Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology
If we are to halt our progress toward the ruin of our environment, more is called for than a few changes in lifestyle. Our destructive ways did not come haphazardly into existence; they spring from a particular attitude toward the earth and our relation to it, and it is that attitude that these essays address. Dharma is the Buddhist teaching; Gaia is the concept of the earth as a living being, an organism that is whole the way a body is, each part of it inseparable from the rest. When you look at the earth through the eyes of Buddhism, you arrive at a picture very like Gaia: the idea of the interdependency of all things is at the heart of Buddhism. Damage one element, and you damage the whole. This is in the spiritual realm what ecology is in the scientific, and so the two systems of thought lead naturally into each other. The essays in this book come at the subject from different angles, all the way from Christopher Reed's Eco-Precepts ("I vow to recycle everything I can") to David Abram's philosophical look at how the Gaia hypothesis influences our perception, to Joanna Macy's thoughts on "the greening of self' - the change from the self as a separate entity to the self as "coextensive with other beings and the life of our planet." Some essays - such as Macy's - are thought-provoking and lively. Others are more dutiful, more academic. But on the whole, the good essays make up for the poorer ones, and the matching of Buddhism with ecology points us in fruitful directions. --FromIndependent Publisher