“energy” is a very big word that crosses into many territo- ries of thought. In its myriad forms, it affects everything we do and determines the shape and character of our world. Because energy is instrumental to accomplishing work and to maintaining health, it makes an ideal focus for the green practice path. Human energy use accounts for some of the worst environmental impacts on the planet. We bear a great responsibility to look closely at these im- pacts and find better alternatives. You do not have to be an expert on green building or hybrid cars to engage the energy conversation. You just need to be willing to observe how energy works and to cultivate healthy social energy relations to sustain you on the green path. This is crucial to being an effective agent in the world, to making wise investments of your energy toward a sustainable planet. In this chapter I introduce ways to develop an awareness of energy as permeating all life activity, and I suggest particular practices for taking up the real work that is to be done with energy.
My own baptism with this subject came unexpectedly in the 1980s when I was working as an environmental science educator for the Point Reyes Bird Observatory in California. Fresh out ofgrad school, I was enthusiastically engaged in building a brand-new education program complete with bird museum, science interns, teacher training,
outside consulting contracts, and a birding travel program. I was learning birds like mad—counting sandpipers at dawn on Bolinas La- goon, banding songbirds in the afternoons, driving to conferences with other educators, heading off on weekend birdwatching trips. I was a busy young environmentalist! But then things got less rosy. The organization went through a series of stressful leadership transitions, and my health began to unravel. When the director cut my program, I went into a tailspin. Between early hormonal changes and meta- bolic collapse, I was exhausted. I had almost no energy to do anything. In order to recover from this serious health crash, I had to be very careful not to squander the small amount of energy I had each day. I learned which activities would drain my reserves and which would nourish me. Singing, for example, lifted my heart; talking was a strug' gle. I took it on as a personal science project. How much could I learn about energy in my own body and in my surroundings ?
As part of this project I spent time walking in the coastal land- scapes north of San Francisco. At first I could only cover very short distances. So I chose thoughtfully—crashing waves or calm oak trees ? Gentle creek or towering redwoods? Each place had its own energy qualities, and these varied by time ofday and season. Within each place, individual rocks or trees had their own energetic character. Plants, too, carried different qualities—delicate orchids compared to exuberant sunflowers, graceful willows versus straight trunk pines. I practiced noting and describing these specific energy qualities as a way to pay attention. I watched where I was drawn as a way to understand the state of my own energy. The practice itself became a training, a way of knowing, an introduction to the shape and flow of energy.
DEVELOPING ENERGY AWARENESS
Solar energy, biofuels, green building, acupuncture meridians, yogic chakras—there are more than enough resources available to learn
about energy in any of these technical fields. For the green practice path, this level of knowledge is secondary or complementary to a more fundamental awareness of how energy works. For this it is far more useful to be curious than welFinformed. I am interested in the basics: how we think about energy, how we perceive energy, and how we respond as energetic beings. You can begin these observa- tions wherever you are; you only need a place to get started. From there, the practice will lead you in the direction of your greatest learning. This approach is not about memorizing facts but rather about developing a kind of energy awareness that can be refined over time. Deepened awareness in one energy arena can inform your awareness of energy in another arena.
Let’s begin by thinking about how energy is organized. How does it manifest in nature and in us ? And how do we work with energy in our economic system ? Energy, in a general sense, takes the form of heat, light, electrical fields, and chemical energy; we can quantify this in ecosystems and human bodies. If you add or subtract energy, things change state—ice to water, water to gas, or living to decompos- ing. Energy can be thought of as intense and concentrated, for example, as in a very hot forest fire, or diffuse and dispersed, as the heat in the ocean. The ultimate source of energy for all we do is the sun. Solar energy fuels virtually all life processes, though the energy continually changes form. With each transformation, energy is used up, lost or degraded to a more dispersed form. This disorder, or entropy, increases over time, so all physical forms of life tend to come apart, slow down, or become more disorganized. Think, for example, of a forest system where leaves are shed every year, limbs fall with storms, or lightning and wind knock down whole trees, which rot on the forest floor; the place just gets messier every year.
Energy is also constantly being organized into highly complex structures. Sustaining any one of these complex life-forms—for instance, a blue whale or a coral reef—requires a continual supply of energy in the form of nutrients and heat. Sustaining life also requires
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continual maintenance and care; when energy supplies or upkeep drop off; the result is decline and death. You can bring your attention to the process of energy becoming organized (as in giving birth) or to energy becoming disorganized (as in the act of dying). In reality, things are unraveling and raveling all at the same time. The forest system grows cluttered with downed wood, and then a brush hre races through and creates a charred opening for new growth. A snowstorm leaves everything looking perfect, but then the sun and wind bring blasts of energy and undo the magic.
In Chinese thought, an awareness of energy is central to philoso- phy and spirituality as well as to understanding the natural world. Ch’i can be translated as “matter-energy” or, in a more dynamic sense, “vital force.” 1 The Chinese believe that this vital force is imbued with spirit; spirit is not seen as separate from matter as in the usual Western view. The Chinese view of the cosmos is one of continu- ous transformation and “ceaseless vitality.” 2 Nature is this vital ener- getic force in full display, a dynamic chuhlled universe with all beings, including humans, as creative manifestations of matter-energy. When we see all of nature as energy, we intuitively sense our deep relation- ship with the natural world. As energy beings ourselves, we are part of the all-encompassing universal energy flow; we feel a profound sense of belonging that reflects our true energetic lineage.
To develop awareness of the dynamic, transformative nature of energy, we can focus our attention on patterns and scales of transformation. My colleague Ian Worley studies ice patterns on Lake Champlain from the air. His knowledge of the natural world is informed by hundreds of hours of flying over the landscapes of Vermont and surrounding environs in a small plane. He can tell you if a break in the ice is the result of wind or warming temperatures. He can explain concentric circles on ponds and jagged edges near shore. He knows which parts of the lake freeze first and thaw last and how that reflects water depth, wind disturbance, and solar gain. He has
observed the lake freezing across seasons and years, and he under- stands all this in the long curve of glacial time when a much bigger Lake Champlain was solid ice all the way down. Most of us, in contrast, tend to see shorter patterns of time, limited by our own short life spans. But this bias can be overcome as we develop our awareness of energy dynamics.
The Chinese describe two complementary aspects of chi, yin and yang, which characterize opposite energetic tendencies, for example, toward motion or stillness, expansion or contraction. “Complementary” is the key word here, since in the West most people are used to thinking of opposites as exclusionary. The yin-yang symbol expresses complementarity graphically, with the wholeness of the circle depending on both curving shapes as they fit together. Inside each teardrop is a small circle of the opposite color, black in white or white in black. This indicates that yang energy is never 100 percent yang but always contains the seeds of yin energy, which will transform the yang energy into something else. Likewise yin energy is never too percent yin but always carries within it the presence of yang. My husband and I like to walk along the shore of Lake Champlain to observe moments of change that reveal this yin-yang dynamic. Early in the season, you can see clumps of slushy ice congeal into floating lotus leaf-like slabs. Under the impact of wind or wave action, they disintegrate back into slush. But if the lake is calm for several days, the lotus forms join together to make a solid sheet out to the breakwater. Later in the season, after people have walked around on the snow-covered ice, their footprints catch the warming sun and become the first seeds of ice melt.
How do we understand patterns of energy as they are organized into heating our homes, running our factories, powering our cars ? This is the stuff of coal mines, uranium enrichment, offshore oil drilling, wind farms, and now cornfields. Energy development requires many complex steps to create usable forms that human societies can harness to do work and make our lives comfortable. The ten thousand details of
extraction, production, delivery, and environmental impact are well described in introductory textbooks. To begin developing energy awareness, it is enough to apply the general principles of energy dynamics outlined above. You can look to see where energy is degrading in a system (such as the impact on northern permafrost where oil pipelines cross the tundra) and where energy is being invested in a system (as in government subsidies for oil and gas drilling). We can evaluate sources ofcommercial energy to see ifthey generate or destroy vital life force and to what extent. Conventional sources of market energy all inflict significant damage on land and water ecosystems; alternative sources challenge this premise, offering low-impact options such as wind and solar power that harmonize with the natural flows of energy.
We can also look at patterns and scale of energy use and development. Rich countries versus poor, for example—people in the United States and other highly developed countries consume as much energy in one day as the poorest people of the world consume in one year. What keeps such extreme energy inequities in place? We could learn about distribution of coal and oil fields and how these assets determine foreign policy and environmental conflicts. We can observe the debates on conventional versus sustainable energy, and note that right in the middle of the most established lobbies for conventional fuels are the seeds of thinking about renewables. And right in the middle of entrepreneurial start-ups for wind and solar power production are the seeds of corporate thinking and profit-making. We can learn about the energy supplies of our own city or region and practice seeing energy flow as the electrical engineers see it—a complex grid of supply and demand, changing by the minute in relation to weather, season, time of day, local capacity. Any and all of these ways of training your awareness are valuable in understanding and moderating environmental impact due to human energy demands. Some of my students believe that if you spend more time outdoors receiving the energy of the natural world, you will have less need for the industrial energy grid. What do you think?
Understanding Energ y
SOCIAL ENERGY FOR THE GREEN PATH
Developing energy awareness is no small task; it is greatly enhanced by practicing with others on the green path. Buddhists speak of the “three treasures ’—the Buddha, or teacher; the dharma, or teachings; and the sangha, or practice community. All three are necessary for spiritual development, perhaps especially the practice community. Working with other people provides encouragement, support, cric ical mass, and mutual insight. Participating in a practice community reinforces shared ethical guidelines and holds people accountable to their ethical intentions. Yet in a highly individualized society such as the United States, it can be hard to find people willing to commit their time to sharing the green practice path, particularly if it involves something so potentially overwhelming as energy awareness.
The lack of social commitment in the United States was pointed out rather dramatically by sociologist Robert Putnam in his 1995 book, Bowling Alone, which showed that American participation in civic and political groups and social activity was in significant de' cline. He postulated that this trend was the result of the increasing prevalence ofleisure technologies for individualized recreation such as television. With the internet, cell phones, and iPods this pattern continues to accelerate. People were choosing freedom to do what- ever they wanted, over making commitments to social groups. To counter this trend, a number of cities launched community develop' ment projects to build social energy in neighborhoods, supporting sidewalk gardens and farmers markets. Architects redesigned urban business districts to promote interaction and community spirit. Planners promoted smart growth principles to foster citizen partic- ipation in local regions.
These days environmental work focuses primarily on building social energy to form effective coalitions. Environmental knowE edge in and of itselfdoes not necessarily generate action. More often, peer pressure and contacts between friends are the best means of
galvanizing support. As social animals, people need a sense of be' longing and the approval of their peers. As environmentalists look more and more toward the work of social psychologists, the individ' ualistic approach to environmental heroism is being replaced by a partnership model, where social relations are built over time to sup- port social transformation.
One of the most effective models I’ve seen for building social em - ergy for environmental work is that of the Northwest Earth Institute (www.nwei.org), which is now replicated at many state earth instf tutes around the United States. The institute’s founders, Dick and Jean Roy, believed that people needed a simple, nomthreatening way to come together and discuss environmental concerns. They began by formulating a short discussion course on the topic of deep ecology and made it available to small groups in churches, compa- nies, and neighborhoods. The NWEI groups met for six weeks to consider the questions raised by their weekly readings and to get to know each other around their points of concern. The first course was a terrific success. NWEI went on to develop six additional courses on voluntary simplicity, sense of place, sustainable living, raising healthy children, climate change, and food, sharing them with groups around the United States. As people found shared interests in the discussion groups, they went on to create youth clubs,' weekend project teams, and sustainability committees in their workplaces. Since 1994, these courses have taken place in over nine hundred communities in all fifty states, bringing together over eighty thousand people to generate social energy for the green prac- tice path.
In certain green cities such as Portland, Oregon, or Boulder, Colorado, the social energy for sustainability is so strong that it is shaping city goals. People with strong environmental intentions fill many civic roles in public schools, market systems, food production, transportation, and housing agencies, and even more important, they know each other as friends and colleagues. They work together
on their projects and build on their successes; they form a central hub of social energy that reinforces individual commitment to the green practice path. Community members develop best practices and share them with friends and colleagues in other regions; the word spreads. Today in small towns almost anywhere in the United States, you can find some network of people trying to build social energy for the environment. Though their local green practice community may be small, they find ways to gain encouragement and support from those further along on the path.
Some of the most exciting practice partnerships are between far distant points on the globe. With international travel more common and the internet bridging cultures around the world, it is much easier for people to share resources and energy. People on the green path recognize each other across widely divergent cultural traditions and are able to work together for shared environmental goals. Still, it is important to remember that social energy may be organized quite differently from one region to another. Western approaches to building social relations may or may not be appropriate in other settings. Those ofus in the industrialized world, for example, rely on electronic technologies to keep our social networks functional. But those modes are not available in many parts of the world. So this is perhaps a cautionary note: building social energy is a complex entropic process that takes time to evolve.
CARETAKING PERSONAL ENERGY
Without well-maintained personal energy, it will be difficult to build social energy for the path. How do we sustain our effort for the long haul without getting discouraged ? Is a specific kind of personal energy necessary to take up the green path ? I think of John Muir, who could hike for miles on end in the high Sierra with not much more than a scrap of bread for food. I wonder how Rachel Carson kept
going even when she was succumbing to breast cancer. How did Thoreau live in that small cabin alone for two years ? Maybe all these people were driven by their strong beliefs. Or maybe they were just lucky enough to have unusually strong stamina or determination. I believe it is crucial to study the nature of one’s personal energy in order to sustain a commitment to the green practice path. By personal energy I mean how well you use the energy you have and how well you work with its ebbs and flows. Countless environmental activists have hit the wall with severe energy crashes, or “burnout,” and have had a difficult time returning to the demands of their work. We must pay attention to this most basic study of energy; we cannot afford to lose time to our own energy crashes.
Some of my own energy insights have come from thinking about the rise and fall of sea energy along the coast. Fora long time I clocked my energy by the tides and moon, noting how the energy came up with the rising moon, hit a peak at the full moon, and then turned inward across the waning moon. When I moved from the West Coast to northern Vermont, I began paying more attention to the rise and fall of energy across the year. Here the wide range of climates across the four seasons is a strong determiner of available energy. The summers with their long days bring everyone out to garden and sail and go for long bike rides; the winters with their very short days offer less energy from the sun and take more energy to keep warm. I tend not to begin big projects at the winter solstice when the sun is at a low ebb; I am more productive once the light begins to return.
Yet even within these rhythms there will be days that take a lot of emotional energy—one stress after another, the energy stretched thin. It is not possible to sustain one big emotional day after another; emotions take energy to experience and process. As neurochemical events in the body, each emotion impacts the stability and wellbeing that nourishes life. Good news and difficult news both take energy to “digest”; for the person following the green path there will
no
be no shortage of either of these. It is important to find a way to steady yourself in the face of continual ups and downs. Some people use meditation or yoga, some use physical exercise, others draw on humor to change their body chemistry and regain equilibrium.
It also takes personal energy to make good environmental choices for yourself your family, your community, the world. In today s world these do not necessarily come easily. If your energy is low or you are feeling beleaguered, it is hard to be true to your green intentions. If your food or sleep nourishment is erratic, your energy may be unreli- able across a day. If you are spiritually discouraged and struggling to contact the bigger wisdom energy of the universe, you may feel alone and isolated in your efforts. It is no small challenge to nurture the green heart and keep your green practices going. You need to main- tain daily caretaking habits that can keep your energy steady and effi- cient. You may also require periodic retreat or vacation or rest to replenish the well. No one can keep going on behalf of the environ- ment day after day without periods for time out and renewal.
Sometimes it can seem like personal caretaking is too self centered, a secondary priority next to the pressing needs of the environment. Another way to think about it is that you are taking care of yourself on the green path so you can be of service to others. You do your best to manage your personal energy so that it will be available for the hard work that is called for. In my mind, this is central to the green lifeway—understanding that your life can be an offering to others and practicing with that in mind. Working with energy becomes a practice in conservation and efficiency, a personal test of the principles we apply to managing energy flows in the electrical grid. It also becomes a practice in inspiring others to consider green energy choices for themselves. Remembering the laws of entropy and disorder, you can see it takes energy to conserve energy, and it takes energy to organize social and physical systems that will be more energetically sustainable in the long run.
PRACTICING WITH ENERGY
Understanding how energy works makes it possible to apply your effort more effectively on the green practice path. In this section we look at specific practices you can take up as focal points for your effort. Each of these practices can strengthen your energy awareness, both personally and environmentally. They provide entry points for working mindfully with energy at home and in the workplace. As you train your mind and body to “see” energy as it moves in different contexts, you help make energy more transparent, less taken for granted. The more we attend to energy in all its manifestations, the more we will be able to design intelligent life-giving energy systems that are good for both people and the environment.
Mindfulness of Impact
Based on the principle of reducing harm, all the facts point to the need to reduce our energy use because of its impact on the environment. Changing our lightbulbs, buying energy-efficient appliances, insulating our buildings—these are all ways to reduce energy use. But if we are walking the green path, we need a broader framework for our path, a way to practice mindfulness with energy in a wide range of settings. One way to pay attention to energy use is through mapping our energy footprint.
The “footprint” concept was first introduced in an ecological sense by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in their 1996 book, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. The cover image shows a big fat foot stomping on the globe holding up a city of skyscrapers, houses, electric lines, highways, and factories. The area covered by that foot represents the productive land required to support your consumption and waste disposal. To determine an average ecological footprint, Rees and Wackernagel calculated the per person use of land for energy production, agriculture, water, the built
environment, and waste disposal. They then multiplied the number of people in a specific city or region times the average rate of con- sumption to figure out the total load of that region’s population. Not too surprisingly, they found that high-level consumers in the global north had much bigger ecological footprints than modest or minimal consumers in the global south. The typical North American footprint at that time was calculated to be four to five hectares (ten to twelve acres), or about three-plus city blocks. Since then the methodology has been refined substantially, taking many more factors into account. The new figure for the United States is one of the highest on the planet—an astonishing 109 hectares, or 269 acres per person. If everyone on the planet lived the way we do, we would need at least four other planets to support our enormous footprints!
Calculating ecological footprints has now been done for most countries in the world and for many cities. You can fill out a standard internet survey to figure out the size of your personal footprint (see www.ecologicalfootprint.org). As this concept has caught on, people are extending it to think about water footprints, food footprints, and energy footprints. Bringing attention to your energy footprint provides a way to continually evaluate your personal energy use. You can then ask, What increases the size of my energy footprint, and what decreases it ? This is the fundamental question in this energy mindfulness practice.
You might note, for example, that energy use tends to go up the more you need to keep a complex situation constant. This pertains to maintaining air temperature in a building or soil moisture in a garden. You might observe where energy leaks out of a system, reducing its effectiveness. Physical energy gets lost through leakage in transport—along gas pipelines or electrical wires; personal energy gets lost in distractions and interruptions. Where energy is bound in objects, it tends to degrade over time—the lawn mower breaks down, the teddy bear loses its stuffing. To develop sources of energy requires inputs of energy, increasing the cumulative energy footprint
in turn. Fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal that are mined from the ground require extensive infrastructure and environmental mitigation, far more than solar or wind energy development.
Bringing mindfulness to energy flow enables us to evaluate our political and lifestyle choices. We can look closely at what drives our energy use up and wastes energy and then choose alternatives that reduce energy use and husbands valuable energy resources, including our own. What we practice in the microcosm of our homes can help us find better models for energy practices in our communities and regions. Building mindfulness of energy at the local level creates a foundation for sound energy policy at the national level. As more people bring their attention to energy footprints, the level of social awareness will increase to the point of making a cultural paradigm shift possible. This form of mindfulness practice thus has very practical outcomes in both the present moment and the longer curve shift to sustainability. As a practice for the green path, it is grounded in facing the real-world difficulties of peak oil and climate change.
Applying Skillful Action
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Energy development, for the most part, is being driven by rapid industrial growth and the prospect of good return on financial investment. If we consider the principles of skillful action in this context, we recall that unskillful actions tend to lead to unhappiness or unhealthiness; skillful actions, by contrast, generate happiness and good health. These are the actions we want for an energy-healthy future. Applying skillful action is a pragmatic way to work with ethical guidelines.
How can a person on the green path take up the practice of skillful action in relation to energy? One place to start is by working with the idea of efficiency. We all must consume and use energy to survive; that is part of being a living, breathing organism. But most
of us have drifted a long way from the well-honed energy practices of our animal ancestry. When you live close to the margin, dealing with the survival needs of food, shelter, warmth, and safety, every decision counts. Your energy budget is limited and it must be expended wisely. In the modern industrial world we have become accustomed to profligate use of energy because it is relatively cheap and easily available. Energy efficiency can be increased by taking appropriate action to reduce use and review sources of waste in our homes and workplaces. But individual action alone will not significantly change our overall efficiency. We will need to apply skillful action to infrastructure changes as well, if we are serious about reducing our addiction to oil and taking less from the earth. As citizens we must also lobby for energy efficiency in buildings, renewable energy portfolios, and financial incentives for alternative energy sources.
To take on these challenges in the political and regulatory arena, we will need to increase energy framework that might be helpful is the economic tool for evaluating large projects or investments, known as cost-benefit analysis. The goal is to accomplish the most you can using your resources effectively. Cost-benefit analysis aims for the greatest efficiency in using energy, labor, and capital as an investment for productivity. This approach can also apply to the person on the green practice path. You can try to estimate where your efforts will have the greatest effectiveness and invest energy there. This usually means building on existing social network relations and expanding them to include green practices. In your home, this may mean assessing how your personal space supports you energetically to be effective. Where have spaces become inaccessible from clutter or dead with disuse ? What personal habits waste your own or others’ energy or time (which is another way to understand energy) ? What kinds of backlogs (dishes, bills, cleaning) keep you from being able to meet your green intentions ? Calculating the costs and benefits of personal habits may make it
efficiency in our own lives. One
easier to simplify your life and thus use your own energy more effu ciently.
The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa wrote quite a bit about energy efficiency; he called it energy “alignment.” 3 The greatest energy loss, he said, comes from inner conflict between body, heart, and mind. The body wants to do one thing, the heart calls for another, and the mind tries to mediate between the two. He sug- gested that spiritual practice could be most helpful in lining up your intentions to enable you to act effectively and without internal him drance. Through meditation you can develop the capacity to see and feel when you are losing energy to internal conflict. This then can be addressed directly, actions taken, situation resolved, so that body, heart, and mind can align with full clarity. This clarity, Trungpa felt, is a powerful force for good in the world. Cultivating energy efficiency internally can greatly increase your capacity for the tasks of the green practice path.
ACTING WITH RESTRAINT
Practicing restraint based on moral guidelines means deliberately choosing to refrain from destructive activities that cause harm. Skill- ful action in relation to energy efficiency improves the way we use energy, but we can also choose proactively to use less destructive energy and less energy overall. Energy conserved from human use becomes energy available to support life for the rest of the planet. As people have spread over every region on the globe, our energy needs have spread with us. Everywhere we drill an oil well, mine for uranium, lay down a gas pipeline, put up a wind turbine, we impact the lives of the local plants and animals. Choosing not to develop an oil field or build another big building are acts of restraint, acts of energy conservation. They are also acts of land and biodiversity conservation
and sometimes also cultural conservation. We can only be proac- tive in conservation if we find ways to get along with less energy.
ines across all religions is “do not steal.” Behind this admonition is the understanding that so- cial relations cannot function without some degree of stability and trust, and stealing very quickly erodes trust between people. Like- wise, environmental relations cannot function ifwe do not maintain some degree of restraint in our relations. We need to be frank in ask' ing ourselves: does our human energy use entail stealing from the earth ? The Hopi and Navajo tribes have spoken out strongly about this, protesting the enormous theft of groundwater from local coal- mining. In northeastern Arizona, Peabody Energy has withdrawn 3.3 million gallons of water per day for thirty'five years, seriously de- pleting the Navajo aquifer. We must also ask: does our human em ergy use entail stealing from other people, our fellow earth citizens ? Mountaintop removal for coafmining in West Virginia steals not only the beautiful stream valleys but also the health of the mining families. One black-water spill of liquid waste fouled seventydive miles of rivers and creeks, polluting drinking water for thousands of residents. Local people have organized to draw attention to the in- justice of mountaintop removal. They are clear that this is not an ethical form of mining and want it stopped immediately.
In today’s consumer society, all the advertising messages suggest that there is no problem or irritation too big that cannot he solved by a new product. We are encouraged to believe that we can have whatever we want whenever we want it. Restraint is often perceived as some sort of anachronistic throwback to harder times. But espe- dally in today’s context, restraint is necessary practice, whether driven by economics or ethics. It is one of the inner disciplines we must take up as part of the green practice path. We simply do not have another four or six or eight planets to exploit. We must curb our appetites before we eat ourselves out of house and home. Holding back from
One of the most common ethical guidel
using something up—whether it is a piece ofland or your own mental attention—is a way to conserve the energy you value. It is a prac- tice in taking time to pay attention, to say “this matters,” to recognize the need to take better care of our important energy resources, in whatever form they may take.
Acting with restraint will sometimes mean “not doing,” a form of not stealing from yourself or others. In my own overfull life, I have found “not doing” to be very difficult. The health crash I experienced in my late thirties was a direct result of having almost no comprehension of the verb “to rest.” I now understand that resting is a crucial aspect of the green practice path. Sometimes it is necessary to choose to rest in order to conserve your own personal health and the health of your household. Rest time is restorative time, the opportunity for heavily used systems to recover and to integrate the impacts of the day. We can think ofhealth as resiliency, the capacity to respond to illness, disturbance, and stress—in other words, health means having energy available when it is truly needed. Conserving energy is a way to conserve health. Acting with restraint is a way of investing in long-term sustainability. This is the idea behind the practice of observing the Sabbath, which includes the custom of closing shops each week on the day of rest. Each of these are investments in resiliency, a kind of energy savings bank for the future. Such acts of restraint are a practice in stress reduction for both land and people, critical for maintaining strength over the long term for environmental work.
NOW WHAT?
Working with energy can be a lifelong project, one that is particularly appropriate today with the old energy models falling fast. No matter how you approach the conversation, sooner or later you will
have to consider the systems drivers that perpetuate our energy pat- terns. We can personally choose to conserve energy and act with restraint, but meanwhile the market system is actively promoting lifestyles and products that are highly energy intensive. The cheap goods from China that we enjoy are made in factories fueled by coah bred plants. The more of these goods we buy, the more coal is mined in China to support manufacturing. The engines of trade rely on an endless supply of energy and consumers. In this chapter we have considered developing energy awareness as a central focus on the green practice path. Using energy wisely, not using it when we can, and watching our energy footprint—these tasks will keep the green path clearly in sight. But this alone is not enough. We must look more closely at our own desires for comfort and security to see how these play into the global equation of environmental degradation. Con- sumerism is fueled by biological need but also by social, psychology cal, and economic pressures. The more we understand how these work, the less we will be driven by the relentless appetites chewing up the earth. The next chapter opens a conversation on desire and con' sumption as a second key arena of the green practice path.
the desire for life is the single most hardwired drive we have been given. Every organism thrives according to this desire, in' vesting energy resources to find the necessary requirements for sur' vival. The central message of this desire is: Look out for me! Look out for me! Meeting our own personal needs is topmost in our evolutionary instructions; if we fail at this, we die. Because this desire is so core to our welfbeing, we will do everything we can to make sure we have what we need. Behind this drive is a deep insecurity based on our fragile vulnerability. Our concern for ourselves and our fundamen' tal insecurity play perfectly into the hands of profiteers who exploit our desire, urging us to buy our way to a better life.
Most people would agree that there is more than enough stuff in modern American society. More designer clothes, more cars, more kitchen gadgets, more shop tools, more recreational toys—you name it, we have it! For every piece of stuff there is a corresponding eco- logical wake. With some determined sleuthing, you can trace the trail ofimpacts from raw materials to production and on to distribii' tion and consumer use. It is usually not a pretty sight. But this book is not about the footprints of consumer products; you can find that information in other guides. If we are to take the green practice path
seriously, we need to get to the bottom of the whole cycle of com suming. So let’s begin with the study of desire.
WHY DESIRE?
Why might it be helpful to work with desire on this practice path ? First, it provides a direct and practical route to addressing environ' mental harm as it is linked to things and services we want. We can study and observe desire in operation at every scale of human sock ety. Families have their desires for the good life; cities and states have theirs as well. Universities, militaries, and prisons all want what they believe will help them thrive and achieve their goals. So does every individual human being. We can begin by observing desire in our' selves; there will be plenty of material here to look at. According to Buddhist teaching, desire is the root of all dissatisfaction. Studying the nature and consequences of desire can illuminate our mostly urn conscious choices and their far-reaching consequences.
A second reason to work with desire is serious concern for the stupendous scale of production and consumption in today’s global society. More and more of the world’s population is expecting to live at the high consumptive rates of industrialized nations. China and India’s tremendous economic growth in the last few years is testi- mony to this goal. Every year the measures of household consump- tion keep rising, from number of cars and televisions to size of houses. Items once considered luxuries are now seen as necessities. The Worldwatch Institute calculated that the $18 billion spent annually on cosmetics could easily cover estimated global needs for reproductive health care for all women. The almost $14 billion spent on ocean cruises would be enough to provide clean drinking water for everyone in the world. 1 Our priorities seem to be upside down; we invest more in the economic engine of consumerism than in our own well being.
Third, we use a lot of personal energy trying to satisfy our ever' multiplying desires. In the course of managing the weekly grocery shopping, we must make hundreds of brand decisions and think over and over again, Will this be satisfying? Choosing among so many products is an exhausting process, especially if you are trying to buy something unfamiliar. The big box stores don’t make it any easier with their mountains of options aisle after weary aisle. We expend precious stores of our life energy or personal ch’i, draining that energy away from other more satisfying activities.
Human desire is not the only driver of global consumption. Increased industrial efficiency and dramatic breakthroughs in computing power are also key drivers. Cheap energy and improved transportation have fueled production and spurred wider marketing of goods. Innovations in extractive technology have made it possible to catch hundreds of tons of fish per day or remove whole mountaintops for coal-mining. Government subsidies, global trade negotiations, and financial incentives such as easy credit have all contributed to skyrocketing rates of consumption. We will keep our focus here on desire because it surfaces everywhere in most of what we do. This is my fourth reason for working with desire on the green practice path: the opportunities are endless. At this moment in history we are in an extremely rich practice held for studying consumer desire.
HOW DOES DESIRE WORK?
You may know the story of young prince Siddhartha, who left his father’s palace to seek answers to life’s big questions. After living a very protected life, he escaped the palace grounds, only to run into the sobering horrors of illness, aging, and death. The shock of such exposure pulled him away from his royal future, compelling him to
find some explanation. With all his being, he wanted to know: what is the cause of human suffering? Siddhartha wandered for a number of years, trying all manner of ascetic practices to cultivate spiritual receptivity. His breakthrough moment came after sitting still for a week under a banyan tree, facing every possible form of suffering in his meditation. When he awakened to true understanding, as the sutras say, he was called by Brahma to share his insights with those who would listen. His first teaching, known as the Four Noble Truths, pointed directly to desire as the source of all suffering.
By desire, the Buddha meant grasping or craving after something. The suffering of mental and physical anguish comes from identifying with the craving or the object of the craving. He also spoke of this identification as attachment, what we might call “being hooked.” You could think of someone who is hooked on drugs or alcohol as an extreme version of attachment. Craving can be so addicting that it directs all of one’s behaviors. This also drives shopaholism, an emerging addiction of the twenty-first century. In many subsequent teachings, the Buddha explained the nature of desire, the causes of desire, the antidotes to desire, and the rewards of detachment from identifying with desire. This is a central theme in early Buddhist texts and potentially a very helpful resource for the green practice path.
The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron explains desire using the Tibetan words shenpa and shenlok 2 She calls shenpa “that sticky feeling” that makes us insecure, tense, wanting to escape our situation. Shenpa thrives on our natural uncertainty and discomfort living in a world that is always changing. To get relief from this uneasiness, we look for things that will bring us comfort—food, sex, shopping, perhaps a favorite cappuccino. Shenpa is the “urge” for that relief; it can be so strong we sometimes turn to self-destructive things or activities. The key to working with shenpa is to recognize it as it comes up. This is more easily said than done; the internal drives to get what we want and avoid what we don’t want are very powerful. They arise in the
limbic system, often below the level of rational consciousness. We may think we are in charge of our choices, but behind each decision is a lifetime of conditioning. Feeling depressed or upset about envu ronmental concerns can play right into the urge for relief generating shenpa discomfort that is almost unbearable.
The way you break the habitual power of shenpa is by choosing not to act on the urge—that is, by refraining from the familiar hooking pattern. Choosing to refrain from action can slow things down enough for you to see what might be going on behind buying that sixth pair of boots you didn’t really need. The Tibetan word for refraining or renunciation is shenlok, which means to turn shenpa upside down, to break open the self-limiting pattern. Meditation can be useful in helping us see how deeply conditioned we are to behave in certain ways. It can show us how we get hooked by marketing messages that stimulate desire and keep us buying an endless stream of products. By refraining from exposure to these messages we open up space for other ways to engage the world besides as a consumer.
Another way to understand desire is through its causes. What is it that keeps the cycle of desire constantly activated and self-reinforcing? While specific causes and conditions for desire are infinite, we can study common patterns that explain the power of the “hooking.” One Buddhist teaching on causal origination, known as the Twelve Links, describes the endless chain of desire and its consequences. Each of the twelve links in the cycle is produced by the one that precedes it, and in turn generates the next link. Looking closely at this metapattern, we can study the nature of these links and come to some insights about how we consume. This is the first step in breaking the habituated power of the links, providing perhaps a taste of the release the Buddha called “nirv ana,” or liberation.
Craving or desire does not exist in a vacuum. It is stimulated by feelings that arise in contact with objects in your sense fields. You smell the freshly brewed coffee and almost immediately your mouth and mind send out the strong message: I want, I want! Sense feelings
can also work in reverse, promoting a sense of aversion. You look in the closet and feel irritated with your outdated wardrobe; the message arises, Get rid of that stuff! These feelings are temporary and need to be kept stimulated if a buyer is to give in to the powerful pulls of desire. Thus advertisers and marketers generate a mind- numbing barrage of contact points for the sense organs. Flashing lights, sexy fabrics, big signs, loud music—it quickly adds up to sen- sory overload.
My friend Bill McKibben once did an experiment of watching every minute of television that aired on a single day on a superdarge cable system in Virginia. 3 It more or less took him a whole year to consume and evaluate this much media input. He concluded that one theme stood out above all the others: “You are the most impor- tant thing on earth.” You the television watcher, you the potential consumer who should be taking advantage of the hundreds of ad- vertised products. McKibben cataloged the multiple ways that view- ers were bombarded by product advertisements, contrasting this with the completely opposite experience of spending a week in the woods. His experiment revealed just how saturated our media envF ronment is. Today s average consumer in the United States sees more than three thousand ads in the course of a day in every possible venue— from internet pop-ups to sports events, clothing logos to shoe treads. These ads promise a better, happier life, promoting desire for one product after another, all of which eventually fall short.
With your sense consciousnesses already conditioned by advertisements and previous shopping experiences, you are set up to be receptive to even more shopping stimulus. Over time you develop a shopping personality, what the advertisers refer to as “market niche.” Despite our personal sense of individual uniqueness, we are captives of our feelings and sense organs in remarkably consistent ways. If we have enjoyed the pleasure from responding to a specific desire, we usually want more of that good feeling. Likewise if we have bad feelings, we want to get rid of them, or at least have less of
them. The marketers promise relief from anxiety, fear, and low self' esteem through products. That is the core message ramping up com sumerism around the globe: Have a problem? Fix it with our product! Never mind any other options such as breathing through that un' pleasant feeling, or finding pleasure in nommarket experiences. The marketers find it far more profitable to keep us hooked on their products, whatever that takes.
In the Twelve Links model, longer-term patterns of craving result in karmic formations, the more deeply conditioned habits that shape lifetimes and cultures. Western consumer societies have become used to easy access to alcohol, painkillers, pornography, and the abuse that is often associated with such deep conditioning. These karmic patterns can be carried from one generation to the next, transmitting the shape of desire almost below the level of consciousness. We imitate what we see around us; we collectively participate in the endless chasing of desire, believing that temporary relief will satisfy us. The Buddha once said that this chasing was like drinking saltwater. It can never satisfy your thirst and it only leaves you feeling more thirsty.
PRACTICING WITH DESIRE
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Motivation for practicing with desire comes easily when you consider the environmental impacts of the objects in your life. Here is where you can really engage systems thinking to support your practice. You can experiment with various levels of refraining to see how hooked you are to your familiar consumer habits. Even though it can be overwhelming to examine things you take for granted, you can take it a step at a time. It is important to be kind to yourself in this process; there is already more than enough finger-wagging going on in our efforts to halt the destruction of the planet. Working with consumerism
can be very empowering in developing your green consciousness. None of us is fully aware of how much personal energy we have given over to the our participation in consumer society. It is time to reclaim some of that lost energy and use it more consciously and eh fectively to support our green practice path.
I’m going to propose four practical methods for working with desire in everyday consumer life. I believe they are broadly applica- ble and may be helpful with whatever consumer issue is plaguing you at the moment. Some of these methods have been tested for centuries in the crucibles of Buddhist and other monastic traditions. Others are new variations I’ve tried with students in my “Unlearn- ing Consumerism” course at the University of Vermont. You will likely come up with yet more applications appropriate to your circumstances and consumer concerns. Behind each set of practices is a general principle or approach that is worth studying in itself just to get to know your tools more intimately.
Paying Full Attention
The first practice is applying mindfulness to common realms of consumerism: buying things, owning things, taking care of things, selling things, giving things. This can be in relationship to food, transportation, energy use, clothing, recreation—anything really. The Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein describes mindfulness as “the quality of paying full attention to the moment, opening to the truth of change and impermanence.” 4 Mindfulness practice applied to consumption means paying full attention to the act of consuming, the objects of consuming, the feelings of consuming, and the consequences of consuming. For many years Thich Nhat Hanh has offered a simple mindfulness meditation on an orange. He takes a full thirty minutes to lead people through the experience of peeling an orange, separating the segments, holding them in readiness, absorbing the citrus smell,