Climate change is often presented as a technical issue that needs a technical fix, but as the IPCC recognise, it has an ‘inner dimension’ that aligns with Buddhist teachings
My son turns thirteen today and it seems quite a turning point. What’s next? Adolescent turbulence, no doubt. Exams. Then what? When I consider what’s waiting when he’s my age, a shadow appears because the climate on which we depend is changing. The evidence is all around us, but however bad the graphs look, our attention shifts so easily.
What can I contribute as a Buddhist? Discussions of climate change often present it as a technical problem, a race to slow emissions. Buddhism has little to say about that. But the IPPC report on climate change mitigation published earlier this year argued that climate change issues also have an ‘inner dimension’ that involves our lifestyles, habits and states of mind. It advocates a shift in attitudes from ‘carbon-intensive lifestyles’ to ‘sustainable development pathways’ and ‘non-material values’.
The next question is how we can make that ‘inner transition’; and a further report published just last week by the UK-based Mindfulness Initiative presents evidence that practices like mindfulness can help us step out of the cycle of stimulation and consumption that makes us part of the problem.
What we step into is a different relationship with the world. Buddhism teaches that we naturally think of ourselves as fixed and separate selves, as if there’s a ‘me’ in here, looking out at a world out there. The truth is that we aren’t separate beings at all. We’re intimately connected to other people and to nature – the Zen master Dogen Zenji says: ‘The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world.’ But our lifestyles and our ways of thinking lead us to feel disconnected.
For many environmental thinkers, our disconnection from nature is the heart of the climate crisis. As the American writer Richard Louv says: ‘We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.’
We need to reconnect, to relearn the capacity to stop and stare with wholehearted mindful awareness, and appreciate what the world has given us. That’s just a start of course. Into that space can come grief for what we’ve lost, fear for the future and a determination, for the sake of all our children, to make a difference.
