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I have a sticker in my office that says "Zen Buddhism: Don't even think about it!" This kind of humorous take often leads to the (false) perception that Buddhism and its more western-palatable "mindfulness" cousin are about disengagement, a sort of blissful denial of reality in which the practitioner's magical skill is to sit there in utter peace and emptiness, able to tune out the world even while the world around is unraveling.
In an open letter to California Governor Brown published yesterday in anticipation of tomorrow's massive March for Real Climate Leadership in Oakland, dozens of leaders and members from the San Francisco Zen Center -- including the central abbesses and well-known figures such as actor Peter Coyote -- dispel the notion of the passive, agreeable monk unfazed by any earthly rumblings below or outside his or her cross-legged self.
February 5, 2015some unthinking thoughts below the orange meditation cushion...Dear Governor Brown,
Image may be NSFW.We write to urge you to ban hydraulic fracturing -- fracking -- in California and, more generally, move away from making our state a major producer as well as a consumer of fossil fuels. We celebrate that you have, in your inaugural address, made a renewed commitment to addressing climate change.
Clik here to view.We know -- you, and us, and many in California and elsewhere -- that hydraulic fracturing is destructive of so many things. It has a long, deep, devastating impact on many species, as well as human beings. It is a theft the present makes from the future, compromising for the sake of the few who profit in the present, longterm well-being for the many to come. It commits us to continue pursuing fossil fuel and with it climate-change emissions when we know, as you said in your inaugural, we need to take "significant amounts of carbon out of our economy." This should mean not only what we consume here in the state, but what we produce to be consumed anywhere.
That carbon goes into the upper atmosphere, wherever it is burned. Too, fracking devastates water, both in the huge amounts used in the process, and in the lasting contamination of groundwater, a terrible waste in a dry state. We can leave that oil in the soil. And we must. We ask that you sign a bill banning fracking and help turn us away from the age of fossil fuels with its immeasurable and lasting damage to the biosphere. California, with its extraordinary implementation of energy-efficiency standards during your first term as governor, with Assemblywoman Fran Pavley's emissions legislation in 2002 that set nationwide standards under the Obama administration, with the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, has often led the way for the rest of the country. What happens here matters everywhere.
