CC sangha talk

CC = Climate change.  And 'sangha' is the Placerville Vipassana Buddhist group I'm part of.  

Next week I'm  giving a talk on corrective actions for climate change.  I've been lamenting about this for weeks now.  It's bringing up a whole bunch of contradictory feelings, dukkha, conundrums, and a reluctance to speak my truth.   After a long talk with our sangha leader, I've been led to highlight a few things.  

But first let me rant a little:
 2005 was a pivotal year for me and it turned me away from popular views & opinions and led me to question most of our pop media's reporting on environmental, ecological and supposed 'solutions'.  I had taken my proceeds of a home sale, traveled the world (Asia, Everest, Europe, etc) looking for answers to unasked questions like: 'is it really that bad? are we all f***ed?, why not just party like it's 1999? .... 
And then came the 2005 seminal paper 'the death of environmentalism' and in 2012 the IPCC Rio+20 reinforced my skepticisms. 
 In 2015 Paul Hawken's Drawdown project revitalized me.  
back to the sangha CC talk:
 First, I will focus on upbeat, abundance focused and solutions.  That includes a tiny intro on what's wrong (imo) with our current CC views:  fear mongering, scientific group think (IPCC = climate mafia), death of environmentalism, etc.

But my real conundrum was how to blend in the Buddhism approach to CC.  Rather than espousing sitting on the cushion and wishing well to all beings (which is a very good thing!) I'd rather focus on a secular, action-oriented perspective.   

I consider myself to be a lukewarmer:  This means that I believe the world is warming, that humans are the major contributors to the warming, BUT we really have no clue how it's all going to play out AND we will adapt.  Also, i'd like to throw in George Will's idea that every 50-75 years there appears to be some sort of ecological black swan event - witness Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 that cooled the earth's atmosphere by several degrees. 

I also consider 90% of the pop media's coverage and sound bites to be more fear mongering to elicit more clicks and sell more bricks.   There's just so much CC noise that its hard to decipher fact from spin.  When I was teaching green business at CSUS i did a

lecture on climate deniers' 'facts' and not one student stopped me for 90 minutes.  I cherry picked data from greenhouse affected cities, stated that most climate monitoring is done around cities, that the Poles' ice shelves are getting thicker, that glaciers were prospering, that many places were getting colder (not warmer) etc...  All based on peer-reviewed scientific data that had hand picked to prove my point.  I was trying to elicit the students' ability to do some critical and original thinking on their own.  Trust - but verify. 

i will start with Joanna Macy's seven generations exercise.  then I'll delve into the buddhist precepts about doing no harm, dependent origination, no knowing suffering, and cravings leading to dukkha (yes craving from a solution to climate change can lead to suffering).

And I'll spend a little bit of time reviewing my rolodex on CC based on 20+ years effort in this area:  my turning point in 2005. CC History (losing earth+), Montreal protocol, IPCC, Kyoto, Rio + 20, Paris, Pope’s Encyclical, Drawdown, Abundance, death of environmentalism, Cradle-to-Cradle™ (DfD & chemistry) WinSol, biomimicry, Carbon/eco footprinting, one earth equiv, downshift vs. downsize, chemical industry, on & on ad infinitum...

And in conclusion I'll focus on corrective actions everyone can do - if only

1. Stop flying,
2. chemicals (even organic!)
3. food waste
4. experiential learnings & spread the love (e.g. biochar ++)

Don't know if this'll help with the dukkha of fear mongering about CC,  but it's my view.  'I'm neither a pessimist or an optimist; I'm into applied hope ' (Amory Lovins 2004)