A Future We Can Love: Susan Bauer-Wu Offers a Buddhist Perspective on the Climate Crisis

The Mind and Life Institute organized a live-streamed meeting and discussion between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the environmental activist Greta Thunberg on 10 January 2021, along with leading climate scientists Susan Natali and William Moomaw, on the topic of Earth’s rising temperatures, raising awareness about the feedback loops that are accelerating global warming. Susan Bauer-Wu, who has served as the Mind and Life Institute’s director since 2015, has since penned a new book, A Future We Can Love: How We Can Reverse the Climate Crisis with the Power of Our Hearts and Minds. This volume is both an invaluable companion to the climate conversation and a standalone compendium of expert input from leading climate scientists, personal anecdotes, Buddhist philosophy, and even Buddhist practices, from lojong to grief meditations, and, notably, words of encouragement to mitigate the hard-hitting facts, all delivered in a wonderfully unexpected familial approach to scientific prose.

Susan weaves elements from the above-mentioned meeting together with further profound information and statistics from people within her sphere—from primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard to Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Don Perovich, professor of engineering at Dartmouth College researching sea ice geographics, and philosopher and environmentalist Vandana Shiva.

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