Harbingers—The Right Thing to Do
4 June 2019Those among you who accept the probability of the coming climate collapse will know what I’m talking about. Acceptance is a long process, and a hard one. But to speak of it is still taboo: you will be attacked, dismissed, patronised, or at best, greeted with an awkward silence. Your friends will kindly wonder if you have a mental illness. They will, in all seriousness, tell you that they get by by simply ignoring the problem, and recommend this as a healthy option. I’ve experienced all these things, and everyone I have spoken to on this has experienced it too. Right at the time when you long for connection, when you feel the fragility of what we have and the need for understanding and support, the support you need is just not there.
Taking facts seriously is hard; and being put down for it is even harder. If you want to change my mind, don’t patronise me, give me a reason.
The forces of denial are not just external; they live in all of us. I know this, and it is why I put effort into overcoming it. Over the past decade or so I must have read thousands of articles on climate change; I read about it almost every day. The basic facts are clear: atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, recently passing 415ppm for the first time. Global CO2 hasn’t been this high for 3 million years. There is no downwards or even mitigating trend. On the contrary, the results from this year confirm that the rate of CO2 increase is steadily accelerating. In the 90s it was growing at about 1.5ppm/year, but today it is over 2.2ppm/year. This is driving us to a catastrophic tipping point in a decade.
Stress levels among scientists and activists are growing. Understandably so: billions of people are going to die, and all that you love will burn. What can more science do, except expand on what we already know, with new findings on a daily or weekly basis that things are, in fact, as bad or worse than we thought? What more can activists do, except the same things they have been doing for decades? Our strategies for change have manifestly failed, because, well, here we are. But this time, we must believe, it will be different. More people, with more energy, more focused. Meanwhile, the Australian people just elected one of the most denialist political parties on the planet. We gave the people the power to choose, and they chose the greater of two evils.
What do we, as followers of a teacher who spoke of the importance of contemplating death with every breath, have to offer? Well, for a start we could try listening to people’s worries and anxieties and not attack them or lecture platitudes at them.
No-one says it will be easy. I have my down periods. Sometimes I feel this sense of disconnect, like everyone is wandering around in a dream and I feel like screaming to wake them up. My community, the people I know and live and work with, are for the most part good and intelligent people. Yet it is rare to speak with someone who does not, in some way, fall back on the various strategies of denial. Heck, I do it myself, but at least I try not to.
And there are lots of you in this world going through the same thing, without even a fraction of this level of support. It is for you, in fact, that I write these articles. I want you to know that you are not crazy, not deluded, not suffering from depression. Reality is how it is, and what you are going through, I am going through too. I am trying to work out my response, bit by bit, and offer fragments of my journey in case they resonate at all.
It is perhaps the greatest emotional work that any of us will have to do; learning to cope with the fact that we, due to our laziness, greed, and ignorance, brought about the end of the world. Of course the forces of denial are super-strong, and anything that threatens them will be attacked and belittled. It’s one thing to know this, however and quite another to deal with it on top of everything.
I get it, the whole denialist thing, I really do. I’m not unsympathetic, because I know the cost. The whole Buddhist path is the journey away from denial towards acceptance. The Buddha constantly told us to see things as they are, not as we wish them to be.
This is one of the main reasons I became interested in the Dhamma. It was already my character, I had a burning wish to investigate and understand, to cut through the distortions and delusions. The Dhamma not only affirmed this, it gave me tools to do it. It taught me that I need a strong basis in conduct and learning, a community and a set of values. And it taught me that insight into the truth must depend on a deep level of emotional integration and stability. I by no means regard myself as someone who has fully learned these lessons; I have very far to go. But 25 years of practice, building on my earlier interests and character, has given me a certain ability to see things with an eye that is both compassionate and clear.
I see the books and articles written by Buddhists on the issue. There’s been a lot of work and attention, and on the whole, the Buddhists, especially in the US, have been one of the most vocal and progressive of the spiritual communities in their response. But I look at them, and they seem to have answers and solutions, and I wonder, if we know the solutions, how come nothing has worked? That’s why I shy away from giving slick answers and easy solutions: I just don’t think the facts bear them out.
There is something I believe in, though, and that is this: facts matter. If we are to make good choices we must have a good grasp of the facts. Facing up to the facts, no matter how dire, is the only way to do this. Without this as a start, how can we possibly ever respond to reality?
And this is the core of the problem with hope. Once we have an absolute commitment to hope—the idea that whatever happens, we must have hope—reality becomes a second-class citizen. But hope is a Christian virtue, not a Buddhist. There’s not even a word for hope in the Buddhist texts, not in this strong sense. This should be a strength of our Buddhist response: it is not based on a fantasy of the future, but on the reality of the present. Yet all-too-often, Buddhists insist on decidedly un-Buddhist ideas of hope or blissful ignorance, or worst of all, the horrifying belief that Buddhists shouldn’t even have anything to say about “worldly” issues like the environment.
If our response is predicated on the idea that we must have hope, it is only a matter of time before that hope is disappointed. Then we have doubled our work: we have to belatedly accept the reality (which by now has gotten even worse); and we have to deal with a loss of that which has sustained us. The longer we put off the work of acceptance, the harder it becomes.
Better to do the work now. Don’t worry too much about the whole “hope” thing, it’s just yesterday’s dream of tomorrow. I gave up hope years ago, and I’m doing okay.
How then do we live? Funnily enough, on the far side of hope the sun still shines, the rain still falls, you still get hungry, you laugh and drop things and get nostalgic over old photos.
And the question still remains: what kind of person do you want to be? If the world really is coming to an end, how do I want to live today? Do we really need a fantasy of the future in order to be decent people? Is it not enough to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do?