Activist

My name is Roshi Joan Halifax. I am a Zen Buddhist priest and Abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have been a social activist since the 1960’s and know first-hand the power of the people in mobilizing responsible moral and social change.

As a woman, a Buddhist, and an elder, I am standing here today in solidarity with the younger generation, people of color, indigenous peoples, and those fleeing war and the climate catastrophe, all of whom will disproportionately bear the burden of climate devastation.

I am also standing in solidarity with you, all of you. Every one of us, our children and grandchildren, no matter how great our privilege, will be affected by this unfolding climate catastrophe.

We must awaken, collectively, to the fact that the primary cause for climate change is fossil fuel dependent economic growth, primed by human greed, ignorance, and the perverse incentives of capitalism. Fossil fuels are a finite, dangerous, dirty, and destructive source of energy. For us to continue to depend on fossil fuels is life-destroying and immoral, no matter how you look at it.

We live in an interdependent world, and cannot deny how profoundly damaging this energy source is to the individual and collective health of all species. It is absolutely necessary that we revolutionize our intertwined energy and economic systems. And we have to do this now from a space of courage, compassion, love, and wisdom.

And yet, thus far, we haven’t. Why? Fossil fuel companies are focused on making a profit, and they have bought politicians, derailed the media, lost their moral compass to cronyism, and subverted our democratic processes so that they can continue to profit, no matter the cost to the environment and humanity.

And listen carefully: there’s a reason why predatory corporate and financial elites promote a focus on individual behavior, like recycling or energy saver light bulbs, and also why they support autocratic regime change, which ends up causing gross economic and social inequality. These forces of capitalism do not want us to realize that we need fundamental systems change, including making our government enforce checks and balances on the companies profiting from polluting our earth and condemning our future. They know that thriving democracies with active citizens are a threat to them; and, hear me clearly!: We need to behave like a thriving democracy, or else!

We also have to wake up to the fact that the climate crisis is making us sicker and sicker every day.

Our air has become a toxic harbor for increasing allergens, mold, fungi, smoke, mercury (a neurotoxin for fetuses), petrochemical cancer-causing poisons, choking dust, disease bearing insects, and extreme heat.

Our water is a toxic harbor for endocrine disruptors, poisonous chemicals, microbial pollutants, including sewage and lethal algae bacterium; as well, plastics are wiping out our oceans and fisheries, sea water is contaminating our drinking water; and drought and flooding are destroying forests, farmlands, and cities.

But maybe the most insidious and least talked about area of sickness is the profound trauma and bottomless grief being experienced by millions whose lives are shattered by floods, droughts, fires, and heat waves caused by climate change.

Extreme climate heat is also linked with aggression, and connected with violent conflict and forced migration, another source of profound trauma, as well as moral injury for millions of people.

Then there is the pernicious psychological suffering experienced by those who witness the terrible degradation of life associated with our climate catastrophe, and the moral anguish experienced in response to the aggressive assaults on the dignity of those who raise their voices in protest and who are bullied and dehumanized by politicos, fake news reporters, and those who profit from this devastation.

We must ask then: who will make the change? Clearly, every one of us must! Whether faith leader or farmer, politician or policewoman, kid or grandmother, we must demonstrate in solidarity for those who are on the frontlines of climate change impacts and hold accountable the perpetrators of climate-caused suffering.

Lawyer Mariel Nanasi, President of New Energy Economy, writes: “We are at a crossroads. We either face the very real possibility of a planet on hospice, driven by an energy system that is the epitome of capitalism on steroids with extreme exploitation and racism at its core. Or a profound opportunity to shift at the very basis of our economic system that we haven’t seen since the abolition of slavery. And it’s really up to us which way we go.”

The first 200 years of capitalism were based on slavery; the second 200 on fossil fuels; and the next 200 must be based on renewables, if we are to survive. If we could abolish slavery on which our country was built, which involved the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, we can respond to the climate crisis and abolish the use of toxic fossil fuels, as well as transform the economies of injustice into economies of peace. Just as the abolition of slavery was the morally right thing to do in 1861, ending fossil fuel use, whatever the cost, is the moral imperative of our time. And we can do this!

As I said, we need to function as a thriving democracy. What happens in a thriving democracy? People VOTE. It’s the single thing that almost everyone can do regardless of station. And it’s the most important thing at this point. Clearly, we need to get this administration out of office, and people need to vote for principled candidates in next November’s election and get their friends and family to vote and help get out the vote and they need to start now! Phone banks, canvassing, financial contributions to democratic candidates in swing states.

For every voter the Republicans purge from the rolls, we need to register two new democrats.

The next thing people can do is contact their elected representatives. Flood them with calls and letters. Tell them to support the Green New Deal. The only thing that will counter corporate power is a steady and overwhelming expression of people power.

Another thing we can do is support the organizations on the front lines: the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide, the League of Conservation Voters, the National Resource Defense Council, Fridays for Future.

Join, give money, volunteer. And talk to friends. Share concerns and ideas. Organize. Protest. Engage in civil disobedience. Action breeds hope. Without hope we have no future but if everyone acts, there is something to hope for.

A good part of my life has been spent relating to situations that might be deemed hopeless—as an anti-war activist, a civil rights worker, a caregiver of dying people. I have also volunteered with death row inmates, served in medical clinics in remote areas of the Himalayas—where life is hard, food is scarce, and access to health care is nil—and worked in Kathmandu with Rohingya refugees who have no status, anywhere. You might ask, why bother? Why hold out hope for ending war or injustice? Why have hope for people who are dying, or for refugees fleeing from genocide, or for solutions to climate change?

I have often been troubled by the notion of hope. But recently, in part because of the work of social critic Rebecca Solnit and her powerful book Hope in the Dark, I am opening to another view of hope—what I call wise hope.

As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what will actually happen. Not getting what we hoped for is usually experienced as some kind of misfortune. Someone who is hopeful in this way has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. This ordinary hope is a subtle expression of fear and a form of suffering.

Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of suffering—both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It’s when we realize we don’t know what will happen that this kind of hope comes alive; in that spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act.

Too often we become paralyzed by the belief that there is nothing to hope for—that our cancer diagnosis is a one-way street with no exit, that our political situation is beyond repair, that there is no way out of our climate crisis. It becomes easy to think that nothing makes sense anymore, or that we have no power and there’s no reason to act.

I often say that there should be just two words over the door of our temple in Santa Fe: Show up! Yes, suffering is present. We cannot deny it. There are 65.3 million refugees in the world today, only eleven countries are free from conflict, and climate change is turning forests into deserts. Economic injustice is driving people into greater and greater poverty. Racism and sexism remain rampant.

But understand, wise hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them, addressing them, and remembering what else is present, like the shifts in our values that recognize and move us to address suffering right now. “Do not find fault with the present,” says Zen Master Keizan. He invites us to see it, not flee it!

The Czech statesman Václav Havel said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” We can’t know, but we can trust that there will be movement, there will be change. And that we will be part of it. We move forward in our day and get out the vote, or sit at the bedside of a dying patient, or teach that third grade class.

As Buddhists, we share a common aspiration to awaken from suffering; for many of us, this aspiration is not a “small self” improvement program. The bodhisattva vows at the heart of the Mahayana tradition are, if nothing else, a powerful expression of radical and wise hope—an unconditional hope that is free of desire.

Dostoyevsky said, “To live without hope is to cease to live.” His words remind us that apathy is not an enlightened path. We are called to live with possibility, knowing full well that impermanence prevails. So why not just show up?