In 2008, Thict Nhat Hanh wrote The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, excerpts from that book are in a 2017 article from Lions Roar.com (https://www.lionsroar.com/the-world-we-have/)
I have sat with the Buddha for a long time and consulted him about the issue of global warming, and the teaching of the Buddha is very clear. If we continue to live as we have been living, consuming without a thought to the future, destroying our forests and emitting greenhouse gases, then devastating climate change is inevitable.
Much of our ecosystem will be destroyed. Sea levels will rise and coastal cities will be inundated, forcing hundreds of millions of refugees from their homes, creating wars and outbreaks of infectious disease.
We need a kind of collective awakening. The masses are still sleeping. They cannot hear the ringing of the bells.
We need a kind of collective awakening. There are among us men and women who are awakened, but it’s not enough; the masses are still sleeping. They cannot hear the ringing of the bells. We have built a system we cannot control. This system imposes itself on us, and we have become its slaves and victims.
Most of us, in order to have a house, a car, a refrigerator, a TV, and so on, must sacrifice our time and our lives in exchange. We are constantly under the pressure of time. In former times, we could afford three hours for one cup of tea, enjoying the company of our friends in a serene and spiritual atmosphere. We could organize a party to celebrate the blossoming of one orchid in our garden.
But today we can no longer afford these things. We say that time is money. We have created a society in which the rich become richer and the poor become poorer, and in which we are so caught up in our own immediate problems that we cannot afford to be aware of what is going on with the rest of the human family or our planet Earth.
In my mind I see a group of chickens in a cage disputing over some seeds of grain, unaware that in a few hours they will be killed.
The American dream is not possible for the Chinese, nor the Indians or the Vietnamese. The American dream is no longer possible for the Americans. We cannot continue to live like this. It is not a sustainable economy.
We have to have another dream: the dream of brotherhood and sisterhood, of loving-kindness and compassion and that dream is possible right here and now. We have the dharma; we have the means; we have enough wisdom to be able to live this dream.
We do not have to sink into despair about global warming; we can act. If we just sign a petition and forget about it, obviously nothing is going to change. Urgent action must be taken at the individual and the collective levels. We all have a great desire to be able to live in peace and environmental sustainability.
What most of us don’t yet have are concrete ways of making our commitment to sustainable living a reality in our daily lives. We haven’t organized ourselves. We can hardly blame our leaders for the chemicals that pollute our drinking water, for the violence in our neighborhoods, for the wars that destroy so many lives.
It is time for each of us to wake up and take action in our own lives.
Violence, corruption, abuse of power, and self-destruction are happening all around us, even in the community of leaders, both spiritual and social. We all know that the laws of our country don’t have enough strength to manage corruption, superstition, and cruelty. Only faith, determination, awakening, and a big dream can create an energy strong enough to help our society rise above and go to the shore of peace and hope.
Our planet Earth has a variety of life, and each species depends on other species in order to be able to manifest and to continue.
We are not only outside of each other but we are inside of each other. It is very important to hold the Earth in our arms, in our heart, to preserve the beautiful planet and to protect all species.
The Lotus Sutra mentions the name of a special bodhisattva: Dharanimdhara, or Earth Holder, someone who preserves and protects the earth.
Earth Holder is the energy that is holding us together as an organism. She is a kind of engineer or architect whose task is to create space for us to live in, to build bridges for us to cross from one side to the other, to construct roads so that we can go to the people we love.
Her task is to further communication between human beings and other species and to protect the Earth and the environment.
Harmony is impossible if we do not have a global ethic, and the global ethic that the Buddha devised is the Five Mindfulness Trainings.
The Five Mindfulness Trainings are the path we should follow in this era of global crisis because they are the practice of sisterhood and brotherhood, understanding and love, the practice of protecting ourselves and protecting the planet. The mindfulness trainings are concrete realizations of mindfulness. They are non-sectarian. They do not bear the mark of any religion, particular race, or ideology; their nature is universal.
When you practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings, you become a bodhisattva helping to create harmony, protect the environment, safeguard peace, and cultivate brotherhood and sisterhood. Not only do you safeguard the beauties of your own culture, but those of other cultures as well, and all the beauties on Earth. With the Five Mindfulness Trainings in your heart, you are already on the path of transformation and healing.
In the First Training we vow to cherish all life on earth and not support any acts of killing. In the Second Training we pledge to practice generosity and not support social injustice and oppression. In the Third Training we make a commitment to behave responsibly in our relationships and not engage in sexual misconduct. The Fourth Training asks us to practice loving speech and deep listening in order to relieve others of suffering.
The practice of mindful consumption and mindful eating is the object of the Fifth Mindfulness Training. The Fifth Mindfulness Training is the way out of the difficult situation our world is in.
When we practice the Fifth Training, we recognize exactly what to consume and what to refuse in order to keep our bodies, our minds, and the Earth healthy, and not to cause suffering for ourselves and for others. Mindful consumption is the way to heal us and to heal the world. As a spiritual family and a human family, we can all help avert global warming by following this practice. We should become aware of the presence of bodhisattva Earth Holder in every one of us. We should become the hand, the arms of the Earth Holder in order to be able to act quickly.
Thict Nhat Hanh vows:
Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I vow to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming. I vow to ingest only items that preserve peace, well-being, and joy in my body, in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family and society.
I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicant or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films, and conversations. I am aware that to damage my body and my consciousness with these poisons is to betray my ancestors, my parents, my society, and future generations.
I will work to transform violence, fear, anger, and confusion in myself and in society by practicing a diet for myself and for society. I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self-transformation and the transformation of society.
It’s wonderful to realize that we are all in a family, we are all children of the earth. We should take care of each other and we should take care of our environment, and this is possible with the practice of togetherness. A positive change in individual awareness will bring about a positive change in the collective awareness.
Protecting the planet must be given the first priority. I hope you will take the time to sit down with each other, have tea with your friends and your families, and discuss these things. Invite bodhisattva Earth Holder to sit and collaborate with you. Make your decision, and then act to save our beautiful planet Earth. Changing your way of living will bring you a lot of joy right away. Then the healing can begin.
Adapted from The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology, by Thich Nhat Hanh. © 2008 by Unified Buddhist Church. With permission from Parallax Press, www.parallax.org.
Thict Nhat Hanh wrote Love Letter to the Earth in 2013. I did not come upon the book myself until 2021, when I was reading anything and everything I could find that related to the climate crisis and how it came to be – in terms of the human capacity to ignore reality that has been spoken about for decades now.
At least since the 1980’s, scientists were sounding alarms, political people were sounding alarms, the UN Earth Summit was sounding alarms – and still as a human species we were not universally accepting that we needed to change.
In 1989, David Suzuki introduced a radio series, It’s a Matter of Survival, which addressed the climate crisis, over 30 years ago. Scientists had proven that human beings were having a larger — and more detrimental — impact on the Earth than any other species in history. It became clear that we needed to change the way we were living, the ways we were consuming and the ways that we were thinking about our natural world. (https://davidsuzuki.org/about/our-story/)
And still, as a human species we were not universally accepting that we needed to change.
In 1992, Al Gore wrote Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. By 1992 he was already convinced that the global environment was on the “brink of disaster.” That book drew upon “the latest research on air, water, and soil pollution to develop a strategic plan for a worldwide clean-up effort.”
In 1992 at the UN Earth Summit, David Suzuki presented his poem, and portions of the declaration were woven into the work of others to form the Earth Charter.
https://davidsuzuki.org/about/declaration-of-interdependence/
And still, as a human species we were not universally accepting that we needed to change.
By 2007, Al Gore had come out with An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming, and by 2009 (Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis) he was saying: “It is now abundantly clear that we have at our fingertips all of the tools we need to solve the climate crisis. The only missing ingredient is collective will.”
By 2013, Al Gore was highlighting:
- A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
• Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
• There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.
And still, as a human species we were not universally accepting that we needed to change.
In 2013, Thict Nhat Hanh wrote Love Letter to the Earth.
The premise put forth by Thict Nhat Hanh stated the exact thing that I had come upon in my own thinking, meditation, and other deep inquiries into what is wrong with human nature, what went wrong between humans and the earth, that has landed us in this place.
As I began to find more and more thinkers and writers who have been saying the same thing, for decades, I was, at first, a little sorry that my thoughts were not original ones after all. And then I became alarmed that since these thoughts HAVE been stated for decades now, why is no one listening?
However, I have also become heartened by the numbers of people (with a lot more public visibility than I) who are stating and restating these truths. It is this that inspired this website, and the hope to share it as a discussion platform, with the hopes that even more minds and hearts can become enlivened about these urgent issues.
The answer posited by Thict Nhat Hanh states that it is from our rupture with Mother Earth that all else has gone awry. He points out that viewing the earth as separate from us is the problem.
Pages 8-9, Love Letter to the Earth:
You may be used to thinking that the Earth is only the ground beneath your feet. But the water, the sea, the sky, and everything around us comes from the earth. We often forget that the planet we are living on has given us all the elements that make up our bodies. The earth is not just the environment we live in. We are the Earth and we are always carrying her within us.
Knowing this, we can begin to transform our relationship to the Earth. We can begin to walk differently and care for her differently. We will fall completely in love with the Earth. When we are in love with someone or something, there is no separation between ourselves and the person or thing that we love. We do whatever we can for them and this brings us great joy and nourishment. That is the relationship each of us can have with the Earth. That is the relationship each of us must have with the Earth if the Earth is to survive, and if we are to survive as well.”
And Thict Nhat Hahn has come up with the exact same solution, that came to me, namely that we need to heal our rupture with Mother Earth in order to heal from all the other ruptures that have followed.
Page 27, “We can all see that Mother Earth is a great bodhisattva. When we see her in this way, with all her many virtues, we will walk more gently on her and treat all her children more gently. We will want to protect her and not harm her or any of the myriad forms of life she has given birth to. We will stop wreaking destruction and violence on Mother Earth. We will resolve the question of what we mistakenly call “the environmental problem.” The Earth is not just the environment. The Earth is us.”
Page 28, “We can’t wait any longer to restore our relationship with the Earth because right now the Earth and everyone on Earth is in real danger. When a society is overcome by greed and pride, there is violence and unnecessary devastation. When we perpetrate violence toward our own and other species, we are being violent toward ourselves at the same time. When we know how to protect all beings, we will be protecting ourselves. A spiritual revolution is needed if we’re going to confront the environmental challenges that face us.”
Pages 28-29, “We’re no longer in touch with ourselves, our family, our ancestors, the Earth, or the wonders of life around us. We have become alienated and feel lonely. This alienation is a kind of illness that has become an epidemic. So many of us feel empty inside and are searching for something to fill the vacuum. We try to fill the void by taking pills or intoxicants or by consuming things. Yet our addiction to consumerism, to buying and consuming things we don’t need, is causing so much stress, so much suffering, both to ourselves and to the Earth. Our craving for fame, wealth, and power is insatiable, and this puts a heavy strain on our own bodies and on the planet.”
Page 29, “Real change will happen only when we fall in love with our planet. Only love can show us how to live in harmony with nature and with each other and save us from the devastating effects of environmental destruction and climate change. When we recognize the virtues and talents of the Earth, we feel connected to her and love is born in our hearts.”
From a review: Thich Nhat Hanh, poems, Love Letter to the Earth, 2013, Parallax Press
While many experts point to the enormous complexity in addressing issues ranging from the destruction of ecosystems to the loss of millions of species, Thich Nhat Hanh identifies one key issue as having the potential to create a tipping point.
He believes that we need to move beyond the concept of the “environment,” as it leads people to experience themselves and Earth as two separate entities and to see the planet only in terms of what it can do for them.
Thich Nhat Hanh points to the lack of meaning and connection in peoples’ lives as being the cause of our addiction to consumerism. He deems it vital that we recognize and respond to the stress we are putting on the Earth if civilization is to survive. Rejecting the conventional economic approach, Nhat Hanh shows that mindfulness and a spiritual revolution are needed to protect nature and limit climate change.
Love Letter to the Earth is a hopeful book that gives us a path to follow by showing that change is possible only with the recognition that people and the planet are ultimately one and the same.
