I was born and grew up in Northern Italy, near Venice, in a city
that was well known to be the one that had the least amount of trees and
green areas per inhabitant in the whole nation. I remember as a child
looking outside of the window, my eyes scanning the skyline searching
for the tip of a tree. Finding one, I would let them rest on its green
leaves and its branches swaying in the breeze. I was filled with a sense
of awe and vastness, a sense of divineness that felt far more real than
the catholic ideas about God that were fed to me in those early years of
my life.
I clearly remember one day looking at a tree, tears coming to my eyes
and thinking: "If a God exists, it must have something to do with this
tree." Many years later, or what it feels like many lifetimes later, I
can now understand and see the intrinsic truth revealed to me in those
moments:
We are part of one organic eco-system that is a physical
manifestation of a divine Force that is much vaster than the sums of all
its single parts.
As a grown up I am witnessing our beautiful Earth going through a
process that I am afraid will soon make the whole planet look like the
city I grew up in. This is one of the reasons i feel compelled to talk
and write about this issue. The other reason is that, even though there
is some growing public awareness of the fact that the Earth is basically
ill - being pushed out of its natural balance by mankind - the majority
of the media are not willing to make the public aware of how serious the
situation is. The reason for this is that the majority of the
information channels are owned or are financially influenced by the big
multi-national corporations that are provoking most of the damage on the
planet and are paying the lobbyists to pass laws and regulations that
are highly non ecological.
So here are a few facts that will give you a more clear perspective:
Each second 2.47 acres of rainforest disappear worldwide, that is
214,000 acres per day (an area larger than New York City), 78 million
acres per year (an area larger than Poland).
According to The Nature Conservancy, originally, 8 million square miles
of tropical rainforest encircled the planet. More than half has been
burned, bulldozed and obliterated. Now, only 3.4 million square miles
remain. If deforestation continues at current rates, scientists estimate
that nearly all tropical rainforest eco-systems will be destroyed by the
year 2030. So half the world's forests are now gone, and over 30 million
acres more are lost each year. In the U.S. too, more than half our
national forests have been logged, mined or otherwise industrialized.
Although rainforests cover less than 2% of the Earth's surface, they are
home to more than half of all plant and animal species. There is a
natural rhythm within which species become extinct and are replaced by
other species that are more suitable to the ever changing climate and
natural habitat. If humans weren't here, or if their activities were
otherwise, there would be one species becoming extinct every 5 years.
This is the pace at which extinction moves as part of a natural process,
the ever changing ebb and flow of life. Today, of all the living
species, 25,000 are going extinct every year!
What we are witnessing right now is not part of a natural process. Man
has affected the environment to a degree never seen before in the
billions of years since the planet has been organically alive. Two of
the main causes of this global imbalance, together with deforestation,
are pollution and over-population. The USA alone, even though it makes
up only 5% of the world population, consumes more than 1/3 of the
world's wealth and creates 50% of the non- organic waste as well as 25%
of the carbon dioxide pollution that is one of the main causes of global
warming.
Our environment has been chained to the gas pump and to the big oil
corporations standing behind them. Drilling and destroying places like
the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and Greater Yellowstone, as the current
administration would have us do, is not the answer. The USA doesn't have
enough oil to drill their way to self-sufficiency. We could empty every
oil reserve in America and we'd still be importing vast quantities of
oil. But if we simply used available technology, for example to raise
fuel economy standards for new cars to 40 miles per gallon, we could
save about two million barrels of oil a day - more than the USA imports
from Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, the world population is growing at an alarming rate:
we are adding the equivalent of another Los Angeles (2 to 3 million
people) on the Earth every month. At this rate, by the year 2020 40% of
the population on Earth will not have enough water to grow their own
food. This is the main reason why many of the big transnational
corporations are buying water springs and wells all over the world. You
can already see the Coca-Cola logo on some of the mineral water bottles.
Water is soon going to become a luxury item.
And without projecting too far into the future, right now every 3.6
seconds someone dies of hunger, and 75% are children. This is on a
planet that could feed all its inhabitants many times over. There is a
great abundance that is not being distributed equally. Just with the
money that is being spent for the war in Iraq we could have greatly
contributed to solving the problem of starvation in Africa, helping to
create the much needed infrastructures that are necessary to grow food
on that continent.
On the other hand, the existence of a 'third world' is just a
reflection, on a larger scale, of a way of thinking that permeates our
western societies and our minds, where 'I' am separate from 'you' ,
where the individual is not seen as interrelated with all other beings
on Earth. In our materialistic Western culture, our fundamental concern
is the individual and his accumulation of material wealth (as a
replacement/symbol for happiness). Because of this we have lost the
sense of a larger meaning beyond us. We have lost touch with the sense
that all living beings are sharing the same Earth: no matter if they are
white or black, buddhist or christian, man or woman, rich or poor, man
or fish, we all share the same home. That was the basic insight that
struck most of the astronauts when they started space travel: they all
said how amazingly beautiful the 'blue planet' looked from out in space,
and how obvious it was that there are no lines defining borders,
dividing countries. It's one world, and we all share it as our home -
it's the only home we've got, so we better care for it.
We share this home with an incredible variety of different animals and
plants with whom we are strictly interrelated. For example, if there
were no trees, we couldn't breath; that's how close we are related! I
feel that the alienation that man is experiencing deep in his heart in
these days, springs from his failure to perceive himself as connected to
all other living beings. We have lost touch with the fundamental reality
of the universe: that we are all interconnected as part of the unity of
all Life. On an ecological level, this kind of mindset is manifesting in
our not perceiving the planet as a living organism, but rather, more
like some inanimate thing that belongs to us and that we can use and
dispose of as we please.
Buddhist teacher Thic Nhat Hanh said:
A human being is an animal, a part of nature. But we single
ourselves out from the rest of nature. We classify other animals and
living beings as nature, acting as if we ourselves are not part of it.
Then we pose the question "How should we deal with nature?"
In the same way, we think that we can dump pollution on the planet and
it won't affect us. Or, reinforced by our belief in a world divided into
different nations, we dump pollution in our own backyard, in Third World
countries. We forget that we are part of one planetary system and that
pollution is bound to come back to us in the form of water, food or
viruses carried by other human beings that have been affected by that
pollution. This is not to mention our lack of feeling for all the beings
that will suffer in those countries as a consequence of our actions.
There are many ways in which, at a social level, each one of us can
contribute to the restoration of balance on our planet, from voting for
the right representatives, to financially supporting organizations that
are good environmental watchdogs, to writing to our local newspapers our
feelings and ideas. By the way, did you know that the Sunday edition of
the New York Times can weights more than 12 pounds, and that 75,000
trees have to be cut each week in order to print it?
But most importantly, side by side with social action, what is needed in
these critical times is a deepening of our awareness and our ability to
see through lies, a deep cleansing of our psyche. We need an
understanding that the world is a reflection of who we are inside, and
therefore it's our responsibility, not only towards ourselves but
towards the whole planet, to open to the depths of life. We must find
the insights within ourselves from where we will again be able to
experience oneness as the reality and division as illusion, from where
compassion can flow into our lives and our actions. We need more
meditation and love.
As J. Krisnamurti said:
What you are, the world is. And without your transformation, there
can be no transformation of the world.
We need to realize that we are not just physical beings on a material
planet, but much more than that: we are a reflection of the cosmos, and
just as the universe is mysterious and vast, so are we. We are a
miniature cosmos, each of us being intimately related to all Life.
A Sioux prayer says:
Make me wise so that I may know
the lesson You have hidden in every leaf and rock.
To be able to hear the subtle music hidden in every leaf and rock, we
need to become silent. We need to cultivate stillness and inner silence,
using whatever approach or technique works best for us.
As my spiritual mentor Osho once told me:
You don't have to do anything to experience existence: you have to
stop doing. You have to be in an absolutely unoccupied state, with no
tensions, with no worries. In this state of tranquility you come into a
certain tuning with the music that surrounds you. You suddenly become
aware of the music of the sun, the trees, the mountains, the rivers and
the stars ...
I feel that once our social response springs from that space of inner
peace, only then will it carry the full potential, the vastness, the
compassion and great wisdom of the human heart.
In Love
Shastro - Hawaii, May 2003
NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) website provides a wealth of
environmental information as well as state-of-the-art online activism
tools: http://www.nrdc.org/