As the souls I've found and the wonders of my love, it is worthy, and with thee, a hundred thousand million colors. Now I can see and hear it, Good morning, everyone. Welcome all. And welcome Tova. Tova Green is here, the vice president of San Francisco Zen Center, former Executive Director of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and she'll be speaking here tomorrow evening, so I'm very happy that you're here this morning.

[01:07]

Today is an important day. Well, every day is an important day. Young men say that. Anyway, in New York today, there's the major climate march responding to climate damage. And actually, tomorrow, there's also an important event, the flood at Wall Street. event at Wall Street, kind of following from Occupy Wall Street, talking about how climate damage has been sponsored as a massive source of profits for Wall Street corporations. All of this is related, and I want to talk about this today in relationship to our practice. So our practice is to sit upright, face ourselves and the world and everything around us, upright and relaxed, but clear and attentive and ready to, willing to be responsive.

[02:10]

So I would be in New York today, except that Tova brought this wonderful opportunity to us this weekend. Some of us have been chanting the Enmei Jibu Kanongyo, the Kanzeon to the Bodhisattva of Compassion at the Joffrey Ballet this weekend. and some will be there this afternoon. So it's been a wonderful, a wonderful event. And I'm glad that some of our Sangha members are in New York, and I'm glad that Linda Ruth Cutts at San Francisco Center Central Abbess and her husband, Steve Weintraub, who spoke here last year, are there, and I'm sure other people. But I felt like I should talk about this today. And I'm also going to be talking about this in two weeks at the Centers and Buddhist Association biannual conference in Oregon, doing a panel on our response to climate damage with Shodo Springs.

[03:16]

So I wanted to say some of what I'm going to say then this morning on this occasion. And first of all, just to say that climate change, climate damage is a really critical moral issue. So part of our practice is just to settle and be present and see our own patterns of greed, hate, and delusion. But also our precepts encourage us to, as Bodhisattva practitioners, to benefit all, to support life, to speak truth. instead of lives, and so forth. So this is a moral issue for us. Just to say a little bit about what's happening, and I've talked about this before and you all know, but just from a report this week, scientists from NASA have confirmed that last month was the warmest August on record globally.

[04:18]

Much of the world, including Central Europe, Northern Africa, parts of South America, western portions of North America, much higher than normal temperatures. According to the National Climatic Data Center, August was the 354th consecutive month with a global average temperature above the 20th century average. The news comes as flooding in India and Pakistan has killed more than 400 people, displaced nearly a million. The flooding is the worst to hit the Kashmir region in half a century. Severe drought in Central America has left nearly three million people struggling to feed themselves. And as a source of the immigration to this country, that is a controversial issue. California is suffering its worst drought in over a century. I hope things are OK there. Meanwhile, a new report by the Norwegian Refugee Council has found more than 22 million people were displaced from their homes by extreme weather last year, more than three times the number of people displaced by war.

[05:24]

So this is a really serious issue. And I'm also going next month to the American Academy of Religion conference for what will be over 10,000 religious scholars, Buddhist and otherwise. And the focus there is response to climate change. So this is a serious practice issue for us. And to quote Dr. Serene, Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, President of the Union Theological Seminary in New York, and she's speaking from a Christian context, but she says, why isn't every single religious person in the United States getting to this climate march? At Union, we deeply believe that For her, Christian faith, faith in God, and commitment to love in the world means you need to be committed to social justice, I would say. Our Buddhist faith and trust in the Buddha way also.

[06:25]

Right now, there's no greater social justice on our planet than climate change. We believe that as people of faith, we are charged, we are morally accountable for care of the earth and to not engage in divestment and to back away from climate change. is to really, in her religious language, to be sinful. So this is a serious ethical question for all of us, in American Zen, in the Ancient Dragon, and so forth. So I'm going to try and talk about this from the perspective of our practice, and I talk about these things sometimes. I also, of course, talk about koans and sutras and bodhisattva practices, but this is related. So first I want to talk about denial. So there's been, of course, a massive intentional

[07:31]

program of denial sponsored by the fossil fuel companies with millions and millions and millions of dollars. That's not the only reason this is difficult to talk about. So, you know, excuse me for talking about these things. This is kind of rude. It's not polite to talk about the problems of our world. And yet, I think as Sangha, it's really important. But part of the denial that the world faces is not just due to the propaganda or brainwashing or whatever you want to call it of the fossil fuel industry, but all of us have a kind of biological response of denial. So this is, I'm referring to Joanna Macy's book, Active Hope, which we have some copies of in our library, and Joanna was here a couple years ago, and I'm gonna refer to her more later, but she talks about the different types of,

[08:36]

denial, or she talks about it in terms of blocked response, that, of course, when there's a problem, our usual biological response in the face of danger is to respond, either to fight or flight or some kind of response. In this case, our response has been blocked not just by fossil fuel misinformation, but our own sense that, well, she breaks it down into seven categories, that we don't think it's dangerous, that it's not my place to do this, to respond to this, that I don't want to be, you know, that I don't want to stand out, that some people feel it might threaten their commercial or political interests. So these are all kinds of, one kind is denial. The other is that they're based on pretending that this isn't happening. The science is so clear. It's obvious all around us. It's not a question. It's like questioning whether the earth is flat.

[09:39]

But also there's the kind of response that it's too upsetting and I'd rather not think about it. Or maybe getting closer to home, I feel paralyzed, I know there's something going on but I don't know what to do. Or maybe even worse, there's no point doing anything, it's hopeless, it won't make any difference. So these are our own responses. apart from the fossil fuel companies. And I think it's important to see through these. So I want to talk about these. I want to talk about how the principles of response, how to respond. But I also first want to say a little bit about just our own tradition. Suzuki Roshi's ways such as Zen Buddhism, Dogen, Buddhism in general, but particularly our tradition. I think we, you know, religious people from other faiths are responding very actively and many of them are there in the streets of New York right now, so to speak.

[10:42]

But our own dharmic background provides us with a really clear and helpful context for responding to climate damage, to problems in the environment. So I'm just going to mention a few of these, all of which I've talked about much more before. But the Lotus Sutra, for example, talks about bodhisattvas Under the ground, ready to spring forth, the Buddha asks, who will come and respond in the future evil age? And these bodhisattvas, under your cushion, under your chair, are ever present to spring forth in times of danger. So this is pointing to the resource of the earth itself. and all the people all around the world who are responding now to what's going on. Another source is from Chinese Huayen Buddhism, or the Flower Ornament Sutra, which has all these wonderful images of interconnectedness.

[11:48]

How deeply we are connected with all the people around the world. Of course, with the people in your own life, all the people you've interacted with this week, and your family, friends, teachers, loved ones, past, present, and future. So this Flower Ornament Sutra provides all kinds of images like Indra's net, where every place in the network of reality is reflecting the light, and each of us is reflecting the light from all that's around us. And this kind of goes on forever. So we're deeply, deeply interconnected. And this isn't just some theory. This is what we start to viscerally feel when we do this practice of zazen and stick with it and see how we are connected in so many ways.

[12:51]

You know, this is not about, this is about seeing how taking care of ourself is also taking care of the world. We depend for our life, for our breathing, on the oxygen produced by plants around the world and by forests and the deforestation of the world is part of this and part of what's causing climate damage, but also it affects the quality of the air we breathe. So, this is not about something somewhere else. Then, just to mention a couple things from Dogen, the 13th century founder of our tradition, who I talk about a lot. He says in one of his earliest writings that when one person sits Sazen, even for a little while, all space awakens, all of space becomes enlightened. And he talks about this in terms of the earth and grasses and trees and even fences and walls, pebbles and tiles. that we and everything around us. We live in this realm of mutual, inconceivable guidance, where we're supporting each other.

[14:11]

So the Earth is calling us to support it now, and it's supporting us in lots and lots of ways. So Dogen is so rich with environmental teachings. We talked earlier this year, during our practice period, about the mountains and water sutra, or the landscape sutra, and how Dogen says that mountains are constantly walking, of course, in so many ways. and that we need to learn our own walking, our own walking meditation from the mountains, and that the landscape of our lives is alive, and that we are part of that. So it's not that the environment is something out there that we need to protect. Our teaching shows us very clearly that we are expressions of that landscape. We are the effects of the prairies and lakes, or mountains and waters, wherever you are. And again, just mentioning briefly some of our dharmic resources, there's this story about the great master Rinzai, who we're also related to, by the way.

[15:17]

We think of Rinzai and Soto as separate, but our Ketsunyaku, our lineage paper, shows that we're also coming from Rinzai's line. He used to plant trees way up in the mountains, in the monastery, lived. And his teacher asked, well, why are you planting these trees? And he said, it's just a guidepost for future generations. So he's showing us. And there's a long tradition. I know at Green Ghost they go and plant trees regularly. And of course the Buddha awakened underneath the Bodhi tree. And of course, In India, they didn't sit facing the wall, they didn't have meditation halls like this that developed in China. They wandered around and they sat facing trees, they sat under trees facing the trees. Anyway, this is just to point to some of the context that we have in our teaching and practice for responding to this climate damage. The other thing is just the awareness that we have of stretches of time.

[16:18]

So I've just been talking about Rinzai and the Buddha and Dogen and these ancient teachings from India and China. We have, as part of our practice, this practice has been preserved over many generations, over 2,500 years, maybe a lot longer, five people doing what we're doing, sitting, facing ourselves, breathing, being upright. So we have this sense of time, and that's really important in terms of climate damage, because part of the problem is that people are continuing to use fossil fuels and promoting that, or promoting nuclear power, which also is going to be damaging long-term. We don't know what to do with the waste. And we have a responsibility to future generations. That's what responding to climate change is about. And the people who continue promoting fossil fuel and coal and so forth are doing this because they're getting a huge profit off it, and the quarterly profit margin is their priority.

[17:28]

we have a sense of future generations. We are practicing here, we're sitting here this morning for ourselves, for everyone else here, but also for the people walking by out front 25 years from now, and 50 years from now, and 250 years from now. And what will their planet be like? So, the next important point is that we don't know. This is an important teaching in Buddhism, not knowing. One of the koans we study says, not knowing is most intimate. So we don't know what will happen to the climate. There are all kinds of dreadful apocalyptic predictions. Actually, from what I can gather from listening to scientists, things are definitely already going to get bad, and are bad, and are going to get worse. But it's not like the apocalypse. We're not going to all turn into zombies. Necessarily, we still can make a difference. the degree of which carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is getting dangerous, is already dangerous, and how bad that gets is up to us.

[18:45]

The people marching in New York today, the people flooding Wall Street tomorrow, but not just today and tomorrow. Continuing, how will we respond to this? Because we don't know what will happen. We know that the scientific predictions, which some people pretend are like, you know, anyway, people who don't believe the Earth is round, the scientific predictions continue to be more conservative than actually what's happening. So we don't know what will happen. It's not clear how bad it's going to get. But I believe that the human race will survive. But what conditions will we be in in 100 years or 250 years? That's up to us in this generation. So the other thing we don't know is what to do in response. And this is part of what Joanna was talking about, about blocked responses.

[19:52]

We feel like there's nothing we can do. But we don't know. There's a wonderful new important book out from Naomi Klein called, This Changes Everything, Capitalism Versus the Climate. And she's talking about how profit-seeking at all costs is damaging our climate. And I'm going to refer back to that. But she also refers to how things change and happen in ways we couldn't possibly expect. And she talks about 1989 and the Berlin Wall falling. That was something that the experts on these things, the policy makers, couldn't have predicted a couple months beforehand. So how change happens is not clear. We might think, oh, there's no hope of change. There's no hope of response, of a serious response to climate. We're just entrenched with fossil fuel, and we can't do anything about it. Well, there are people doing things about it. And Germany is one example now.

[20:53]

But anyway, we don't know how things change. And yet, and we don't know what exactly to do to help respond helpfully. And yet, there are... I want to talk about principles of response in various ways, and I hope we'll have some time for some discussion as well. So Joanna Macy talks about active hope. She doesn't mean being hopeful, just kind of optimistic, just thinking things the Pollyanna way, thinking things your best, but to act on our best hopes. What is it we hope for? Active hope is to act based on what our hopes are and what can happen, what might happen. Of course, we don't know. So she talks about, so I want to mention her analysis, which I've talked about here before, but it's worth remembering. mentioning again, so some people see the world as business as usual, and if you look at the mass media, everything's fine, and science will figure out how to fix all this somehow, or we don't have to worry about it.

[22:03]

Then other people see that things are falling apart. She calls this the great unraveling, that we live in a time where lots of things are falling apart. and we don't know what to do about it. But the third position is what she calls the great turning, which she says we're in the middle of. And this is how humanity and the planet is turning from the world of violence and aggression and competitiveness and profits at any cost to something else. And it's hard to see this. It's happening kind of like the grass coming out through the concrete. It's happening underneath the surface of the business as usual. But she talks about this great turning in terms of three major modes. And so I want to talk about that. And we're all involved in at least one of them. Some of you are involved in others.

[23:05]

So first is holding actions. This is lobbying the government, trying to work with corporate powers, trying to mitigate the damage. This is important. That we see that what's needed now and the occasion in New York this weekend is that the UN Secretary General has called the leaders of the world to come and talk seriously about doing serious change. I don't really think that the leaders are going to make any difference. It's up to us. But that's the situation. We need a systemic change. This isn't just about recycling or changing light bulbs. I mean, it might be helpful for us to all do positive things in response. But what is going to make a difference is systemic change. So there are people supporting divestment campaigns from fossil fuel universities, pension plans, labor pension plans. The cities are starting to do this. So there's lots of ways of lobbying governments and corporations, including demonstrations.

[24:13]

So as a kind of ceremonial ritualized response So when I go to demonstrations, I wear, not my full robes, but I wear Kampari, Laksu, and I'm there as a clergy person. And there's a power to that. And all of you can go and participate in these things in a kind of ceremonial way, in a respectful way, in a dignified way. So we have something to offer to that response. Part of holding actions is also social work and helping people who have been displaced. So we have people in our Sangha, not only in New York today, but also whose life work is working with people who are suffering. And part of the suffering that we all have, we all have our personal suffering, but also in the back of our awareness is this concern, this anxiety.

[25:20]

about what's happening to the world and our planet. So all of this is part of the first mode, the holding actions, taking care of people who are having a hard time and speaking out and responding. The second mode that Joanna talks about is alternative structures. And some of the people here in Osanga are doing this, developing alternative regional economic structures or agricultural structures, farmers' markets, organic gardens like they have at Green Gulch. These are all another kind of response. If our ordinary systems of media and education economics and food prices are going to go way up increasingly with droughts. As that's unraveling, we need alternative structures. The third mode is what all of us are doing here today. This is the work of Zazen, changing the paradigm of how we see ourselves and our hearts and minds.

[26:29]

So just by sitting, just by being present and upright, being willing to face your own grasping and confusion and frustration and fear and anger, we also can promote a kind of sense of non-denial and of cooperation in our society and in our world. So how do we change the way people think about things from competition and aggression to collaboration, cooperation, seeing how we're connected, caring about others, instead of trying to do unto others before they do unto us, which is kind of the mode that most of the world is in now. So I just want to say a little bit more. Part of what is happening now is that lots of people around the world are thinking creatively about how are we expressions of the environment.

[27:36]

I don't even like to use that word environment as I've said because it sort of makes it out there. This floor is made of wood that came from trees. The air we're breathing, the oxygen comes from plants, not the water we drink. In some places, it's in danger. How do we see ourselves as expressions? So I'll just mention that there are creative approaches and I've talked about, last spring when we were talking about the landscape sutra, I talked about the Dark Mountain Manifesto, which tries to go beyond environment to talk about new stories of cooperation, new stories about how we are expressions of the world, the landscape around us, to express this in poetry. so the Dark Mountain people have sort of given up on going to demonstrations, but they're still part of the response.

[28:41]

So you can Google Dark Mountain Manifesto to read about that. There's also the Planetary Hospice, so I don't like to use that term anymore because it sort of feels so negative, like the planet is dying, but the fellow who who wrote that planetary hospice, and you can Google that too, and get it online, actually works at the San Francisco Zen Center Hospice, is training there, and is talking about eco-psychology, how do we respond to denial. So all of us, of course, have our own personal difficulties in the world, and I don't mean to diminish the need to face that as part of our practice, but also we are affected by all of this that's going on. How do we respond? So one of the things that I want to say is that just talking about it is a response.

[29:47]

So I've been doing that sometimes here. and encouraging us to talk about it. And I don't have answers. And I don't know exactly what to do. I can suggest things. There's all kinds of possible responses that people are making, people on our Sangha, using simpler modes of transportation, public transit, bicycles, using airplanes less, not eating meat, lower energy use, all of these, doing gardens, urban gardens, there's all kinds of ways to respond. But one of them is just to talk about it. Because, you know, it is kind of rude to talk about. It is kind of, you know, people don't want to hear about it, it's scary. And yet, just to be able to talk about it is maybe one of the most important responses right now, that people need to know that this is happening and to know that they can say something.

[30:55]

And that's what's happening in New York this weekend. And then the last thing I want to, well, almost the last thing I want to say is that there's not one right response. There are many, many, many possible responses. So I don't want to tell any of you how you should respond. You should go to demonstrations, or write Congress, or build gardens, or whatever. Whatever you're drawn to is part of the response. We each have our own way of responding to the difficulties in our life and in the world. And when we do this from this settled place, of just sitting, we can respond more helpfully. We can be more flexible. We can see more options. We can find some steadiness, even if we're afraid. So I want to just say a little bit from Naomi Klein, whose book I mentioned, This Changes Everything, Capitalism Versus the Climate, and she's pointing to the

[32:02]

way in which our society is organized as a source of this problem. I'll just read a little bit of what she said in recent Democracy Now. Climate scientists don't know what to expect. Things start going nonlinear. It changes everything about our physical world if we just simply do what we're doing and continue down this road. We do have the opportunity to get off that road, but in order to do so, we have to change pretty much everything. There's some really fundamental things about our economic system and our society. So this is what Naomi Klein says. I recommend that new book. And things are going to change anyway, radically, given the effects of climate change in our lifetimes, certainly in our children's lifetimes. She goes on, the good news is that the things we need to change, many of them are broken anyway. We need to make vast investments in the public sphere, which would create millions of good jobs.

[33:07]

We need to invest in health care, in education, in the sciences. In so doing, we will tackle one of the most intractable problems we face, which is gross wealth inequality. This is part of the context of climate damage. We can't fight climate change without dealing with inequality in our countries and between our countries. So far, most of the effects of climate have been in what we call third world countries. I don't know. We're becoming a third world country in lots of ways. But we can't fight climate change without dealing with inequality in our countries and between our countries. But really, this is quite hopeful. I think if we do respond to climate change, she says, with the decisiveness that the scientists are telling us we need to, if we respond in line with that science, we have a chance to remake our economy, the global economy, for the better. This is not going to be the kind of change that comes from above. It's going to be the kind of change that is demanded by mass movements from below.

[34:09]

So mass movements has many contexts, too, what that means. It doesn't just mean demonstrations. being aware of this, talking about it with each other, and responding. So I wasn't sure how long all that was going to take, but we do have some time. And I'm interested in, and part of the work of responding to this is for us to talk about it. So you don't have to agree with opinions I've expressed, please. And yet I feel responsible to the precepts to express some of these. But I'm interested in your responses. Maybe if I may, Tova, just call on you. So some of the people who are here today won't be able to be here tomorrow evening. So if you would say a little bit, please. Well, I think like you, if I weren't here, I would probably be in New York.

[35:12]

But all this can't be in New York. And I'm glad that there are representatives of a number of Zen centers going to New York, and I hope they find each other, and there's a big interfaith contingent marching. And I hope also that this has some effect on the United Nations and their discussions. But I think what can each of us do at home and our families and our sanghas I really appreciate you bringing it up here, and also your essay, which was based on a talk and some questions about looking at, there were a few, but looking at how we practice with the precepts, not only in our daily lives, but as we think about for all of us bringing it home, looking at whether we can take public transportation or use energy-efficient and water-efficient light bulbs and showers and so on in our homes.

[36:34]

I think every small thing makes a difference, and we keep talking about it with our friends, our family, so it doesn't seem like it's such impossible thing to change. I tend to be optimistic, so I look for those calls that say there's still time for us to do some things that might mitigate the effects of what's happened. Thank you. Yeah, I heard a climate scientist from the University of Chicago last month who was saying We're halfway to the terrible, really terrible things. But there's still time. There's still time to make a difference. Thank you, Tova. Other responses? Any comments, questions, responses, please? Jenny, hi. Well, following up on what you said, Tova, and when I was listening to you talk, you were mentioning the danger of homelessness.

[37:41]

I drove here tiny, all by myself, in my car. And when I go to bed, I'm flying. So I can switch the light bulbs in my house, but when it comes right down to it, I'm complicit in this climate change. And I'm still making choices. But that's, but I think, so thank you, yes, that's true, absolutely. This is not about somebody else, this is about all of us. We're all part of this system. We have our electric lights and so forth based on fossil fuels, our nuclear, which is just as bad. So, how do we, but, you know, I think feeling personal guilt about this isn't so helpful. So you, so Jenny, also a distinguished visitor, came from, is a member of Osama, but came from St.

[39:00]

Paul, but you drove rather than taking a plane? I did, and I didn't walk either. Well, okay, that would take, that would not have impacted you anyway. So we live in this world, how do we, you know, we are still in this world that is based on fossil fuel energy. So it's not about any one of us, of course, I think, doing specific little changes that Tova talked about is helpful, but maybe it's most helpful just in terms of increasing awareness. The more that people all around the world are aware, so people should know that Jenny drove instead of taking a plane through St. Paul. This is a good example that can inspire us that, yeah, that there is a problem. Not that some of us need to take planes to go to places sometimes, but how do we see the whole process of what's happening in the world systemically?

[40:06]

So each thing that we do is part of that third mode that Joanna talks about. Part of it is consciousness, and what I was really struck by today is you talk about what our practice is, and that is consciousness. For us to be conscious, that's why we face hurtful from the environmental movement is that everybody has to have a green halo. And it's like all or nothing. And it's not.

[41:06]

It's steps in a way. I had to go to a wedding in Columbus, Ohio. I drove. But I drove at 65 rather than at 80. And I make sure my tires are at the proper pressure so I can get, you know, decrease my dependence on gas. And there's things And that's what I think is so important to speak out about. It's important to be aware, to be connected. I think it's more important, the fact that you're aware of that. I don't know if guilt, like Taigan said, is a good thing, but just stay the conscious, okay, and then next time you do something else. Right, and so I'm flying to the Soda Zen Buddhist Association meeting in Great Valley in Oregon to talk about this.

[42:14]

But that's not the point. How are we going to change? There are alternatives. Germany and other places are using solar and other technologies. alternative systems. That's going to have to happen, and how that happens is going to happen only based on all of us, as you say, David, changing consciousness so that there's pressure from many, many, many people all around the world, and that's happening more and more. We have time for a couple more responses or comments. Yes, Libby. Well, as you were talking, there were so many parallels that I was thinking between what you were saying, and experiences I had when I was in the Peace Corps in Southern Africa, and I was involved, I was assigned to work with HIV, AIDS-related issues, and I came at an interesting moment in the epidemic. That's like the epicenter of the HIV epidemic. And so the rates of infection are just, like, excruciatingly high.

[43:17]

It's just amazing. And, but I was there. It was like six years ago, I don't know, a while ago. Anyway, but when I got there, there was just, still, people were living with, in denial. It was like, you couldn't talk about this. And the only explanations that people had for it were sort of fantastical. But nobody wanted to talk about it or think about it. It was really striking. And I spent two years, two and a half years there, sitting with this question of, what is going on? And why does this feel so stuck? And people are dying all around of this. But we can't talk about it. And as I got there, there was this push around testing and education and actually ARVs. There was a treatment. There was actually things that people could do so that it wasn't so hopeless.

[44:21]

What I came to feel about it was that the biggest barrier was this terror. It was like an abject terror that people had that made it just, that that was what was fueling the denial. Yeah. But, and I mean, I could... to go on about the different parallels I'll get. So one part was a denial piece, but also part of it was the sense of hopelessness that people had in general, but that I had often as I was doing the work, because I felt like I had no evidence of anything I was doing. I was involved in all kinds of different efforts. But I developed this analogy for myself to survive it, that all of us who were doing this work you know, people from that, from there, I mean, you know, local people, everybody involved, were sort of, it's like, it felt like we were on this steep hill, and there was this boulder, or this enormous weight coming down, and that we were sort of trying to push it.

[45:25]

And then we wished that we could just sort of push it, and it would just be gone, or there would be some enormous sense of movement, but that was not possible, because it was such an enormous, complex thing. And so more there was a sense of, well, I don't know if we're making any headway. I don't know if we're just going backwards. But whatever we're doing, we have to do something, or else it's just going to roll down the crusher. And the nice punctuation mark at the end of this was that just recently I, and I never knew whether I did any good. I spent two and a half years of my life I recently was listening to NPR and there was a study coming out about this push that I was a part of, it was a big push that was going on at that time, and that it did seem to make a big difference, that the corner was turned around the HIV rates.

[46:28]

by these years that so many people put in energy. And I was just one small particle, you know, in this larger thing. So anyway, just wanting to share that bit of hopefulness. I feel like that, of course, there's many examples of that kind of movements making a difference, but when you're inside of it, you really don't, like you said, it's like a mysterious quality of what, how it's working and what you're doing. Thank you very much for that. Story and testimony, yeah. There are lots of examples, you know, the Berlin Wall coming down in 89. There's so many things, apartheid ending, and part of this, again, thinking about it in terms of time span, that part of all of this, it's like racism, and I talked about this in relation to Ferguson, couple weeks ago that is so deep in our psyche as well as our society, the legacy of slavery and racism.

[47:33]

And in the same way, the way of thinking of the environment out there that we can dominate it, or even think that we can take care of it as some self-sacrifice. But to see that as separate, as something that we can exploit and cut down forests for their to maximize the assets of the trees and exploit the fossil fuels and so forth. We see the world around us as separate and dead and exploiting and that karma is so deep that It's going to take a while to change, and yet we have to do it fairly quickly. But how that happens, at some point, the Berlin Wall comes down, or smoking stops being popular. I've told this story too, when I was, one of my great young accomplishments was when I learned to smoke when I was 17.

[48:35]

I thought it was so cool and I could actually, I had to force myself to learn how to inhale. And with all due respect to any of you who are smokers, now that's not socially cool. That changed. How did that change? Anyway, yes, Alan. For climate change gases, let's see in the study that half of our climate change gases are from the food animals that we eat. So every meal, every day, I don't eat them. Compared to heavy meat here from food, my gases are half. And what I expect is to get the health and longevity that let's just stand on street corners and hand out pamphlets and deal with everything else by changing a few more light bulbs. Yeah, thank you. Yes, meat and the meat production in our society is this huge source of the climate destruction.

[49:40]

Thank you. Any other, thank you, any other last comments, responses? Yes, Alex. You know, one parallel I was kind of struck by when I was listening to you talk as well is, I thought like, isn't this just like, this is our practice, isn't this really like the way to think about or approach climate change? How is that, why would that be any different than how you approach your own practice of Buddhism? Like, I, you know, I draw today by myself, but I started when summer came along, this summer. I've got a bike in my garage and I, when I can plan it out and do it, I rode my bike instead of driving. And it was nice. I got to, you know, have a breeze in my face and, you know, enjoy the nice weather. But I think of it like, you know, those are the choices students have to help practice close to, you know,

[50:42]

we're not always capable of being mindful of human beings in every situation. And to bring that to every moment of our lives, our practice is trying to cultivate that and bring more of that into our lives. So it's good for people to put themselves in this lab and recognize that this is just like a practice. You're not enlightened right now, right? So you're working towards cultivating more mindfulness to your life. This is just another aspect of that practice. Exactly, yes. So yeah, this is not a practice for super beings. We're practicing as human beings, and we see the mess that human beings have gotten ourselves into, but we're also part of the solution. So yeah, thank you for that. So thank you all very much.

[51:33]

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