Applying Gandhi’s Ideas to Climate Change
by Peter Applebome
The New York Times
March 30, 2008
At what was once a Capuchin monastery on the Hudson River, the Zen archers were out in force on Friday. They were members of a New York City group celebrating 10 years of study with a retreat at what’s now the Garrison Institute, a New Agey organization that tries to meld contemplation and action.
The idea of the Zen archery is to combine intention and action, focus and carry-through. Physical action slows. The archer and the bow become one. The art becomes artless. The archer evolves through perseverance and discipline. Or so they say.
It’s not much of a stretch to go from the visiting Zen archers to the institute’s own initiative, an ambitious program next month to look at how the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi relate to current environmental issues, particularly climate change.
Central to Gandhi, after all, was the notion that the truth, power and moral force of a movement are inseparable from the truth, power and moral force of its actors.
Hence Gandhi nonviolently freeing India from the greatest empire of his time, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. overturning segregation in the South, Nelson Mandela ending apartheid — intention wedded to action, focus leading to carry-through, evolution resulting from perseverance and discipline. Like the Zen archers, it may seem way too abstruse and exotic for the short attention span of modern life, but then, maybe not.
The Garrison Institute, founded in 2003, sits across the river from an important site in American environmental history, Storm King Mountain, where more than 40 years ago an epic battle over land use helped redefine environmental activism and law.
So there’s nothing unexpected in the current melding of Gandhi and climate change, tied to the Metropolitan Opera’s first staging of Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi, “Satyagraha” (“The Power of Truth”), beginning April 11. After that is a private conference at the institute, followed by a free public event on April 13 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan including scholars, environmental leaders and artists, among them Mr. Glass.
The guiding notion is that climate change today calls for the same kind of collective will, shared destiny, moral purpose, personal responsibility and strategic acumen as the other great movements, and that Gandhi’s ideas and achievements are entirely germane to what needs to happen now.
“The environment and nonviolence is like a marriage made in heaven,” Mr. Glass said. “If we treated the environment with nonviolence we wouldn’t have the polar ice cap melting away.”
Remarkably, almost a century ago, Gandhi’s writings were full of thoughts on the environment.
“The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”
“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. ... If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
“This little globe of ours is not a toy of yesterday.”
“We may utilize the gifts of Nature just as we choose, but in Her books, the debits are always equal to the credits.”
To the reflexively jaundiced modern eye, Gandhi evokes a presence seemingly ancient and somewhat naïve, but naïve is the last word you could apply to Gandhi, who wedded moral insights to a shrewd tactical sense of politics and public opinion.
“He had an ability to find a very simple symbol that could mobilize a great number of people; think of his Salt March,” said Gandhi’s grandson and biographer, Rajmohan Gandhi, referring to the 1930 protest against the British tax on salt that helped galvanize India against British rule. “You might say he was an advertising genius.”
Al Gore cited both Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln in a speech on climate change in 2007. He noted Gandhi’s sense of satyagraha and a statement of Lincoln’s during the depths of the Civil War: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
But disenthralling ourselves, seeing the world and its perils afresh, may be even harder now than it has ever been — too many diversions, too murky and vaporous a peril, too little sense of urgency, an enemy that is more us than them.
And if there’s an advertising genius who has found the simple symbol to make people individually and collectively change behavior, he hasn’t stepped forward.
From Storm King to Woodstock to the institutes and ashrams that dot the landscape today, the Hudson Valley has played a remarkable and barely understood role in the evolution of the nation’s environmental and personal consciousness over the past half-century.
But skeptics might say it’s produced more individual evolution than a transformed culture.
No mere conference is likely to change that, but maybe the Gandhi-philes will find some clues. Without them, we’re left, it seems, with the few Zen archers able to magically hit their targets, while the vast majority of us neither know nor much care what ours are.
The New York Times
March 30, 2008
At what was once a Capuchin monastery on the Hudson River, the Zen archers were out in force on Friday. They were members of a New York City group celebrating 10 years of study with a retreat at what’s now the Garrison Institute, a New Agey organization that tries to meld contemplation and action.
The idea of the Zen archery is to combine intention and action, focus and carry-through. Physical action slows. The archer and the bow become one. The art becomes artless. The archer evolves through perseverance and discipline. Or so they say.
It’s not much of a stretch to go from the visiting Zen archers to the institute’s own initiative, an ambitious program next month to look at how the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi relate to current environmental issues, particularly climate change.
Central to Gandhi, after all, was the notion that the truth, power and moral force of a movement are inseparable from the truth, power and moral force of its actors.
Hence Gandhi nonviolently freeing India from the greatest empire of his time, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. overturning segregation in the South, Nelson Mandela ending apartheid — intention wedded to action, focus leading to carry-through, evolution resulting from perseverance and discipline. Like the Zen archers, it may seem way too abstruse and exotic for the short attention span of modern life, but then, maybe not.
The Garrison Institute, founded in 2003, sits across the river from an important site in American environmental history, Storm King Mountain, where more than 40 years ago an epic battle over land use helped redefine environmental activism and law.
So there’s nothing unexpected in the current melding of Gandhi and climate change, tied to the Metropolitan Opera’s first staging of Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi, “Satyagraha” (“The Power of Truth”), beginning April 11. After that is a private conference at the institute, followed by a free public event on April 13 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan including scholars, environmental leaders and artists, among them Mr. Glass.
The guiding notion is that climate change today calls for the same kind of collective will, shared destiny, moral purpose, personal responsibility and strategic acumen as the other great movements, and that Gandhi’s ideas and achievements are entirely germane to what needs to happen now.
“The environment and nonviolence is like a marriage made in heaven,” Mr. Glass said. “If we treated the environment with nonviolence we wouldn’t have the polar ice cap melting away.”
Remarkably, almost a century ago, Gandhi’s writings were full of thoughts on the environment.
“The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”
“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. ... If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
“This little globe of ours is not a toy of yesterday.”
“We may utilize the gifts of Nature just as we choose, but in Her books, the debits are always equal to the credits.”
To the reflexively jaundiced modern eye, Gandhi evokes a presence seemingly ancient and somewhat naïve, but naïve is the last word you could apply to Gandhi, who wedded moral insights to a shrewd tactical sense of politics and public opinion.
“He had an ability to find a very simple symbol that could mobilize a great number of people; think of his Salt March,” said Gandhi’s grandson and biographer, Rajmohan Gandhi, referring to the 1930 protest against the British tax on salt that helped galvanize India against British rule. “You might say he was an advertising genius.”
Al Gore cited both Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln in a speech on climate change in 2007. He noted Gandhi’s sense of satyagraha and a statement of Lincoln’s during the depths of the Civil War: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
But disenthralling ourselves, seeing the world and its perils afresh, may be even harder now than it has ever been — too many diversions, too murky and vaporous a peril, too little sense of urgency, an enemy that is more us than them.
And if there’s an advertising genius who has found the simple symbol to make people individually and collectively change behavior, he hasn’t stepped forward.
From Storm King to Woodstock to the institutes and ashrams that dot the landscape today, the Hudson Valley has played a remarkable and barely understood role in the evolution of the nation’s environmental and personal consciousness over the past half-century.
But skeptics might say it’s produced more individual evolution than a transformed culture.
No mere conference is likely to change that, but maybe the Gandhi-philes will find some clues. Without them, we’re left, it seems, with the few Zen archers able to magically hit their targets, while the vast majority of us neither know nor much care what ours are.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
posted by Swallowtail at 10:08
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