being near duplicates of their classes in second grade? Might you not think there was something infuriating and perhaps even a little obscene about it? Even stranger is the way that the yogis have sometimes come to want and expect to hear the same basic teachings again and again – "You can never hear it too many times." There are noticeable ways (and not just in the explicit teaching) that the diet given can sometimes feed the demand and the expectation, and so the whole thing becomes self-perpetuating to some extent. It's not any one's fault of course, it's merely the way that the system has ended up for the most part. But why is that okay in the Dharma, when it wouldn't be okay in any other sphere of life? I realise that this may for some feel part of a much larger discussion about 'progress' in Dharma practice, but, at the very least, I don't think any one would deny that more ongoing contact between Teacher and Students, is more fertile ground for all kinds of wonderful and promising possibilities.

Thirdly, collectively flying less will, if it is managed well and possibly in co-ordination with a re-thinking of teacher 'deployment', promote and support stronger local Sanghas to emerge and thrive, similarly bringing the promise of many creative possibilities and many benefits for everyone.


So, again, the question: what are we actually going to 

 all work together to conceive of and create a different way of doing things. Can you envision it? A network of structures where it's very rare for Teachers or yogis to fly to a retreat, and where there are ample opportunities for everyone to hear Teachings and to practice and explore the Dharma widely and deeply and with ongoing support from each other and from closer relationships with Teachers; and for Teachers to teach in a creative, fulfilling and financially secure and sustainable way. We could figure out the practicalities involved in such an evolution. It won't necessarily be simple or easy, but there are already precedents that are relatively close to such a model e.g. CIMC in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so in some instances and locations the transition may not be all that difficult to achieve. But arguably it will, on the whole, be a big shift and will clearly, it seems to me, require a great deal of thought. And some aspects may need a lot more discussion and creative thinking e.g. whether a change to the dana system is, in fact, necessary or a helpful support to the overall re-visioning.

the Boards, Teachers, Trustees, Directors and Staff of Dharma Centres need to actually bring this up at meetings as a potential vision, put it on the meeting agendas, and discuss practical steps to begin to realize such a vision, or another suitable way forward.

Similarly, it needs to be brought up as an urgent item for discussion in Teacher Meetings of all kinds –

to discuss both the practical possibilities and challenges, and the Dharma aspects; and,

to share and process together our individual emotional responses both to Climate Change and to the transformations that adequately responding to Climate Change will require of us, as in the vision suggested here

A Working (Cyber) Group consisting of Teachers and Retreat Centre Directors representing as many Centres as possible and interested others should be set up to look at the potential implementation of new models in this age of Climate Change.

At the same time, it is also possible, and probably necessary, that change begins to be implemented unilaterally, by individual centres rethinking their programming and their messages to yogis. So each centre will need to set up its own working group or designate someone to co-ordinate and begin to implement a different vision.

An online forum open to all, to further and deepen the discussion of everything the complex challenge of Climate Change raises - regarding the Dharma and also the practicalities of possible new visions. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sustainabledharma

In addition to the issue of flying, each Centre could form its own Greening Group to keep alive its own 'Green Charter', an ongoing exploration of lessening its adverse environmental impact in all kinds of areas.

Anything else you can think of that would be helpful – please e-mail: sustainabledharma@yahoogroups.com

Why would we not re-vision our response and the way we do things? Why would we not rise to this? We must, and we can. We would then be taking better care of the planet, the human and the other species, the Dharma, the yogis, the teachers, and the futures of all of these. Please - let's not have limits to our mindfulness and inquiry. To how fully we live the Teachings and all that they imply. Let's raise the standard. Lets raise the game. Is the Dharma not about waking up? If we do not take good care to really inquire into all this, to 'step up' to it all, if our self-scrutiny is incomplete, our mindfulness, metta and investigation cannot but be incomplete, mediocre....A mediocre Dharma. Let's help to establish a Dharma of more comprehensive and unshirking integrity. Let's grow up together. And let's be part of a solution.

Yours imploringly and inquisitively, 
Rob Burbea
Resident Teacher and Co-founder of Sanghaseva
Gaia House 

April 2011

(My heartfelt thanks and appreciation to Chris Cullen, Kirsten Kratz and Rachel Davies for their very thoughtful and helpful feedback and suggestions in preparing this paper.)

1. Cited in Oxfam (2008): The Urgency of Now: www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/fp2p/downloads/tuon4.pdf

2. See, for example, the wide-ranging survey of studies discussed in Hamilton, C. (2010): Requiem For A Species – Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change. London: Earthscan

3. See, for example, the numerous studies discussed in Crompton, T. and Kasser, T (2009): Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role Of Human Identity. WWF-UK

4. See, for instance, Randall, R (Sept 2009): Loss and Climate Change: The Cost of Parallel Narratives. Ecopsychology

5. See Jackson, T. (2009): Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a finite Planet. Earthscan

6. See both Jackson (2009) op. cit. and Hamilton (2009) op. cit. for penetrating discussions of the far-reaching and wide-ranging consequences of a rigid belief in the doctrine of the necessity of economic growth. (Jackson's book also explores possible alternative economic structures.)

7. See, for example, Hillman, J. and Ventura, M. (1992): We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse. San Francisco, Harper

It's obvious that there is such an abundance and depth of good will in the Dharma world and in those who work in one form or another for the Dharma, and the expression of this goodwill is visible in countless ways large and small. Yet it also seems that in one area in particular - our actual responses to the Global Climate Emergency - we are falling short of what it is possible for us as a community to manifest.

'Dharma Teaching and Values in the Age of Climate Change'

Waking Up in (Our Own) Time:
Embracing Environmental Ethics as Part of Our Practice

What does it mean to wake up today, in the midst of this modern life?

If ‘waking up’ has something to do with the way we meet life, what is our sense of what an ‘awakened’ (or at least, a ‘more awakened’) meeting with life might involve? What do we imagine it might look like? And in our notion of ‘Meeting Life’, what exactly do we mean when we say ‘Life’?

For modern ‘Life’ (however we construe it) now inevitably includes an awareness of a whole range of uncomfortable but undeniable facts about itself, about our collective situation and how we shape it through our choices and actions. At times of course it can feel tempting to try to avoid this awareness and the questions and emotions it might bring up for us. To live wakefully and authentically, however, we have to endeavour instead to somehow broaden the range and reach of our hearts and our questioning, and with it the compass of what the Dharma means today.

We live together on a planet of now more than 7 billion human beings (and rising), and with all the immense and almost overwhelmingly complex challenges that we (and other species) are facing, we might wonder whether humanity is equipped, practically or philosophically, to meet such unprecedented and elaborately interacting issues as climate change, massive species extinctions, depletion of resources, unsustainable consumerism and runaway economic systems and all the suffering that these already cause and will cause in coming years.

Of course, the responses of the heart and the beauty and necessity of empathy and compassion are all vitally important in relating to all this, but I have explored those aspects at length a number of times elsewhere, and in what follows, I would like to try to emphasise instead the qualities of clarity and unflinching honesty. I hope you can ponder this article within a larger context of necessarily diverse approaches to these themes.

So then, although it’s nearly impossible, because it’s entangled with all the others, let’s try to tug at just one thread of this daunting knot of our times, from a Dharma perspective:

Though often conceived of as an ‘environmental’ issue, anthropogenic global warming is also probably the biggest Human Rights issue the world has ever faced. For we know, almost with certainty, a stark truth: as a result of global climate destabilisation, alongside the wholesale devastation to other species, many millions, or even billions of (mostly poor) human beings will be confronted with practically unavoidable death and suffering by starvation, water shortage, loss of land and displacement through droughts and flooding, increased disease, extreme weather events and doubtless brutal regional conflicts fuelled by resource scarcities.

Now, if climate change is a Human Rights issue, it must then be an ethical issue; and if it is an ethical issue, it must be a Dharma issue, because the Dharma path is based on ethics (sīla), and should also have as a measure of its fruit the expression of ethical care. (Many of us feel that it would be an ethical issue even if no humans at all were affected but only non-human nature, that the circle of moral consideration needs to expand to include a deep valuing of the natural world, in and of itself. But, for now, we’ll just consider the human-to-human moral questions.)

We should perhaps pause here already, as it can be hard not to feel turned off considering all this. Talk of such enormous human and non-human misery, such irretrievable loss, the powerlessness and inertia we feel and witness can feel burdensome and oppressive. And in the West, ‘morality’ can often bring with it a habitually and historically associated sense of heaviness and repression, or possibly even guilt, which is rarely helpful. Naturally we may rather want to hear and think about things that make us feel good. “Where is the joy?” we might ask, from lives that might feel already burdened with busyness, complexity and demands. “Can’t someone talk about this in a way that inspires?” But maybe, given the perhaps unparalleled complexity, diversity and obscurity of the psychology underneath our collective inertia and inadequate responses to the climate emergency, the task of inner transformation will call for, and call forth, a whole spectrum of voices and emotional pitches and timbres, and some of them simply won’t be joyful or easy. We can learn, though, to simply include it all in what we ask the heart to hold, what we train the mind to contemplate.

A few years ago, in a stab to remove talk of crisis from contemporary environmentalism, someone made the interesting point that Martin Luther King Jr., in the ethical struggle of the Civil Rights movement, inspired by raising his dream as a vision. He did not proclaim “I have a nightmare”; that wouldn’t have fired the imagination. But, as James Gustav Speth wrote in response, ‘he did not need to say it. [African-Americans in the 1960s] were living a nightmare. They needed a dream. But we, I fear, are living a dream. We need to be reminded of the nightmare ahead.’ What does it mean to wake up from this dream?

Whatever our reaction to hearing or reading about the environmental situation and its moral aspects, somehow each of us needs to find his or her ways to hold such pressing ethical questions so that these questions open us, rather than shut us down. How will you and I keep truly alive in our own hearts and minds and in the Dharma community an open investigation into what sīla means for us in this modern age?

It seems a crucial first step that we do. Because if climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue, and so a Dharma issue, I wonder further if it behoves me, as a Dharma teacher, to demonstrate moral leadership here in one way or another. Reflecting on what forms that might take, two paths immediately suggest themselves as indispensable. Firstly, what I say, write and teach must speak deeply to the sīla aspects of these issues. Surely, from somewhere, somehow, the fires of ethical concern must be lit. In a world nightmarishly slow to address the moral and practical challenges of climate change, a sufficiently large segment of humanity must venture beyond spoken platitudes to raise the essential moral questions to a primary place in society’s discourse. And secondly, I have to express more than words that sound good. In order to be real, ethics need to materialise, to be made manifest in behaviour as well as speech. We may need care here, however: to be too rigidly prescriptive in terms of behaviour tends to make many people feel understandably nervous and deprived of a degree of freedom. Unskilful rigidity tends to inspire little support, or, at worst, may even end up provoking a defiant backlash. If we let go, though, of such inflexible ‘rules’, we must still find ethics to guide us, and what these might be is still open for our exploration.

Most Buddhists may want to look to the teachings of the Buddha for direction. But the Buddha did not live and teach in a fossil-fuel-based, industrially globalized world of 7 billion people with an awareness of the disastrous cumulative effects of their actions on countless present and future lives. The moral precepts he taught, beautiful and vital as they are, were commensurate with the nature of his society at the time, and simply may not be, as they stand, complete enough, wide enough for our age. We may need to look elsewhere for additional guidance.

The Dalai Lama recently met with scientists, philosophers and religious leaders from around the world at the Mind and Life Conference convened to discuss the global environmental crisis. He stated his opinion that religions, including Buddhism, East and West, have become “part of the status quo, part of the problem, and need to become instead part of the solution.” Recognising that the multiple environmental crises have many of their roots in unquestioned economic thinking and untrammelled consumerism, he went on to say that Buddhism and other religions “need to challenge greed and consumerism in the world much more deeply, and need to start contemplating and addressing larger socio-economic and environmental issues in their teaching.”

We humans have known about climate change for a while now; at least since the first IPCC report in 1990. To the Dalai Lama’s statement we could add that this knowing exactly how we are causing devastating climate change and our concomitant lack of appropriate responses to curtail emissions are, from a Buddhist point of view, almost classical examples of the work of delusion and greed, two of the root afflictions that Dharma teaching and practice is supposed to uproot. Shouldn’t we then expect modern Dharma to be vigorously and emphatically addressing these manifestations of delusion and greed in ourselves and in our societies, and particularly the ways they fuel the almost incalculable present and future suffering of global warming? The Dalai Lama is effectively saying he does not see much substantial evidence of this yet within Buddhism, and he feels it needs to change.

Our modern Dharma must include environmental ethics as equally as any other of the traditional ethical guidelines. My hope is that these can become integrally woven into the vision that we have of what the Dharma is and involves. Just as most practitioners might expect, say, ethics around sexuality to be manifest in a ‘Dharma life’ and certainly a teacher’s life, so we might also expect environmental ethics, kindness and care to have comparable importance. And their absence from any ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘path of wakefulness and kindness’ would similarly call into question for us, on a gut level, the authenticity, reality and fullness of that ‘Enlightenment’, that ‘wakefulness’ and that ‘kindness’.

Visibility matters here. The perception of all those who come to, or even consider coming to, Gaia House matters. As in other areas of modern moral concern in our culture, it is important to communicate a moral message loud and clear – to be transparently and visibly diverse, for instance, and not institutionally racist or institutionally sexist. Gaia House has done remarkably well in recent years in terms of the carbon footprint of the building itself, and this crucial work is to be celebrated. Great credit is due to all those involved. Now the Gaia House teachers would also like to get involved. Hopefully, as mentioned, we can begin to communicate widely this message of environmental ethics (and the associated Human Rights ethics) and their centrality in the Dharma. In addition, and as a very modest start, we have made a number of small requests to the Gaia House Trust, recognising at the same time that in the longer term a bigger shift in the way teachers and teachings are offered internationally may well be needed. We know that on their own these measures hardly represent a significant shift, but, without knowing exactly what the next steps might involve or require, we hope this will be a genuine beginning.

We also recognise that the vague hope that from somewhere there will arrive for us a technological fix to rather effortlessly remove the whole problem is an illusion and a part of the dreaming, the being asleep. Waking up will involve sacrifices for everyone. And this may be difficult. We, and indeed the network of Dharma centres, have long been accustomed to having relatively easy access to a great deal of all kinds of things (and not just obviously material things), and somehow we, like most people, expect this abundance to continue. As individuals, and as institutions like retreat centres, we must admit that we might have the same reluctance that can be witnessed at the inter-national level to give up and have less when we might not see others doing the same. Perhaps we fear we may miss out relative to others, or lose our standing or status.

Of course, it can be a lot more uplifting and attractive to talk of community projects that we can feel enthusiastic about, e.g. the installation of the biomass boiler, and this is hugely important psychologically (and obviously practically). But it’s also true that the biomass boiler involves no loss at all for anyone. It seems harder to enthuse over pending sacrifices. We need, however, to be able to be moved to action in the absence of the emotion of enthusiasm. There are anyway other potential sources and channels for our enthusiasm: in re-visioning together how Gaia House operates within the system of international Dharma teaching for instance, in spirited protest at Government policies, and perhaps, even, in civil disobedience.

Bringing all this into the scope of what Dharma practice means may not be easy or comfortable for any of us. It can be difficult and unsettling when one dwells on these ethical questions. We might realize how many of the decisions that we make, individually, collectively, or institutionally as a retreat centre, are effectively, in part, statements of valuing some things over others. How many tonnes of personal carbon emissions, above what I need to survive (what are termed ‘luxury emissions’), can I justify, even if it’s ‘for the Dharma’, knowing that any extra I emit might mean a future human being will not have even enough to survive (‘subsistence emissions’)? We need to be clear and honest here what we are deciding and implying matters more than the lives of certain others. Of course this is not a simple ethical problem. We cannot trace a direct one-to-one causal connection between, say, that flight I took, and a particular person’s misery and hunger through drought. But we do know that there is a connection. And just because ethical problems like this may feel dishearteningly complex and unfamiliar, that does not mean that we shouldn’t try to feel or think our way through them. Because what could I say to convince this future person that I am making a morally right choice? The fact that they are not yet born or are still too young, far away or poor to know or complain can take some of the stark discomfort of it away, but it still exists as a moral dilemma given what we now know. Reflecting on the ways we do things from the perspective of caring for future human beings can feel uncomfortable to say the least, and such contemplations may not be completely welcome inclusions into my practice, especially if I have come to meditation and the Dharma understandably seeking inner simplification and the calming of agitation. These pressing questions are not simple, however, and it may well be that a degree of agitation accompanies earnest and engaged inquiry and reflects a healthy ethical sensitivity.

We don’t know exactly what will be asked of us as teachers or as a retreat centre in the coming months and years, but if we are too quick to refuse to consider certain possibilities, changes, and sacrifices that would make a difference, we might also need to inquire a little more searchingly, lest we be then not too far from President Bush Sr. ‘explaining’ the US refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol by stating that “The American Way of Life is not up for negotiation.”

We do not want the Dharma and Gaia House to mimic the wider failure of governing bodies to change anything really significant, so we ask for your feedback, ideas and support. In the midst of almost certainly the defining issue of our time, and as we move together towards a very uncertain future, what do, what will contemporary Dharma teachings counsel, model and express?

'Waking Up in (Our Own) Time'

The Buddha and the Sacred Earth

July 2016

Though many now try to suggest otherwise, the Pali Canon and early Buddhism tend to view the world as something to be transcended: one is reborn repeatedly into the world through ignorance and craving, and through enlightenment there can be an end to that cycle. Monks and nuns were encouraged to live ‘in Nature’, not so much because of any intrinsic worth or sacredness of Nature, but because living away from towns was more conducive to a simple, calm, and undistracted life, free of unhelpful enticements. And a similar aim was primary in shaping the Buddha’s ethical philosophy. Though stressing certain forms of non-harming and including some consideration of animal welfare, and though encouraging the cultivation of kindness and compassion for all sentient beings, the ethical guidelines and trainings set forth by the Buddha were not principally prompted by a sense of the sacredness of Nature or Life; rather they too were advocated because by refraining from obviously causing harm to other sentient beings and by developing a mental habit of kindness one created a simpler life and a more peaceful mind, both of which were regarded as necessary to achieve a depth of meditation, which in turn would eventually enable one to escape this world of samsara forever.

In addition to this transcendentally-oriented body of teaching, various versions of non-transcendent Buddhism have also been articulated, evolved over hundreds of years in India and in contact with other cultures. Many of these traditions, including for instance some schools of Japanese Zen, carry more obviously a flavour of ‘the soil’. And they are often guided as much by the archetype of ‘the natural human being’, ‘the human being of simplicity’ – an archetype that influences and inspires so many modern western environmentalists – as they are by classical Buddhist teachings. Many of the streams of Thai Forest Buddhism also share that fantasy of natural simplicity, its ethos and sensibility. It is particularly evident, for example, in the teachings of the Thai Forest monk Achaan Chah, as popularized for Westerners by Jack Kornfield and Paul Breiter in the lovely book A Still Forest Pool. But still, teachings on what to believe about Nature, or how to regard it, other than as a support for one’s personal practice, tend not to be central. Not much is said.

Contemporary expressions of Buddhism vary widely in regard to all this. Some resemble Pali Canon Buddhism very closely, retaining its thrust towards a transcendence of the world, along with all that that entails. Some are less transcendentally inclined – for example, much of the lineage of Achaan Sumedho, Achaan Chah’s senior western disciple. There, individual inclinations among the monks and nuns vary considerably; this lineage now encompasses within it a wide range of attitudes to Nature and the environment. Many modern forms of Buddhism strive for a more secular vision and attempt to discard what they view as the cultural baggage of Eastern superstitions, about rebirth, for instance, or different realms of being. Some, however, may also have become in many ways less ambitious, more a set of techniques and attitudes designed to alleviate just a modicum of personal suffering. These versions of contemporary Buddhism, often having much in common with certain psychotherapeutic self-help programs, are generally non-transcendent, and they tend to make simple sense to, and sit more comfortably with, many people in the West today. Their commendable intention is to strip the Buddha’s Dharma (doctrine) down to its essence, the Four Noble Truths – an awareness of suffering, an understanding of how the mind causes suffering, the possibility of relief from that suffering, and a set of practices and guidelines to help move toward that relief. But typically all sorts of assumptions and beliefs absorbed from contemporary culture are still wrapped up, uninvestigated, in the path that ensues.

Nature and the world, for example, can unfortunately just become a mostly irrelevant backdrop to my personal practice – the process of trying to reduce my levels of stress and anxiety, to cope with my life, with my unruly mind and the difficulties of having a body, and with ‘reality’. Often, implicitly and unquestioningly, this ‘reality’, the setting for my practice, is a world and existence that is just what it seems to the modern western mind with its set of, usually unexamined, presuppositions and beliefs.

This view and the attitudes that underpin it are taken perhaps even further through recent theories and experiments in areas such as the neuroscience of mindfulness. While there is undoubtedly much to discover in that domain, the tenor of such investigations often produces unhelpful limitations, for it supports and is supported by the modernist notion of ‘Nature (or Cosmos, or Human Being, or Mind) as intricate Machine’. Emerging in 17th Century Europe with Descartes, Bacon, and the Scientific Revolution, that idea has since then slowly gathered so much authority that it now almost completely determines how most people in the West intuitively conceive of and perceive Nature. Such a view of things can of course be very helpful at times and in certain ways. But when it is assumed to be the total and only legitimate ‘Truth’, when our only way of knowing Nature and ourselves is through the lens of such a notion, when it is not recognized as just one valid perspective and way of knowing among others, then it spawns all kinds of problems.

As suggested earlier, many people are attracted to Buddhism now because it seems to offer a path of spirituality, or a way of being in the world, that is not dependent on beliefs. But so that Buddhism can continue to grow and serve as a radical resource for those who engage it, and so that any individual Buddhist’s practice and understanding are not unhelpfully limited, it is crucially important to inquire to see just what assumptions and beliefs have in fact been absorbed, whether consciously or unconsciously, from the culture one is living in; and to see just how they are influencing one’s view of Nature and the world.

Meditative Experiences to Transform Our Views of Self and Nature


That said, with the vision of relying less on belief and more on meditation as a path of knowing and understanding, there is an enormous range of meditative experiences that can open, through practice, to potentially transform the way one sees oneself and Nature.

It is possible, for example, to meditate on the theme of interconnectedness, to train oneself to see and feel interconnectedness. One can approach this in many ways. But often the interconnectedness that is highlighted in modern Buddhist teachings is a material interconnectedness. The Vietnamese Zen teacher, Thích Nhất Hạnh, emphasizes this level of interconnectedness very beautifully. One can reflect, for instance, on what was involved in making the paper on which you are reading these words: the trees from which the paper pulp came, the rain that watered those trees, the clouds that released those rains, the ocean waters that evaporated to form those clouds, the sun that warmed the waters to the point of evaporation; the workers on the plantation and at the factory that produced the paper, the food that sustained them and gave them energy, the natural elements and other human beings and perhaps animals that helped to produce that food—all these and more are somehow woven together into this piece of paper. This paper has the clouds, the rain, and the soil in it.

I may also contemplate my own body or my breath in meditation and regard it attentively through an understanding that I am, right now, for example, breathing air that has been breathed by countless others and by trees and plants. And looking more closely I find the apparent divisions between ‘me’ and the air or other elements of Nature are not quite as solid as they seem at first. I can meditate and see in this way until it becomes easily accessible to me as a way of knowing and being in the world and until my heart feels the implications of this interconnectedness. For some, though not for all, this kind of awareness does open up some sense of the sacredness of Nature.

There are also other aspects or levels of interconnectedness that can be realized through meditation. Certain experiences and perceptions can sometimes open when meditation deepens, that can in many cases strongly influence the attitude to Nature. One example is a meditative seeing of oneness. And two of the more common mystical perceptions for a meditator here are that ‘all is Awareness’ or ‘all is Love’; that materiality and solidity is a kind of illusion and the ‘stuff’ or ‘substance’ of the world, and everything in it, is actually Awareness or Love. For a number of reasons these are usually very beautiful and heart-opening experiences, and each may well lead to a particular sense of the sacredness of Nature. This is not always so, however, and for a minority they might instead lead to a kind of nonchalance in relation to Nature and the world: “It’s all one; it’s all only Awareness. So it doesn’t really matter much what happens.”

This view of oneness and this level of experience is one that, with persistent practice, a meditator will eventually go beyond. For as meditation and insight deepen further, more profound levels of interconnectedness are realized. We understand that not only is the matter of the world interconnected, but that in an even more fundamental way the mind and the world are not ever separate. The world is always seen, sensed, known, through the mind; and the mind, we might even discover, creates or ‘fabricates’ the world, in a certain sense. Even when there is no thinking, some or other subtle conception always remains to form, colour, and inform our way of looking and so our experience of things and the world. ‘Nature’, we come to understand, is not separate from mind, and does not exist in some objective way; it is not inherently ‘like this’ or ‘like that’. (As Buddhists say, Nature is, along with all things, including the mind, ‘empty’.) Of course Nature in a number of ways creates and shapes the mind too–that we can easily see. But it is the reverse contingency that is most fruitful to comprehend here: We are always involved in making ‘Nature’. We may romanticize it, or fear its wild and alien power; we may personify it with imaginal figures, with angels and daemons, imagining and sensing the cosmos as multi-leveled, multi-dimensional in some way and divine in essence, or regard it as a meaningless machine to be figured out and even re-engineered. But none of these perspectives, and certainly not the currently widespread modernist view, will ever be the whole truth or the ultimate truth.

We are left then not in perplexity, nor in a dismissal of the world, but in mystical awe of it all. And we are left too with a freedom to see in different ways. Through such a depth of understanding, many possible doors of perception become available and are recognized as valid perspectives. How, then, do we want to see ‘Nature’ at any time? And what are the effects of different conceptual frameworks and ways of looking – on our hearts and our consciousness, on our civilization and culture, and on the other species that inhabit the Earth? What ways of looking will open a sense of sacredness, of care, of deep beauty, and meaningfulness?

Here we move away from any rigid clinging to a tight notion or definition of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, and open the possibility of seeing and sensing more ‘poetically’. For we realize that, in some way or other, the state of the consciousness, the heart, and the imagination are, along with the conceptual framework of the moment, always part of our sensing and knowing ‘Nature’ anyway. Acknowledging this and becoming more aware of it, we can respect each of these facets and explore what they open to us.

In relation to the environmental emergencies we face and as a part of helping to develop a healthier relationship of humanity with Nature, this profound insight into perception and reality and what it opens for us might be the most significant gift that Buddhism has to offer. We cannot, at this point in the evolution of knowledge and civilization, indulge our nostalgia and revert to a kind of simplistic primitivism. After centuries of modernism, very few will be able to really believe that kind of view. Our understandings and views need not to regress but to progress beyond modernism. And that probably means expanding our comprehension of what constitutes valid knowledge of Nature. Reductionist scientific materialism has a certain value, but it is not the whole picture and cannot provide us with all the perspectives and insights that we need.

Importantly, opening the doors in such a direction would also be congruent then with insights and developments in Western philosophy and psychology, and even with the most advanced of the sciences. For in its own way physics too has, in the last hundred years or so, gone well beyond the mechanistic and simplistic view of reductionist materialism: reality is no longer construed as being made of little billiard ball-like things, existing in absolute time and space, independent of the observer.

Surveying its history, then, Buddhism might seem not to have deeply considered or offered much to our relationship with Nature. But more recently some of its streams are beginning in different ways to respond more actively to the environmental situation. In Cambodia and Thailand, for example, on the edges of forests threatened by clear-cutting, monks have ceremoniously wrapped monastic robes around trees, marking the trees as ‘ordained’ into the monastic lineage. They realize that, since their culture does not respect or see sanctity in Nature nearly as much as it respects and sees sanctity in the monastic clergy, this may be the only timely way of changing people’s perception of the forest.

And as the recognition of the urgency of our various ecological crises begins to dawn in the global consciousness, some Buddhists, still perhaps in the minority, are beginning to realize something more basic – that the traditional conceptual framework of Buddhism and its Four Noble Truths needs stretching so that it includes and addresses the suffering caused by climate change and environmental degradation, as well as other social injustices. Christopher Titmuss’s book, The Green Buddha, for example, does just that; as does Thích Nhất Hạnh’s expansion of the traditional ethical precepts in the Community of Interbeing to include an active caring about one’s carbon footprint and one’s impact on the environment. In much of Joanna Macy’s work the emphasis is more on reconnecting – to our awareness of the Earth’s magnificent web of life, its evolution, and our place in it all, as well as to the complex of deep and often difficult emotions we may have suppressed in disconnecting from Nature. And an exploration of all of these aspects is supported through courses, teachings, and wilderness experience at Guhyapati’s EcoDharma Centre in the Spanish Pyrenees, where trainings in compassionate environmental activism are also offered.

In the UK, DANCE (Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement), and in the USA, similar initiatives such as Buddhists for Climate Action and One Earth Sangha, seek to creatively explore, to give birth to, galvanize, and empower a wide range of Buddhist responses to the global environmental emergency. Through all of these strands a realization is slowly emerging that meditation and the direction of practice are always informed by conceptual frameworks, views, images, and fantasies – of where the path leads, what ‘Enlightenment’ looks like and involves, and of the nature of Nature, of the world in which we live.

These understandings, as well as the more profound insights described earlier, offer potentially exciting and life-giving avenues which Buddhism might fruitfully explore in its evolution. No longer tied to one way of looking and conceiving–to seeing the world as a realm from which to escape, or to seeing Nature only through the assumptions of modernism - we can open a freedom to see in myriad ways, to see sacredness everywhere, perhaps, and allow love and passionate care into our relationship with the natural world.

Though many now try to suggest otherwise, the Pali Canon and early Buddhism tend to view the world as something to be transcended: one is reborn repeatedly into the world through ignorance and craving, and through enlightenment there can be an end to that cycle. Monks and nuns were encouraged to live ‘in Nature’, not so much because of any intrinsic worth or sacredness of Nature, but because living away from towns was more conducive to a simple, calm, and undistracted life, free of unhelpful enticements. And a similar aim was primary in shaping the Buddha’s ethical philosophy.

'The Buddha and the Sacred Earth'

The three articles that appear here (written by Rob and published in 2011 and 2016) challenged, galvanized and supported those in the Insight Meditation tradition, and in the wider Dharma community, to turn towards and engage ethically with the planetary crises of our times. Together they constitute a powerful statement of deep care and a plea for radically different 'ways of looking', in relation to our selves and to Nature. These writings are of relevance not just for Buddhists, but for any human being who is concerned about the state of our world and humanity's impact on it in the 21st century. 

Eco Dharma

'Dharma Teaching and Values in the Age of Climate Change'

'Waking Up in (Our Own) Time'

'The Buddha and the Sacred Earth'