I'd like to spend my time today briefly and directly addressing the topic of this conference. As opposed to that which is ponderous, earthy, weighty, hefty, dense, and onerous. Ascetics are in favor of lightness. Mahatma Gandhi, who travelled lightly for many years during his long protest marches, pointed out that there is often enough for our needs, yet never enough for our greeds. Gandhi considered the urge to consume resources to be a wicked appetite that grows with the feeding.
Buddhist asceticism holds that by destroying desire, one can destroy unhappiness.
The ascended one, the en-lightened, will float weightlessly into nirvana, free of the karmic wheel. Ascetics believe that materiality is a spiritual problem. The Platonic tradition says the genuine world is the light and perfect world of abstract analysis, while this merely physical world, this situation which seems so solid and intractable, is a blurry set of shadows on the cave wall. In medieval Christian theology, the human soul is weightless and immortal, while human flesh is a corrupt sump of sinful and beastly desires. Therefore we come to contemporary Green thinking, which is much younger than these other traditions, but bears their intellectual and spiritual stamp.