Another externality dismissed in market systems is the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who conduct propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don't, someone else will. And this vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. --Noam Chomsky, Is the World Too Big to Fail? (2011)
The most pressing issue now facing our world is the state of the environment. If things are allowed to worsen, our world could turn into a hungry ghost realm. So we, as bodhisattvas, have the duty to protect it and promote its wellbeing. And the most useful way we can do so is by awakening as many minds as possible to the magnitude and urgency of this issue. --Sakya Trizin Rinpoche (2010)
In Buddhist mythology, the world of the hungry ghosts is one of the six realms of conditioned being depicted in the Buddhist "wheel of life." Its three higher realms are inhabited by gods, titans and humans. The three lower realms are those of animals, hell beings and hungry ghosts. In the first quotation above, an eminent Buddhist master warns that our global ecological crisis could lead to the Earth degenerating from a biosphere that supports an extraordinarily rich variety of human (and other animal and plant) life into a world populated by hungry ghosts.
A traditional Buddhist belief is that self-realization is possible only on the biological basis of a human body. So Sakya Trizin points out that global ecological collapse could also eliminate the possibility of enlightenment from the Earth. Understood more metaphorically, the collapse of human civilization, which has become a very real possibility, might leave only a few humans desperately struggling to survive on an impoverished planet, preoccupied indefinitely with finding their next meal and unable to focus on anything else.
Dr Gabor Maté, a psychiatrist working with hard drug addicts, sees the wheel of life as a mandala revolving through six realms, populated by different aspects of human existence. In the animal realm we are driven by basic survival instincts and appetites; in the hell realm by states of unbearable rage and despair. The hungry ghost realm is the domain of addiction where we endlessly seek something outside ourselves to satisfy an insatiable yearning for fulfilment. The street addicts in his care spend almost all their time in this state. But many of us move back and forth between realms, even in the course of a day. Maté considers that "post-industrial" capitalism has created a society addicted to shopping, work, drugs and sex. If we ask how such a "hungry ghost society" would treat its ecological inheritance, perhaps we should study those street addicts.
Of course, this state of affairs also has everything to do with leadership. How do we address the type of psychopathology among leaders that recommends we follow "business-as-usual" to the bitter end of ecological collapse? We all understand homicide. Thanks to the 20th century, we also recognize genocide. But we haven't yet agreed on a word to denote what the human species is doing now: killing great ecosystems like the world's oceans, destroying the stable climate system upon which agriculture itself depends or driving more than half the species on Earth to extinction. We are not witnessing a failure of imagination, but rather the triumph of propaganda. It is especially the case in the world's most powerful country, America, where the media that have become our "collective nervous system" are concerned not to inform us, but to sell our eyeballs to advertisers.
An important part of genuine education is realizing that many of the things we think are natural and inevitable (and therefore should accept) are in fact conditioned (and therefore can be changed). The world doesn't need to be the way it is; there are other possibilities. The present role of the media is to foreclose most of those possibilities by confining public awareness and discussion within narrow limits. Our society is now dominated by a power elite composed of governments and large corporations which include the major media outlets. People move easily from each of these institutions to the other because there is very little difference in their worldview or goals -- primarily economic expansion. As John Dewey put it a long time ago, politics remains "the shadow cast by big business over society." The role of the media in this unholy alliance is to "normalize" this situation, so that we accept it and continue to perform our required roles, especially the frenzied production and compulsive consumption necessary to keep the economy growing.
Meanwhile, weather-related disasters increase every year and the world begins to burn. Our best scientists have carefully researched and published their findings in authoritative professional journals. But as Chomsky points out, the scientific consensus itself has been drowned in a high tide of corporate propaganda. The very fate of our species is being treated as a mere "externality" by free market ideology.
Ban Ki Moon, secretary-general of the U.N., warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year that our model of economic growth has become not merely obsolete, but a global suicide pact. We have mined our way to growth, burned our way to prosperity and believed in consumption without consequences. In the 21st century, all resources are running short and the one we are most clearly running out of is time -- time to build a new sustainable economic model for survival. That is why Sakya Trizin alerts us to another grave dimension of climate change: that it may lead us to the extinction of the human spirit, of wisdom and of the lineage of enlightenment itself.
Noam Chomsky: Is the World Too Big to Fail? The Contours of Global Order
The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother.
...remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. ...you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.
All things are connected. What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.
-Seattle
If we are to survive, we will adapt. If we fail to adapt, we will perish. The world will go on. What purpose does this fear-mongering serve? Why does change engender so much fear when it is the one constant in the universe - the only thing that is actually inevitable?
"Driving half the species to extinction"? Consider. Has anybody ever done a census of the species on this planet? No. So how do they arrive at this preposterous claim? Theoretical. So how do you calculate the number of species on the planet? Then how do you calculate how fast they are dying off or have already died off? How then do you compare what is occurring now with what was happening 10,000 years ago?
I'm not going to tell you - you're living off spoon-fed information now and you're not learning anything that way. What I will say is that if you answer those questions for yourself, you will find disturbing things. The rate of extinction of species will not be one of the disturbing things you find.
precisely.
and unfortunately, the dominant theme seems to be that nobody wants to wake up -- no one wants to hear doom and gloom, and even if we did get it, (because i think we all do really just so many are in willful denial) it seems so all too overwhelming.
the view of a dying world provided is almost impossible for us to imagine. it pits a dichotomy of self vs. everything else, rather than understanding true inter-dependence.
it's as if everything tells us it's ok to pretend this isn't happening because there's nothing we could do about it anyway so just keep on consuming and destroying as usual.
somehow, some way, we must realize that this is happening. we must focus on cherishing, loving, and caring for our world. we must decide to love ourselves enough to save us.
Of course nobody will use that term outside of activist circles, and that's so for good reason. But there is certainly no respectable economic theory that claims that externalities are negligible or don't matter or should even be seeked.
The concept comes from a school of thought that wants to clarify when and how markets work, not from worshippers.
the earth will cleanse itself if needed.
it will not wait for politicians to do the work for it.
of a Buddhist. When in studious study, I find myself in a "Tri-plex" of Judeo-Chritian,
The Vatican,and restored Testements through the Prophet/Scribe; Joseph Smith Junior.
We all carry the "Ghost" you speak of, In a myriad of manfestions, stemming from
pathological "passions". One must "Harnus" the ECHO, of the Inner.
i.e..>"The last Temptation of Christ".{Scorosise}
Jesus wasn't Christ until his made a trek to [Kasmir, India]... after graduating
the "muster" and divine will of his Abba, Abba Master. Thus Jesus the Christ!
A Zen Spiritual coach throughly "entegrated", me into the "middle-path.
I, like the Buddha, Hermit Thomas Merton & The prodigal son, all share
one singular trait of "Spirtual Wonderlust;"
That if your on a chosen Missionquest, You didn't have to leave your house,
Monestic Cell , and/ore Ashram to the great "awake" to your very Buddha-Nature.
Divinty of the immaculate was within your very "Buddha-Soule" long before you
made the choice to transverse the Atlas Globe.
"If You Meet the Buddha Along the Way, Change his spair Tire"
Author Unknown-"Zen Mortor Cycle Maintence"