Mobilizing for the People’s Climate March

Moving from a Culture of Death to a Culture of Life
Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi

On September 21, concerned citizens from all across the U.S., and from many other lands, will be converging on New York City for the People’s Climate March, billed to be the biggest climate march in history. The immediate occasion for the march is the gathering of world leaders at the United Nations for a summit on the climate crisis being convened by the UN Secretary General. The march’s purpose is to tell global leaders that the time for denial and delay is over, that we have to act now if we’re going to secure the world against the ravages of climate change.

If we’re going to emerge intact, what we need at minimum are binding and enforceable commitments to steep cuts in carbon emissions coupled with a mass-scale transition to renewable sources of energy. However, while clean energy policies are clearly essential in combating climate disruption, a long-term solution must go deeper than adopting new technologies and such pragmatic measures as cap-and-trade or a carbon tax. The climate instability we are facing today is symptomatic of a deeper malady, a cancer spreading through the inner organs of global civilization. The extreme weather events we have experienced come to us as a wake-up call demanding that we treat the underlying causes, the paradigm that underlies our industrial-commercial-financial economy.

The distinctive mark of the dominant paradigm is the locating of all value in monetary wealth. Human value, labor value, natural value all translate into financial value, and the latter is the only value to which the paradigm ascribes ultimacy. All other values must submit to the reign of monetary wealth in the form of increased profits and greater returns on investments. The model posits the goal of the economy to be continuous growth, based on the madcap premise of infinite growth on a finite planet.

This way of thinking depends on a process of “objectification,” which means that it treats everything — people, animals, and trees, rivers, land and mountains — as objects to be utilized to generate financial gain for corporations, their executives and their shareholders. This logic of objectification and its scheme of values entail policies aimed at the unrestrained domination and subjugation of nature. The system depends on the unregulated extraction of natural resources to generate energy and produce commodities for sale in the market. It thereby turns nature’s bounty into a plurality of goods, leaving behind mountains of waste and pollution.

The corporate paradigm treats people just as callously as it treats stones, trees and soil. It pushes indigenous peoples off their lands and treats labor as an abstract variable, reducing real human beings to figures in a database. This system flourishes by inciting in people insatiable desires for the consumption of material commodities. Its blueprint is the simple “throughput” sequence by which resources and labor are converted into goods that are converted into monetary wealth and material waste.

All these factors functioning in unison churn out the devastation we see around us, signs of a planet in peril. We’re living in a world weighed down by “the culture of death,” both literally and figuratively. Amid unimaginable luxury, almost 900 million people must endure chronic hunger and malnutrition. Easily cured diseases turn fatal. The gap between the super-rich elite and everyone else grows wider. And climate disruption claims tens of millions of lives each year. Unless we change direction fast, the final outcome could well be the collapse of human civilization as we know it.

To avoid civilizational collapse, we need not only new technologies to reduce carbon emissions but even more fundamentally, a new paradigm, a model for a culture of life. We need, in brief, an alternative way of understanding the world and an alternative set of values conducive to a more integral relationship of people with each other, with nature, and with the cosmos.

This change in worldview must lead to reverence and respect for the natural world, recognized as our irreplaceable home and nurturant mother. It must acknowledge the finitude of nature and treat it accordingly, bearing in mind our responsibility to future generations. It should promote solidarity between peoples everywhere based on empathy, respect, and a shared humanity. It must lead to the development of benign “appropriate technologies,” the selective utilization of natural resources, and the deployment of renewable sources of energy. It should further endorse an ethic of simplicity, contentment and restraint to replace the voracious appetite of consumerism. And most deeply of all, it should awaken in us an aspiration toward communion with the cosmos and all living beings, a harmonization between human ideals and the creative capacities of the universe.

We now stand at a crossroads where we must choose between competing worldviews. Depending on our choice, we can move in either of two directions. We can move toward continued devastation and eventual global collapse, or we can instead turn toward inner renewal and healthier relationships with each other, with the earth, and with the cosmos. As climate change accelerates, the choice before us is being thrown into sharper relief, and thus the need to choose wisely grows ever more urgent.

The obstacles that confront us are formidable. To prevail, we will need exceptional determination, collaboration, and will power. We must be uncompromising in our insistence on the need to make the transition to a higher stage in our technological development and in our cultural and spiritual evolution. For our own sakes and for generations to come, we must bluntly repudiate the culture of death and embrace a new vision, a new economy, a new culture committed to the real enhancement of life.

The People’s Climate March will be one big step in that direction, a powerful demonstration of the strength that comes through unity.

To learn more about the People’s Climate March, visit http://peoplesclimate.org/march/