Carbon Dharma: the Occupation of Butterflies
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Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies Using the metaphor of metamorphosis, Carbon Dharma calls for our occupation of the Earth as Butterflies, to undo the damage done by the human species in its present Caterpillar stage of existence. It diagnoses the reasons for our Caterpillar stage of existence as the misinterpretation of the fundamental principles that underlie our democracy and our industrial civilization. The book is intended for the youth of this world who are facing some of the gravest challenges ever faced by any generation of human beings. It is also intended for all those who love the youth of this world, for the youth cannot solve these challenges on their own while their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts continue to pile on more grave challenges for them to solve. While drawing upon the ancient Hindu concept of Dharma, or "right action," the book weaves illustrative stories from the author's life and leads up to a global call to action, action of a very specific, focused kind. Rather than listing hundreds of "change-light-bulb" type actions that a lot of us have been doing disjointly, but somewhat ineffectively, it lists three specific actions that we can begin to do concertedly to make a difference. While changing the world is about changing ourselves, effecting social change requires such concerted action. A Climate Healers Publication ISBN-13: 978-1467928458 ISBN-10: 1467928453 CopyLeft, Sailesh Rao, 2011-2016. Original edition published in 2011. Revised second edition, 2016. No rights reserved. Any part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher. Email: [email protected] Publisher Website: http://www.climatehealers.org Book Website: http://www.carbondharma.org Front Cover Photo: Courtesy, the Karech Village Forest Protection Committee of Karech village, Udaipur District, Rajasthan, India, and the Foundation for Ecological Security, Anand, Gujarat, India. Preface: Courtesy Brian D. McLaren All Illustrations: Courtesy Niharika Desiraju. Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies Sailesh Rao with Preface by Brian McLaren and Illustrations by Niharika Desiraju A Climate Healers Publication All proceeds from the sale of this book goes to support the 501(c)3 non-profit, Climate Healers. Sailesh Rao is the Executive Director of the US 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, Climate Healers. An Electrical Engineer by training with a Ph.D., from Stanford University in Stanford, CA, Sailesh switched careers and became deeply immersed in the various environmental crises facing humanity after some life changing events and after he watched Vice President Al Gore’s slide show on TV. Carbon Dharma is the result of his findings over the years. Preface is by Brian D. McLaren, an author, speaker, activist and public theologian. More on Brian at http://www.brianmclaren.net All illustrations are by Niharika Desiraju of Danville, CA, USA, who drew them in the summer between her fifth and sixth grades. Table of Contents Preface ------------------------------------------------------- 1 Prologue ----------------------------------------------------- 4 1. The Caterpillar and the Butterfly ------------------ 9 1.1 The Population Conundrum --------------------- 12 1.2 Civilizational Transformations ------------------ 18 1.3 Who are We? --------------------------------------- 21 2. Karma --------------------------------------------------- 27 2.1 Actions and Inaction Matter --------------------- 28 2.2 The Strange Paradox ------------------------------ 32 2.3 The Axiomatic Flaws ----------------------------- 34 3. Dharma ------------------------------------------------- 39 3.1 The Cosmic Fig Tree ---------------------------- 40 3.2 Two Pillars of Happiness ------------------------ 42 3.3 The Addiction of Wishing ---------------------- 46 4. The Really Inconvenient Truth -------------------- 51 4.1 The Core Problem -------------------------------- 55 4.2 The Root Cause ---------------------------------- 62 4.3 The Way Forward -------------------------------- 67 5. The Kurukshetra of our Times -------------------- 71 5.1 The Symbolism of Idols ------------------------- 72 5.2 The Unknowability of Absolute Truth --------- 75 5.3 The Battle in our Minds ------------------------- 77 6. The Caterpillar Culture ---------------------------- 81 6.1 Lust, Aggression and Greed --------------------- 82 6.2 War on Nature ------------------------------------- 89 6.3 Winner Takes All ---------------------------------- 95 7. The Butterfly Culture ------------------------------ 103 7.1 Regenerating Life ------------------------------- 104 7.2 Conscious Consumption ----------------------- 108 7.3 The Creation of Abundance ------------------ 116 8. Climate Healers ------------------------------------- 123 8.1 The Lighting Project ---------------------------- 124 8.2 The “Namaste” Solar Cook Stove ------------ 131 8.3 Miglets to the Rescue -------------------------- 134 9. The Metamorphosis -------------------------------- 141 9.1 Miglets and the Corporations ----------------- 141 9.2 Awakening through Awareness --------------- 148 9.3 Call to Action ----------------------------------- 153 Epilogue -------------------------------------------------- 161 Acknowledgements ------------------------------------ 171 Interesting Facts and References ------------------- 173 Bibliography -------------------------------------------- 189 Index ----------------------------------------------------- 214 For Sushil, Akhil and the Miglets of the world. “If there was no change, there would be no Butterflies,” sign at an Occupy San Francisco Rally. Preface In biology, there’s a phenomenon called parallel evolution. Two different species found on two different continents from two distant branches of the evolutionary tree evolve similar characteristics to survive and thrive. How does this happen? Similar conditions, biologists tell us, mean that similar characteristics provide a survival advantage. Something similar is happening in the world of religion. Sailesh Rao is a Hindu. I am a Christian. Some might say we are different religious species from different continents from distant branches on the family tree of human religion. But as I’ve gotten to know Sailesh, as I’ve learned of his beautiful work among the poor of India, and even more as I’ve read Carbon Dharma, I feel I’ve found a spiritual brother, a kindred spirit. Coming from such different backgrounds, we’ve reached remarkably similar (and where they differ, complementary) conclusions about what’s wrong in our world and what needs to be done to make it right. My version of the journey began in 2006. After leaving academia in the 1980s to become a pastor in a nondenominational Christian church, I started writing books. In 2005, I wrote a book on the essential message of Jesus, which I discovered to be (this is pretty obvious, but sometimes religious people show amazing creativity in missing the point) “the good news of the kingdom of God.” That pregnant phrase, I had become convinced, was not about where we go after we die, as I had been taught: it was about how we live before we die. It was a call to reconciliation - with God, with ourselves, with our neighbors and even our enemies, and with nonhuman creation as well. Carbon Dharma 2 Preface When I left pastoral work to write full-time in 2006, I knew what I wanted my next research and writing project to be. First, I wanted to pursue a question that had been nagging me for over twenty years, simmering on the back burner, so to speak: what are the world’s biggest problems? In other words, which problems are the diseases beneath the symptoms ... which problems the game-changers (or enders) ... which problems, if they aren’t addressed, could destroy us first or hurt us the worst? Then, I wanted to take what I had been discovering about Jesus and his message and apply it to those questions. The result was a book called Everything Must Change: Where the World’s Biggest Problems and Jesus’ Good News Collide. Writing Everything Must Change certainly changed me. I’ll never recover from that research and reflection. Meanwhile, as you’ll read in the chapters that follow, a Hindu engineer from India was going through his own evolutionary process. In the end, we both arrived at similar conclusions. 1. Our world is in trouble, big trouble. 2. The big trouble relates to our relationship with the environment. 3. We can’t make the changes we need without a deep spiritual change. 4. Our respective religious traditions offer powerful and profound resources to help us experience that change so that we are converted from being part of the global problem to being part of the global solution. But it wasn’t only the similarities between our work that intrigued me as I read Carbon Dharma. I was even more intrigued to gain greater insight into Hinduism and how Hindu perspectives, rooted in the Hindu scriptures, can enrich our pursuit of a better, more sustainable, even regenerative way of life. There’s a section in the pages to follow where Sailesh tells about his struggle as a boy coming of age to deal with the stories of Hindu scripture. Must he take them literally? Are they only true or valid or valuable if they are literal? Or can they be actual without Carbon Dharma Preface 3 being factual? I found a huge smile spreading across my face as I recalled my own parallel structures as a boy caught between scientific evidence for a universe 14 billion years old and a biblical story that unfolded