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The Interconnectedness of Well-Being Zen Buddhist Teachings on Holistic Sustainability

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The Interconnectedness of Well-Being Zen Buddhist Teachings on Holistic Sustainability The Interconnectedness of Well-Being Zen Buddhist Teachings on Holistic Sustainability Tess Edmonds AHS Capstone Project, Spring 2011 Disciplinary Deliverable P a g e | 2 I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete, The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken I swear, there is no greatness of power that does not emulate those of the earth, There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth, No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth, Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the earth. I swear I begin to see love with sweeter spasms than that which responds love, It is that which contains itself, which never invites and never refuses. I swear, I begin to see little or nothing in audible words, All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth, Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the earth, Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot touch. -Walt Whitman P a g e | 3 A PERSONAL NOTE OF INTRODUCTION This project began with a personal journey of exploration, experience, and thinking about how to bring together areas I have increasingly sensed are interrelated. As far back as I can remember, I have always had a deep-rooted love for Nature – a quiet reverence for the mountains and rivers, animals and plants with which we share this planet. This intimacy with the natural world motivated me to seek alternatives to the current systems and ways of life that are eroding natural resources and ecosystems. A twin motivation of mine has been the desire to better understand human nature and specifically the aspects of human nature that lead to the purest, greatest happiness in an individual – that steer people away from poverty, fear, violence, greed, discontent and towards a flourishing existence. Pursuing these two paths through the creative problem-solving framework of design rooted in humanities and social sciences, I have expanded my way of thinking about these issues academically. Pursuing them through the study of the self, I have found that Zen Buddhism has much to offer on these topics. It is difficult to say what Zen is, exactly. Its connotation and colloquial use in western culture do not offer much in the way of truly understanding this teaching “which is against the current, which is lofty, deep, subtle, and hard to comprehend.”1 In many ways, I am unqualified to be writing on the topic of Zen and how it draws deep connections between the well-being of people and the well-being of the environment. Zen is “beyond words” and “fundamentally impossible to write about.”2 Rather, it is best experienced directly, as we will discuss. In acknowledging that this work is about Zen teachings more than it is Zen teachings, I also seek to show that these core principles can offer new perspectives on why people and our environment are not flourishing, why many of our current approaches to these issues are not working, and how we might shift these paradigms. 1 Walpola Rahula. What the Buddha Taught (U.S.A.: Grove Press, 1974), p. 52. 2 Matthiessen, Peter. Nine Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (Shambhala Dragon Editions), p 1. P a g e | 4 THE BIG PICTURE Three Stories In 2003, the residents of Shishmaref, Alaska, decided by majority vote to move their native village from the tiny island of Sarichef to the mainland. This Inupiat village was quickly being eroded into the sea as shorter and shorter winters meant the permafrost upon which their houses were built was melting. Storms buffeted the shore of the small island, lacking its usual protective layer of ice, and as homes sunk into the sea, it was clear that their future there was uncertain. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveyed possible new sights for the village and determined that it would cost the U.S. government $180 million to move Shishmaref. However, the real cost to the residents was not measurable in terms of material loss. Many feared that by leaving the island, “they would give up their connection to the sea and become lost.”3 One day in April of 2009, Mrs. Kellerman went down to her basement to find her husband dead. Freddie Mac Acting Chief Financial Officer, David Kellerman, had hung himself with a piece of exercise equipment. Apparently, Kellerman had been strongly considering resigning from the company but feared what it would look like to the public, in light of the Freddie Mac’s crippling financial troubles. Sources said “he had hardly seen his family, including his young daughter, in recent months” and that “he had been consumed at work by a growing number of challenges.” He ended both his life and the sixteen year long career that he had built from when he joined Freddie Mac as a young analyst.4 Late one night in 1978, Clyde Foster, the mayor of Triana, Alabama – a small, poor, mostly black community – received an alarming phone call. An anonymous reporter told him that he had heard through a leak at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) of a study showing DDT concentrations in local fish forty times above the level considered safe by the federal government. Mayor Foster was greatly troubled by this information and called the TVA the following day for corroboration. Indeed, they were aware of the report on Indian Creek. Mayor Foster replied to the TVA man he was speaking to, “Sir, I must tell you that I am greatly concerned over this threat to the life of my town. I’m sure you’re aware that we swim in that creek, that we fish in it every day – for food, damn it, not for trophies – and it was our only local source of water until 1967.” The TVA man said he was sorry and hung up.5 These three stories expose some of the most perplexing realities of our world. We have created mind-bogglingly complex technologies that are consuming all manner of non-renewable resources, but we are only beginning to grasp their dire effects on our climate and ecosystems. We have encouraged the view that self-made affluence marks success in life, and yet the stresses and pathology present in certain versions of that lifestyle are clearly overwhelming. We have instated dozens of environmental acts and regulations, but not infrequently they negatively impact the well- 3 Elizabeth Kolbert. Field Notes from a Catastrophe. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 9. 4 Zachary Goldfarb. “Freddy Mac Official Spoke of Resigning.” In The Washington Post. April 24, 2009. 5 Michael Haggerty. “Crisis at Indian Creek.” In Unequal Protection, Ed. Robert D. Bullard. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997), p. 23. P a g e | 5 being of people – and disproportionately people of low-income and color – because they do not take into account people’s needs or are not enforced in communities with less political sway. Modernity and prosperity have brought with them many benefits; however, a growing body of anecdotal and research-based evidence suggests that traditional measures of progress and success have led us to a reality in which we face a degraded environment and societies in which unhappiness is still rampant despite affluence. Many thinkers from diverse disciplines have taken up the question of human well-being; fewer have engaged in a deeper discussion of the connection between human and environmental well-being. If we hope to enjoy a future on this planet, then both the human and the environmental dimension must be addressed, for an existence devoid of well-being seems hardly worth sustaining, and no existence of any kind can be sustained on an earth that is hostile to humans and other living things. This paper is concerned with the interconnections between issues of environmental sustainability and human well-being. It examines these connections through the lens of Zen Buddhism and focuses on the United States context. These two angles were chosen based on both personal relevance and the recent engagement of American Zen scholars and students in environmental issues. Furthermore, while the developing world merits extensive attention and efforts to increase the well-being of people living in low-income and resource-poor settings, it is the lack of environmental and human well-being in the developed world that is perhaps even more perplexing. From a conceptual discussion of these issues, I will venture into an exploration of applications to sustainable design thinking as it relates to systems. While several scholars of Buddhism and of environmental studies have put these two subjects in dialogue with one another, no one to my knowledge has applied this thinking to sustainable design. Sustainable design, or ecological design, is the application of a semi-structured creative problem solving process to finding innovative solutions that address the needs of stakeholders within their social and environmental contexts. However, many people and entities practicing their version of sustainable design are still focused on the symptoms of environmental issues, as opposed to the entire problem from roots up. To this developing field of work, I hope to add an appreciation for the need to address human well-being in concert with environmental well-being. Suffering and Empathy The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that suffering is inherent in life. The truth of this statement is apparent in our daily lives, whether or not we are familiar with Buddhist teachings.
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