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See other Writings Inner Peace and World Peaceby Ruth Wallen (2003) Meditation and Ecological Consciousness It is a pleasure to be here today. I speak as an environmentalist, ecological artist, and long time student of Tibetan Buddhism. I was asked to come here today to talk about the relationship between inner peace and outer peace, between working with mind, personal consciousness and working with world ecological consciousness. As I was thinking about this opportunity to talk to you, I thought about the first earth day, over thirty years ago, when I was in high school. At the time I would have thought that it was frivolous to talk about personal peace or realization in this context. Vast ecological problem needed to be solved on a societal, political level. I still think that that is true, but I wonder where, or how, society get the will, the courage, the inspiration to make the kinds of changes that are necessary. Thirty years ago I could have heard discussions about many of the same environmental problems--global warming, habitat destruction, large scale high tech agricultural practices, over use and unequal distribution of the world's resources. Not much has changed. We may have acknowledged a few of the problems that we talked about in the seventies. Due to air quality legislation, it is still possible to breathe, more or less, the air in Los Angeles, where I attended my first earth day. But even these small gains are being eroded. SUVs flaunt tighter emission controls and the Bush administration is doing everything it can to roll back emission controls and incentives for renewable energy.
So if we start on the personal level, if we start with working with our own minds, what can we learn? The first thing that one does in many traditions of meditation practice is sit down, slow down, and notice one's thoughts. It's not a matter of getting rid of them, that would create a war within yourself, but simply noticing, and then letting go--out with the breath. Paying attention is quite a remarkable thing. What happens if we start to pay attention in meditation and in post meditation practice? Several years ago I did a solitary meditation retreat in the Agua Tibia Wilderness, about an hour from here. I was practicing about 12 hours a day. There was too much poison oak, which I am quite sensitive too, to physically wander much. I never bothered to set up a tent and somehow I never could get a flashlight to work, so I was just there alone for a week. This is not exactly how I would recommend doing a meditation retreat, but it was a wonderful opportunity to watch my mind. The first couple nights I kept hearing all of these little rustling noises in the oak leaves. I concocted many wild stories about what might actually be causing the racket. Finally at dusk I noticed that it was just little frogs hopping about. As my mind began to settle, it's amazing how much more I began to notice. By the end of the week I would sense ticks before they even got to my body and take them on a leaf and walk them down to the base of the cliff where I was meditating. What happens if we really look at the world around us? Bioregionalists often ask: how many of us can name or even notice the five different birds or butterflies that frequent our gardens; how many of us can tell which of the plants are native, or where the other ones come from, or what can grow without needing to be watered? Who has an idea of where the nearest stream is, or what your neighborhood looked like fifty years ago? During that week of sitting I developed tremendous appreciation for the world around me. Every morning I awoke to a few clouds in the sky. Then the sun would come up and dry up the dampness. Spring and summer in San Diego are so comfortable, so beautiful. Waking up every morning was a delight. I am not saying that we need to give up our homes and go live in the woods, or that that is even possible given current population levels, but we could stick out our necks so to speak, outside of the supposed comfort of our homes, both the literal home and the home or cocoon we make for ourselves in our mind, and take in more of the world around us? Another thing I notice whenever I sit, is how my mind is constantly flitting from one thing to the next: I want this, if only this could happen, I don't want to feel that…It's as if my mind is constantly looking for a new source of entertainment. In everyday life we might think about that acquisitive nature of the mind and how our consumerist culture feeds on that. We don't have to be total ascetics, but we might notice how a consumerist and throw away culture is ravaging the earth and causing a tremendous poverty mentality among the youth who are not so fortunate to have the means to acquire the life style depicted on television and in advertising. Even for the rich, nothing is ever enough--the gap between rich and poor actually growing in this country. For all of us, we can start with little things, from bringing our own bags when shopping, to walking, riding a bike or carpooling instead of driving alone in a car. On a societal level, as world's richest nation, we should be leading the way. Instead we are fighting regulations to preserve the quality of the environment from well known Kyoto accords on global warming to a more obscure ban on the pesticide methyl bromide which has been shown to damage the ozone layer. In many parts of Europe there are cans for separating trash on every street corner and every apartment. Why not here? We should have the most energy efficiency technologies and not lag significantly behind Europe. So again what happens if we slow down, pay attention, delight in the world around us… One of my first art works was about the life in the San Francisco Bay. At the time there were various proposals to pipe much of fresh water input into bay, necessary for it's health, to southern California. Many people thought that little marine life grew in the bay anyway, that it wasn't much more than a sewage dump. So I did a very simple experiment and placed little blocks about six inches long, surrounded by a wooden frame to provide some protection from rough waters, in the bay at three locations. Beginning on the winter solstice I followed the growth in the bay for a year. What I found was amazing. First there were rich patterns from a variety of algal species. Then in March barnacles settled out of the water. Soon these were topped by mussels, and then by many colorful creatures with unfamiliar names, like bryzoans and tunicates, and a variety of small crustaceans. The other thing that was amazing was that there was a remarkable difference in what grew in the industrial area of the bay and what grew in the area where the bay was used for park and recreational purposes. Higher levels of effluent in the industrial area really did make a difference. I also realized that my simple science fair type observations could tell almost as much as sophisticated science. At one point I tried to get information about pollution levels in the bay, but it was terribly difficult. In water everything is highly mobile. Do you measure at the sewage out fall sites, in the middle of the bay, and at what depth, time of day or time of year? And what do you measure, the pollutants themselves, the rate of uptake, or the populations densities of various organisms? I realized that though it was difficult to quantify things I could still trust my eyes, my senses, and the simple "data" produced by my work that suggested that much less marine life grew in polluted area. Probably there will always be some scientists who say that global warming is not yet proven, or coming back to the frogs that I mentioned earlier, that even though many species of frogs seem to have disappeared, or have significantly small populations, that we can't be sure because we didn't have good data, good enough population sampling a hundred years ago. But this doesn't mean that we don't have a problem. If we just look at the frequent beach closure signs or the brown haze so common in east county we know that something isn't quite right. In Central America alone over twenty species of frogs and toads have disappeared in the last decade. In Europe and North America, more and more species are being found with deformities, no eyes, or missing or extra limbs. To cite another example, carbon emissions have risen by 30% this century. Childhood asthma is increasingly common. Many of the hottest years on record occurred in the last decade. The world's growing population puts ever larger groups in danger from climatic alterations. Again, can we slow down, pay attention, delight in the world around us… As we begin to pay more careful attention, can we dare to care about what we find? Perhaps the important point is that meditation is not just about looking at thoughts but making friends with them. So often we are afraid of really sitting with pain, or anger, or any intense emotion. Instead we want to push ourselves away, and we are actually tremendously self-critical. When you sit you gradually realize that you can just stay with all of the difficult emotions, with everything that we think that we don't like about ourselves We don't have to push ourselves away, continually searching for new entertainment. As we learn to be able to stay with our own feelings we also can feel compassion for those around us and perhaps even feel their grief and loss. We can have the courage to move beyond self-centered protectiveness and care about the world around us. Did you know that San Diego County has higher number of endangered species than any county in the US? We can care about the fact that most of the many species of frogs that were once found in southern California are now rare members of the springtime chorus. We can strive to protect what is left by doing small things, like staying on existing roadways to protect the arroyo toad in east San Diego county. The exhibits all over the park today will tell you more about specifics of what you can do. But we can start by paying attention, by allowing ourselves to care about the fate of our neighbors, both human and non-human, and the fates of those on more distant corners of the globe. We can care passionately about the world around us. We can dare to trust our hearts and feel the range of emotions from delight, to grief, pain and anger as we begin to notice more about the state of the world. But though we can learn not to shield ourselves, we also can learn not to become overwhelmed by despair as we begin to become conscious of tremendous challenges of daily losses, from habitat, to individual species, to the cultural treasures of Iraq. There is tremendous pain and suffering, but there is also the brilliance of being alive, of following our breath outwards, of waking up every morning to the sun and the clouds. We can use our awareness of this brilliance as a source of inspiration, as a source of hope. As human beings we can experience the full dimensions of life. We can care compassionately for those around us. We can pledge to be healers and protectors of the world.
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