The Top Environmental Problems

This quote about the top environmental problems was shared to me by my daughter.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in conjunction with my work with the Buddhist Climate Action Network and the Earth Holder Sangha.

I’ve written about the retreat called The Bells of Mindfulness from Mother Earth led by dharma teachers John Bell and Jo-ann Rosen at the end of last month.

In our discussions, we came to the conclusion that despite the dangerous situation, there are things we can do to lesson our carbon footprint.

Then, on March 14, I attended the Benjamin Dean Lecture at the California Academy of Sciences with Dr. Mark Boslough from the University of New Mexico and Sandia National Laboratories.

He compared the “death plunge” of an asteroid into Earth’s atmosphere and the resulting effects of an impact to the “death spiral” of irreversible human-caused change in the planet’s climate and discussed whether one is more likely—or preventable—than the other.

When asked what was the one best thing we can do right now to help our environmental problem was to have people, corporations, businesses, and governments contribute money to a fund for emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that the funds could be used to intensify the research into renewable sources of energy.

I thought this was a very good idea, then I read this quote from Gus Speth:

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

– Gus Speth, a US Advisor on climate change

This was also one of the outcomes from our retreat – that the problems were mostly the result of greed, aggression and delusion.

So, what will you do to reduce your carbon imprint?