Buddhist Voices in the Climate Crisis: Welcome to the Anthropocene
By Hozan Alan Senauke
Buddhistdoor Global
September 8, 2022
Welcome to the Anthropocene—an age in which human activity is the dominant influence on planetary geology, atmosphere, and ecology. As the Buddha famously preached, everything is burning. Burning with the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. And now the fires are literal. In our species’ craving and delusion, we have set fields and forests on fire across wide swathes of the world.
The image above is an untouched photograph that I took at the Berkeley Marina in California in September 2020, when a hellish glow fell over the Bay Area from fires to the north. The ravages of a global climate emergency are not something that will just slowly emerge in our children or grandchildren’s day. The emergency is here, now, manifesting as unprecedented heatwaves, fires, drought, hurricanes, floods, and rising seas, and the side effects of famine, refugees, and wars, as nations and people contend for resources and survival. As a species, we humans are doing this to ourselves; a kind of mindless self-destruction driven by the three poisons. And, of course, we impose this new reality on so many other species on the planet. In the end, it may be that only cockroaches will be the victors.