Green Options

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.

This world is founded on some basic laws, including cause and effect. Every action has a reaction. Every cause has an effect. And we may think that we’re all separate beings in this world, separate beings and entities. But in reality, we are all connected, we are all intertwined, and we are all One. And thus it follows, for everything we do, it has an effect not only on us, but on everyone else and everything else around us and even beyond.

So, we are tackling the problem of environmental fragility today. And how did we get to this place? How did we get to this situation?

Of course, there are a lot of scientific explanations, political explanations, systematic explanations, and so on.

But how did we get here, really?

By every action ever made — by us, by others, and by all of us combined.

By every thought.

By every feeling and every want or need in our hearts and expressed in our thoughts, our words, and our actions.

We can see that no matter how hard we try, we will fail to address the problems we face today if we don’t address our own personal sustainability and situation. What do I mean by personal sustainability?

Nearly three years ago, I took note of Bill McKibben’s Grist essay calling for more artistic expression about climate change, and lamented the most popular offerings on the subject at the time: the movie The Day After Tomorrow, and Michael Crichton’s global warming conspiracy novel State of Fear. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to read one of the latest efforts to address climate change within the framework of popular fiction, Marvin L. Zimmerman’s The Ovum Factor. This “eco-thriller” is the author’s first novel, and he demonstrates a real talent for spinning a page-turning yarn: I read the book in two sittings. Despite the story’s fast pace, though, Zimmerman succeeds in creating a work that a reader may finish quickly, but won’t simply put down afterwards. The thoughts that reader may have upon finishing The Ovum Factor, though, often won’t necessarily coincide with the author’s intentions..

Zimmerman’s protagonist, investment banker David Rose, isn’t particularly unique: like a number of John Grisham main characters, he’s successful, but unfulfilled. He’s looking for meaning in work driven almost solely by profit margins. Ironically, it’s the head of the firm for which David works that provides him an opportunity to find such meaning: billionaire Isidore Steinmartz sends the junior associate to Southern California to assess a project underway by Cal Tech professor and Nobel prize-winner Charles MacMillan. The project is titled PANDA, an acronym for Project for Accelerated Neural Development in Anthropoids. In short, MacMillan is studying how to increase the brain’s development during gestation, and produce super-intelligent children. Steinmartz, a member of an elite secret society charged with watching for, and heading off, the extinction of the human race, believes a generation of such beings will be needed to tackle the massive ecological challenges facing the planet and humanity.

David Loy, a Buddhism scholar, presented a lecture at Vanderbilt University recently describing a spiritual perspective on the challenge of consumerism.

There is a video available that is worth watching if you have a free hour and, like me, are into this kind of stuff! Otherwise, I will give an overly simplistic summary below.

The basic spiritual crisis we face as individuals is our failure to recognize that the sense of self is a construct. The construct creates a feeling of alienation. This causes us to try to find meaning in accumulating wealth and things to verify our existence, creating further anxiety and sense of lack. The solution to the problem is to realize that the sense of self is indeed a delusion. This results in a caring attitude toward everyone else because of the recognition that we are not separate but part of a whole.

Effortlessly perched along the spectacular coastline of Big Sur, California, along the winding Highway 1, rests the Esalen Institute. While waves crash upon the rocky cliffs, up to 250 people per day participate in enriching workshops or research activities, often followed by a soak in the hot mineral baths tucked in a cliffside crevice. Since 1962, the nonprofit educational institute has provided transformational workshops for people eager to explore and realize human potential through experience, education and research.

My journeys along Highway 1, in search for leading ecopreneurial enterprises, brought me to this healing place and, as I discovered, a thriving residential community that draws energy and sustenance from their surrounding biological richness. It’s this residential community of researchers, staff, and educators, along with the enrichment programs and remarkable natural setting, that have drawn over 300,000 visitors from around the world seeking a greater connection to community and the land.

In their Solarium, a building attached to the main lodge where all the meals are taken in the community, I talked with Juliet Johnson, a former water engineer turned sustainability guide for the Esalen Institute as its Sustainability Coordinator.

Fish burgers are back on the restaurant menus. It must be Lent again.

Marking the beginning of the Easter season, worshipers go to church on Ash Wednesday (often still recovering from Fat Tuesday) and get ash spread on their foreheads. The ash is a symbol of contrition and repentance. Then everyone is expected to give up meat and beer and act gloomy for the next 6 weeks. Sound like fun? No wonder Mardi Gras is so popular!

But when you think about it, a collective confession can be incredibly meaningful in light of our complicity in greenhouse gas emissions. The tradition of Lent has potential for inspiring action. In addition to repentance, the ritual of smearing carbon on faces can visually represent the carbon we are contributing in our daily lives. The following are some reformulations of the elements of Lent with a green focus. (These principles are intended to be helpful to people of any faith background or none at all.)