As a rapidly growing population of beings that generally takes from the Earth more than it needs - something that most distinguishes humans from other animals - we are degrading the health of our little planet with rampant ferocity. Optimism is becoming increasingly scarce, quite in line with the reality we are creating. Remaining "optimistic" without recognizing our role in the problems we are perpetuating is one of the dangers we face.
Whether we are optimistic or otherwise, we have most likely already gone beyond the "tipping point" toward an increasingly unlivable planet. Far beyond indeed for those beings our actions have extinguished! Innumerable species, and individual animals within species, are going, going, gone too soon. With more and more industrializing people coming into the world, and barring some unimaginable catastrophe, this trend will only increase exponentially. Clearly, we cannot stop or go backward from here. We are firmly set on course for more of the same.
The magnitude of the growing loss of natural animals and their habitats, along with our increasing use of their lands for the unnecessary, cruel, and heavily polluting animal industrial complex to feed more and more human mouths, points to a decreasingly habitable world. Healthy ecosystems inhabited by animals living according to the needs of their evolutionary development are requisite to maintain a habitable world for human beings in the long run. This truth involves great complexity and is also plainly obvious.
So then, what if we can't fix it? What can we do? What I want to suggest is that all is not lost, even if we cannot meaningfully slow the damage we continue to wreak, let alone repair it.
As we look toward a future with fewer healthy ecosystems and fewer individual animals and animal species, my own sense of how the Dharma, the Message, the Wisdom of the great wisdom traditions may inform our actions in relation to the needs of our changing Earth today involves to some extent beginning to refocus away from ideas about how we can fix it, looking instead toward how to most beneficially behave with one another as fellow denizens of Mother Gaia facing these increasingly painful challenges together.
As social beings, we are ethical beings. That is how we have survived over millennia. Our ethics, based upon our capacity for compassion, is what makes our human species humane. At the deepest level, our sense of well-being has less to do with the conditions we face; it has more to do with how we behave, how much we care about others, and how we enact that caring with one another.
As the Buddha told us: all we can take with us beyond this life is our actions. This includes not only the effects of our actions. His message points more to how well our actions have matched our most loving aspirations and kindest intentions.
The Dharma is eternal and universal. Our alignment with it begins with our best, most selfless, intentions. Yet, how it is to be applied varies according to the circumstances that arise before us.
Now, as always, kindness is paramount. Now, as we face unprecedented challenges as a global community, learning to love one another as the sacred beings we are may be more important than ever before - or, to put it another way, more urgently needed and most appropriate to the needs of our fellow beings.
Even if we cannot repair what we have broken, we can remain optimistic that we may yet be able to call upon our best intentions, align them with the Great Wisdom of the ages, and therewith hope to resolve our story on Earth by having learned the meaning and value of Love and having applied that wisdom in loving one another and all beings through the painful and difficult times to come.
May we pray, and also act accordingly. "May all beings be happy and well."
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Thank you for caring for animals!