We know that to hide in Buddhism is not the way to honor our teachers and to nurture our descendants. If the three refuges remove us from the suffering of the world, we have not understood them. American Buddhism must serve the world, not itself. And we know the 21st century will yield burgeoning populations with an ever-decreasing store of resources to nourish them. Fueling this suffering is the relentless consumerism which pervades our society and the world.
Greed drives so many of the damaging systems of our planet.
The socially engaged biologist Stephanie Kaza reminds me, in America each of us consumes our body weight each day in materials extracted and processed from farms, mines, rangelands, and forests-120 pounds on the average. We now own twice as many cars as in 1950. And with every bite, every press of the accelerator, every swipe of the credit card in our shopping malls, we have left a larger ecological footprint on the face of the world. We have squeezed our wealth out of the bodies of plantation workers in Thailand, farmers in Ecuador, factory workers in Malaysia. The crisis of consumerism is infecting every culture of the world, most of them emulating our American lifestyle.