sorrow, the exquisitely sculpted walls of Glen Canyon were buried under millions of tons of water.
Around the same time, an oil platform suffered a blowout off the southern coast of California, and the buildup of pressure caused two hundred thousand gallons of crude oil to leak from the ocean floor. It took eleven days to fix the break; four thousand seabirds died from oil clogging their feathers. Beaches were ruined with the black tar that washed up for miles north and south of Santa Barbara. Newspa- per photos showed dedicated volunteers carrying hopelessly soiled seabirds to rescue centers. President Richard Nixon observed that the Santa Barbara incident had “touched the conscience of the American people.”
The mounting threats to the natural world seemed to call forth a spiritual urgency for those who feared the whole ecological founda- tion of life was at serious risk. It was our human duty to correct the errors of our ignorance; many saw this as our shared ethical respon- sibility. As the war raged in Vietnam and feminists called for gender justice, environmental issues took on a depth of ethical concern that reflected the social upheaval of the times. Spurred by public outcry, the United States Congress passed law after law in remarkable time, protecting endangered species, marine mammals, clean water, and fisheries.
But still the stories continued, making it clearer than ever that human life and health were threatened by environmental abuse. With the 1978 toxics leak at Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York, and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Penn- sylvania, less than a year later, ordinary people began to realize: this could happen to me. Although the twenty'five thousand people within five miles of the partial reactor meltdown were spared extreme harm, the accident set off shock waves in peoples imaginations. We could all see that any nuclear reactor was vulnerable to accident and that any- one living near a hazardous dump site, oil refinery, industrial factory,
Being with the Suffering
or landfill was personally at risk From environmental disasters just waiting to happen.
How does an organism respond to the threat of harm ? Animals of all kinds are hardwired with a lifesaving response system of fight or flight. We survive a threat by running away to safety or by fighting the attacker and defending ourselves. These strategies have evolved over thousands ofyears of living with fires, floods, and predators. Both responses, however, are completely inadequate in the face of wide- spread environmental suffering. We have seen the photos from space of the “blue pearl,” our small planet against the huge darkness. We can’t really run away; there is only this one earth and its very thin, fragile layer of life. Fighting the attacker is tangled up with politics, business, the economic health of the nation—a very complex beast to attack. With these basic “fight or flight” impulses so clearly inadequate, people concerned about the environment have turned to higher orders of thinking. The ethical call is unavoidable. In the first decade of the twenty-hrst century, with climate change high on the global political agenda, that call is recognized by more people around the world than ever. Even if we don’t know exactly what to do, we must turn to face what is happening and find a way to respond.
WITNESSING SUFFERING
Much of our ignorance about ecological degradation is the result of not seeing, not smelling, not tasting, not hearing, and not feeling the deeper impacts of environmental suffering. We are too busy or perhaps too afraid to pay attention to what is going on. It is easy to see suffering when it has gone to extreme levels—if s hard not to notice a burning river. But we need to be able to see the causes of these environmental disasters, to see the suffering as it is developing. Environmental suffering is the combined suffering of individuals and
the systems they are part of and that support their lives. Gardeners are well aware of this: if you see a plant with yellow leaves, you check the soil to see which nutrients are missing. When a plant is ailing, its failure to thrive signifies a weakness in the system that supports it. If the blossoms fall without setting fruit, you check for interfer- ing pests. Learning to make the connections between individuals and systemic suffering is part of becoming a useful witness. This is one of the most basic practices on the green path: simply seeing what is going on and calling attention to what you see. By being keen observers for our planet, we are more connected to the world around us and in a better position to prevent harm and improve the health of the earth.
To lay out this territory, I will suggest several lenses for observ- ing suffering in the environment. The more skilled you are in ob- serving, the more you will be able to detect changes in the system. While this is not a comprehensive catalog of the realms of witness- ing, it can be a place to begin.
One of the most natural ways to observe suffering is one on one, body to body. We feel empathic concern when we see a small child crying or a person who has lost a limb. When people we love are stricken with grief or illness, we want to be with them to offer support, to listen, to witness their suffering. That same response arises for some people when they see an animal or plant suffering. If you have a personal relationship with a companion animal, you become highly sensitized to the animal s behaviors and can quickly tell when that fellow creature is suffering. This skill is easier to develop with animals we are around all the time; it is much more challenging to do the same with wild animals. Wildlife biologists are trained professionally to recognize wild animal behavior and patterns of disease
for different species. They spend hundreds of hours in the field ob' serving wild animals, tracking their movement patterns, diet, and social relations to determine the state of their health. They are often the first people to spot outbreaks of disease such as West Nile virus, which has spread so quickly across the continent.
Without accurate knowledge of animal behaviors, we may mis- interpret something we believe is an indicator of suffering. Or we may miss entirely some signals that can’t be picked up by our sense or- gans. It is important to recognize that our witnessing capacities are limited by our own perceptual capacities. For example, we don’t hear as well as most dogs and we can’t see ultraviolet light like bumble' bees. We see well in the daylight, like crows, but we don’t see well at night like owls do. Further, no two human witnesses will have the same perceptual capacities. What we are able to perceive is strongly influenced by the conditioning of our minds. An experienced bird' watcher can distinguish many more birdcalls than the average person, for example. All observations are conditioned by the mental devef opment of the brain and neural system of an individual, and every individual has been shaped by a unique set of influences, including gender, race, and culture. What appears to be animal suffering to one person may not be recognized by another. There is no such thing as “objective” observation. It is important to humbly acknowf edge this fact to keep one’s observations in perspective.
Nonetheless, with the help of microscopes, telescopes, and binoc- ulars we can observe in detail many aspects of animal and plant life. What, then, would be some indication an individual is suffering? Signs of physical injury or poor health might be first to catch your at' tention. The deadly nature of DDT was discovered when scientists noticed that pelican eggs were cracking before the chicks could ma- ture. The commonly used pesticide had been released offshore from an industrial plant and had built up in the local fish population. The pelicans ate the fish that ate the DDT, and the cumulative DDT
blocked the calcium from forming eggshells thick enough to hold together. Pelicans kept laying eggs, but the population was plunging toward extinction.
Sometimes it is the sudden scarcity or even absence of organisms that causes alarm: where did they go ? Songbird populations are es- pecially good indicators of widespread environmental impact. Peo- pie who count birds every year follow the trends of individual species to see which are in decline or have disappeared altogether. Observ- ing absence may be a sad clue that another species has gone extinct or perhaps has changed its migration route or feeding area. Absence in one area needs to be correlated with information elsewhere to build a more complete picture of what is going on. Field naturalists and volunteers with the Audubon Society now have extensive data' bases of bird counts from around North America that allow for year- to-year tracking of population fluctuations.
Ecosystem Suffering
While some people are more attuned to witnessing the suffering of individuals, others have a gift for sensing an ecosystem as a whole or being alert to the processes that determine the health of the system. Very often extensive data may be required to verify a significant change or impact on a system. But local residents may notice the first signs of trouble—a strange color in the creek or an outbreak of disease. The witness who senses that something is “not right can alert a professional response team to gather the necessary informa- tion. They can then call on environmental groups to engage their resources in the troubled situation.
Ecosystem health depends on functional flows of energy, water, and nutrients. The most direct way to witness energy flow is through watching the weather. Patterns in the weather from year to year deter- mine energy and water flow in ecosystems. How much heat for how long? How much rain for how many days in a row ? What are the cu-
mulative impacts of a stalled weather system or an unusually hot sum- mer ? How is the climate changing in response to global warming ?
Powerful weather events almost always generate environmental suffering for some organisms and ecosystems. People in northern Ver- mont will never forget the sound of snapping trees during the ice storm of 1998. It sounded like gunfire going off—bam, bam, bam! The air crackled with the sound of trees going down under the weight of the ice. Freezing rain had been falling for over three days across sev- eral thousand square miles of eastern Canada, northern New York, and New England. Most of the news coverage covered the extern sive power outages caused by the loss of thirty-five thousand utility poles and a thousand steel pylons, leaving millions of people struggling to stay warm. The tree loss was unprecedented; Quebec’s maple syrup industry was devastated, and many forests looked clobbered, with broken limbs and trunks in chaos everywhere. It took weeks of witnessing to collect the full picture of what had happened to the northern woodlands.
Nutrient flows (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur) are more easily observed in the relations between organisms in an ecosystem. If rains are steady, producing plenty of milkweed nutrients for munching caterpillars, it will be a good year for monarch butterflies. Steady rains, though, will also foster molds in agricultural fields, making it a potentially bad year for strawberries. The green witness looks for possible strains on relationships within systems as indicators of environmental impact. Not all ecological relations are immediately apparent, but many can be seen by repeated observation: noting who is eating whom, who is hanging out with whom, who is serving as a home for others, and so on.
Many people develop an ecosystem view by simply living in one place for a while and watching what goes on. Countless alarm cries have been registered because of local knowledge of place, reinforced by “friends of places and place-based school programs. Old-timers are particularly good resources of place-understanding because they
have been witnesses over decades or generations. They carry the long view, a sense of the local ecosystem across time and its capacity to respond to disturbance.
Personal Views of Suffering
Our capacities to witness suffering are shaped by our “personal view”—the combination of ethical, religious, aesthetic, and other valuesTased responses we have developed to the natural world. This view may be informed by ecological knowledge or by religious training, family values, or a keen sense of beauty. The personal view touches something very deep and real. It is hard to encapsulate in words, though many philosophers and religious writers have tried. Artists and poets may do better at pointing to the mystery of the world that is so much larger than our own small views of it. I encour- age those on the green practice path to study the origins of their own personal views in order to be more honest observers. It is im- possible to keep your personal views from influencing your perception of environmental suffering. But that does not mean that personal views are necessarily an impediment. They may, in fact, strengthen your own sense of why it is important to draw attention to ecosys- tern degradation or species extinction.
It is especially useful to recognize your own cultural condition' ing toward other than human beings and their suffering. Many peo- pie raised in the West have been taught to see forests and rivers primarily as resources for human beings. Human-centered bias can be one of the greatest deterrents to being fully present with other living beings. If you see the environment as primarily for human use—whether for food, shelter, recreation, or spiritual develop- ment—you may not see how other species suffer under the thumb of human dominance. If you see the environment as only plants and animals, you will overlook the struggle of indigenous peoples. Ifyou see the environment as only wild places, then you miss the cultivated
places, the agricultural ecosystems, the recreational sites that also need protecting. Observing one’s personal views often means ac- tively confronting counterproductive bias that works against clear seeing.
Our personal response to suffering has also been shaped by the strong emotions of our life experiences, particularly as young people. People who grow up in abusive households are especially sensitized. They may have witnessed abuse of household pets, behavior that is now known to be associated with spousal abuse. Under constant threat from emotional and physical bullying, they may find solace in empathic relationship with non-human beings. Those who take on the protector role in relation to family bullies often carry that same position into their environmental work. Children who have been exposed to a lot of suffering when young—whether from illness, death, or harassment—are often the most sensitive to animal and ecosystem suffering. I believe that personal reflection on your own history with suffering is an important piece of the green practice path. It represents your best effort to be a clear witness, aware of the influence of the ideas and experiences that have shaped you.
These three lenses—observing individual, ecosystem, and personal views of suffering—offer practical ways to engage environmental suffering. The witness on the green practice path will have no shortage of things to observe; this is quite easily a lifetime practice. It is one thing, however, for suffering to catch your attention. It is quite another to actually sit with it and try to grasp its full measure in your heart.
BEING WITH THE SUFFERING
Sometimes there is nothing to be done about the suffering we witness. We feel helpless, sad, overwhelmed, anxious. It is difficult to accept these feelings and know the suffering will likely continue. When we look around and see how widespread the suffering is for animals,
trees, oceans, and forests, we can easily become discouraged. When this happens we need spiritual support for sustaining our gaze in the face of such helplessness. The eco-theologian Jay McDaniel speaks of green grace” and “red grace” as ways to experience a sense of heal' ing in relation to suffering. His sense of Christian sacrament is that which makes us whole in the midst of our brokenness. Green grace arises from spiritual contact with special places and a sense of awe for the earth as a miraculous whole. Red grace is core to the Chris- tian experience of communion, the idea that right within the suffering ofjesus is the healing love ofhis wisdom. Red symbolizes the blood that has been spilled on the cross and reminds us that we, too, by our actions in the world, also cause suffering. By acknowledging our own part in the suffering, we accept our failings and, at the same time, resolve to develop our spiritual capacities to offer peace and kindness to the earth.
Very often our minds make it more difficult to be with the suffering directly. We get caught up in our anxiety or our desire for resolution, wishing things were different. Too much mental activity can prevent us from just being with the fact of the suffering. One of the most helpful spiritual practices for this state of mental unrest is walking meditation. At a retreat in northern California we incorporated walking meditation as a way to be with the suffering of the local forests. Here in the land of big trees, it was very disturbing to listen to the constant rumble of logging trucks above the retreat center. Load after load of fallen giants passed by day and night, causing me great mental torture. I kept thinking of the scalped redwood groves, the hundreds of years of evolutionary heritage hurtling toward whirring sawmill blades. Every tree tore at my heart; it seemed as if they were taking my family away. And there was nothing to be done, at least right then. So we walked slowly, one step at a time, breathing, calming the mind. At first it seemed to make no difference; my mind was still on fire. But as the day wore on, with one long session after an-
other of walking meditation, I found a way to be with the trucks and also be calm, breathing with the suffering in my heart.
In some situations walking meditation may not be enough. Even with the support of others, the quiet breathing may seem too pas- sive, too self-conscious. You may want to be more active to express the pain you feel in being with the suffering of the earth. This is the place for prayer, for song, for wailing—for speaking out loud the words that need to be said: May this destruction cease! May we find a better way! Mmy the song of the earth prevail! The voice cries out, sending your true wishes into the universe, giving you courage to stay with the suffering. The prayer takes the form of melody, the melody picks up rhythm, and soon you have a song to keep you company.
My words are tied in one With the great mountains, With the great rocks With the great trees,
In one with my body And my heart.
Do you all help me with supernatural power, And you Day And you, Night!
All of you see me One with this world!
—Yokuts Indian prayer 1
The songs are there for us to find, so are the prayers. They are made out of the suffering and can be called forth when we most need them. Being with the suffering is not something to fear; it is actually the way through to deeper understanding.
TRACING SUFFERING TO SOURCE
Observing suffering and being with the suffering are important places to begin. Inevitably we want to know why an individual or ecosystem is ailing, especially if the consequences may be significant. We hope that the unhealthy situation may be reversible. If we can make the cor- rect diagnosis of the ailment, then we can find the appropriate course of healing. This is the basic process in any medical assessment of dis- ease. In Buddhist philosophy this diagnostic method is expressed as the Four Noble Truths, one of the very first teachings of the Buddha after his profound awakening.
The first of the Four Noble Truths points to the indisputable existence of suffering, that all beings are subject to suffering through birth, illness, old age, and death. These challenges come with the territory of being alive. They apply to all organisms and all ecosystems. Nothing is really permanent; the fact of continuous change means there will be some suffering in the simple effort to stay alive. The witness looks directly at this suffering as a personal practice in being with the environmental crisis. Thich Nhat Hanh’s phrasing of this precept is very strong:
Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sound. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world. 2
The second Noble Tmth urges the practitioner to look deeply into the cause of the suffering at hand. Certainly not every form of environmental suffering has human action as a root cause. Tandslides, earthquakes, and outbreaks of disease are the result of many physical and biological pressures on existing earth systems. They are not
necessarily “fixable” by human intervention. But this suggests a method for tracing cause—look to the agents involved in the situation. Ifpeople are part of the picture, we can ask: Who is taking action and why ? What is their motivation ? What profitable activities are they trying to keep going ? How are they “attached” to the things they are doing that cause harm to the earth P When we ask difficult and sometimes uncomfortable questions, it encourages close scrutiny of the situation and reveals insight into what is driving the suffering. Good critical thinking depends on a well-developed analytical mind. Scientific training develops such analytic skills, and so do Buddhist practice and other disciplines of the mind. By naming the specific agents (people, corporations, governments) driving a specific environmental harm, we can begin to map out root causes and their relative impacts.
This is not easy work. It can sometimes take years to sort out the history of actions that caused groundwater pollution or climate change. Even if the players and their actions are identified, there is often no momentum or social process for calling them to task. Sometimes it takes a change in political leadership before certain problems and problem-causers can be addressed. Sometimes it takes years and years of educating the public before there is enough pressure to stop the harming action. We are still in the middle of those years and years with climate change. Identifying root causes is crucial work because it is a powerful form of truth-telling. By naming the causes along with their specific agents, it becomes possible to assign responsibility and hold agents accountable for the consequences of their actions. This, in fact, was the foundational philosophy behind the 1980 U.S. Super- fund Act—the principle that the “polluter pays.” Climate negotiators from the South have adapted this principle to climate negotiations, insisting that northern countries pay for the damage their industrial economies have caused from carbon emissions.
The third Noble Truth states that there can be an end to the suffering. This is a message ofhope and healing: it is possible to address the causes determined in the second diagnostic step. There is no
2 9
guarantee of specific outcomes, but we do find strong affirmation of a complex universe that is in continuous flux. With multiple potem tial players and outcomes, something can happen that changes the current state of things for the better. From witness to analyst, the practice path now takes us to the role of active agent. Everyone has the capacity to offer some useful contribution that will turn the situ- ation from harm to healing. The third Noble Truth affirms this ca- pacity, encouraging 11s to be more confident that human beings can make a positive difference with the environment.
SKILLFUL ACTION
But how to act? What do the Four Noble Truths have to say about choice of action ? The fourth Noble Truth describes a wheel of eight spokes, each of which helps to turn the dharma wheel of libera- tion. Right livelihood, right speech, right effort— these and the other spokes are specific places to practice healing. Right or skillful action is what leads to happiness, or we could say healthiness, as in the healthy functioning of an ecosystem. Unskillful actions tend to lead to unhappiness or unhealthiness. Skillful and unskillful action generates internal results, or how you feel about your choice of action, as well as external results, or the way it affects others. Sri Lankan teacher Bhante Gunaratana explains that skillful actions “are those that create the causes for happiness” and “bring happiness to the doer and receiver.” 3
Skillful action requires clear intention and some understanding of cause and effect. I suggest three additional criteria for choosing action steps. First, the action would be appropriate —that is, fitting in scale to the situation, within cultural norms of acceptance, and directly related to the suffering at hand. Second, the action would be effective —that is, it would make some difference in reducing the cur-
rent suffering, and it would lead to further effective measures. Third, the action would be doable by a specific agent. It is useless to think of good solutions if there is no one in a position to actually carry them out. Actions are taken by people, and people have to be not only willing to take them but in a position where they are permitted or even supported to take them.
“What can you actually do?” This is an important question, useful in almost every situation, environmental or not. It may he true that every little action counts, but we need to look at which actions are most effective in the big picture of things. Often when I speak with students or in public lectures, people ask me: How should I begin? What is the right thing for me to do? I know it can seem overwhelming; there are endless possibilities for taking action. It is easy to become paralyzed just trying to consider where to step into the fray. Certainly some issues such as climate change seem to override smaller concerns such as styrofoam cups. But ultimately the suffering must call to you in some way. It must touch you, move you to want to be with the suffering, to analyze its causes, to find a course of action. That is a tall order of business. It desperately needs your heartfelt motivation. The call itself contains its own response.
I encourage people to begin by listening to the heart. What threat to life moves you most? What situation has come to your attention through a friend, a news article, a minister, a bike ride ? What causes you to feel some moral twinge, some sense that you ought to he doing something ? The situations are continuously presenting themselves; if one of them speaks especially loudly, that is the one to respond to. I have great faith in this approach to environmental work; I have seen it motivate people to do amazing things—from sitting atop tall redwoods for months at a time to planting trees in the middle of a desert. The process is iterative; it instructs as it unfolds. One response leads to another call, and that call leads to further response. Spiritual leaders speak of “following one’s calling” as a way to be of
service in the world. Skillful action based in call and response can be exactly that: ones calling to act on behalf of others so that the earth community may thrive.
Witnessing the suffering of the world impels us to step out of our individual lives and engage the bigger issues around us. When you start this work it is important to enter where you can be most effective in drawing on your own experience. If you sink in over your head you will not be very helpful. But if you can wisely listen to the voice in your heart, you will find your piece of the work. The invitations are all around us—which one calls to you? With a strong intention to reduce harm and be a witness to suffering, your steps on the green practice path can indeed make a difference. This ailing world is much in need of people who can see and respond to environmental suffering. Your sincere efforts are greatly needed—what can you offer to this world ?