Have a Happy New Year?

by Douglas S. Barasch  |  January 7, 2008  |  More By Douglas S. Barasch

Nearly every imaginable environmental solution lies right over there, just within reach. But the implementation—ah, that’s another matter. That’s because so many solutions lie at the intersection of science and good intentions.

This is obvious to everyone, right? Newspapers and magazines report almost daily on ingenious ideas that could/would/should have a profound impact on a wide array of vexing problems facing the planet. What is lacking (usually) are not answers but political will, which is to say good will, which leads to benevolent activity. The necessary ingredient is an enlightened perspective that transcends (or transforms) our individual or parochial outlooks. (Fortunately, our self-interest often overlaps with that of others.). All in all, an appropriate topic to consider over the winter holidays.

One of the gifts I retrieved from beneath our Christmas tree the other morning was a book by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, How to See Yourself as You Really Are. (Our holiday tradition is wildly eclectic, our extended family comprising a mix of Jews, Christians, and Buddhists.) Hard to know what to make of a book title like that, but in the first couple of pages His Holiness makes the point (as he has in various books and lectures) that while our scientific and technical knowledge is supremely advanced and has brought great benefit to the world, our knowledge of our own psychology, our spiritual selves--collectively and societally--has not advanced much at all in these last several centuries. The evidence for that is abundant. Were we wiser, we would not constantly be holding a knife to our own throats, threatening to kill ourselves.

Which brings me to China—not because of the Dalai Lama’s tragic relationship to that nation, but because industry and the economy are booming there, in the process bringing a better “quality of life” to millions of people. (We could debate what constitutes a good quality of life; I use the term loosely here, in the sense that people in China want the material comforts we have long had in the West—from running water and electricity inside their homes, to electronic entertainment and telephones, to their own motorized transportation. The Dalai Lama also has a few things to say about the relationship of material comforts to personal happiness.) Government planners decades ago set China on this course and created the levers to implement this grand vision--and lo and behold, the vision became manifest. But this leap forward has unleashed forces as potent as the country’s economic explosion: air and water pollution on such a grand scale that hundreds of thousands of Chinese are falling victim annually to disease and premature death as a direct result. The energy required to power this massive industrialization is fueled by coal, so China now challenges the United States as the leading emitter of greenhouse gasses. And as China goes, so does the planet, since all of our brilliant strategies to decrease the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and combat global warming will not achieve the desired results unless China employs these strategies, too.

And here’s where we come back to the seed of this rumination: China’s central government knows it must enforce strict environmental regulations—many of which are already on the books—but faces the daunting obstacle of persuading corrupt local politicians and its armies of newly-minted entrepreneurs to value environmental safety on a par with personal profit and professional advancement. (Beijing’s challenge is often summed up by an ancient Chinese proverb: “The mountains are high, the emperor is far.”) But the same can be said of countless politicians and industrialists in our own country—those who profit from coal and oil, minerals and timber—consumed by avarice, though in their own minds they are just playing by the rules of the game.

During Christmas dinner, members of my family were chatting about the various environmental crises we had heard about in the news—threatened polar bears, rising seas, droughts—the whole biblical litany of woes. I said our conversation reminded me of the challenge I constantly face as an environmental journalist: How do I write about these problems without becoming a deadly-dull bearer of grim tidings? If the news I reported or commented on was consistently, relentlessly depressing, wouldn’t I eventually find myself alone and ignored? But my 15-year-old daughter suggested, “Well, you just have to let me people know they can do something.” So true. We can all do something—even if it’s just simply changing our point of view, expanding our awareness, sharing that awareness with others—because such knowledge eventually informs our actions.

My 9-year-old son recently played Tiny Tim in a production of Scrooge, a holiday musical. Toward the end of each show I attended (and I was in the audience for them all), I would hear the transformed Scrooge utter these words (borrowed from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol): “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”

So says Dickens, and so, too, would the Dalai Lama, I believe, because this same sentiment is in harmony with the Buddhist idea of karma. We can change our karma—our individual karma, our national or even global karma—through enlightened action, of which we are all capable.