Climate Crisis: a result of man's mills or man's mind?
You might have heard that the climate change is anthropogenic, meaning it’s caused by man’s activities in the nature. When you go back to the time when the talks related to climate change started unfolding, you’d know that it’s somewhere around 1960s-1970s. And the start of industrialization has been called as the biggest or, in some cases, the only culprit.
There’s this mindset that without mills and factories our environment would have been fine, but what we’re going to talk about is that is it truly the root cause of climate catastrophe we’re headed towards? Is there something else that’s hiding, that almost no one is talking about? I know it’s tempting to say that it’s caused by industrialization or capitalism or something else, but are they really the deepest source of climate change? Is there something beneath every economic/political system that’s dictating those systems? Of course, there is because the systems don’t operate by themselves.
Can we say that there is something beyond systems, companies or organizations that’s bringing us closer and closer to calamity? Yes, there is. And it’s something that every system, company, or organization originates from - the human mind.
Who is man? Again, it’s pleasing to say that man is the most intelligent creature on Earth but that’s only the half picture of what man really is. Man is also a continuous dissatisfaction and restlessness. Every man is dissatisfied with his current situation and want to do something that will satisfy him. In his search for completeness, man goes in the outer world and uses his hollowness as an engine to attain wholeness.
One line of thought says man can attain completeness by venturing out in the material world, although everyone deep inside knows that that never happens. The attainment of one kind of material thing leads to the urge for another and it keeps going with no end in sight.
Another line of thought says that before stepping in the material world for happiness, man first know who is the one experiencing hollowness? Who is it that says he is incomplete?
Out of these two lines of thought, the former is the most prevalent while the latter gets a tiny bit of attention, if any. Without questioning himself, man goes in the outer in the search for happiness and tramples everything in its way.
When man goes in the outer world in search of something to fill his emptiness, he lays his hands on more and more things thinking that he would be happy but instead of attaining lasting happiness, he gets more dissatisfied. And the result is endless consumption with no real knowledge about why is he doing so.
The urge to obtain, conquer, and consume keeps intensifying with the hopes that he would be happy for life after obtaining, conquering, consuming this brand new thing. Ask yourself, can one obtain, conquer, and consume everything he sees in the material world, be it humans or man-made stuff or the natural stuff? Of course, he can’t. But unaware of the source of his dissatisfaction, he tries out as many things as he possibly can. He tries to find the lasting happiness in car, house, land, woman, animals, vacations, money - to put in one word: consumption.
Out of the ocean of energy that man possess, almost all of it is poured into the outer world while no effort is made into understanding the inner world; into understanding that who is striving for the consumption of different things and why? As a result, man’s wandering in the outer world continues.
Man talks about everything that’s not the ego, and puts all of his energy into finding out what’s in the outer world that’s causing him discomfort. He talks about economics, politics, dialectics, nations, people, and myriad of other things but not himself. The nature of the ego is such that it looks to find problems in the material world but it doesn’t want to investigate itself. Man knows nothing about himself, so he has to try out everything in the outer world.
What happens when man is unconscious of his true nature? He consumes.
He consumes other men and women i.e., male consumes females and females consumes male, and the result is overpopulation.
He consumes the man-made objects i.e., buildings, gadgets, machinery, etc. and where do these things come from? They come from manufacturing and manufacturing requires energy, which comes from the burning of fossil fuels. So the result is greenhouse gases.
He consumes the natural stuff i.e., beef, chicken, rivers, mountains, soil, forests, etc. And the result is the loss of biodiversity.
All of these three have been recognized as the major drivers of climate change by the worldly eyes, but when investigated with the eyes of honesty and self-inquiry one comes to know that even these three are not the fundamental drivers.
The distortion in the constitution of man himself leads to the build up of systems that we blame as the source of climate change. You can’t pinpoint one historic date or one historical event and conclude that as the source of our current plight, because the very essence of being human is destruction as long as he doesn’t free himself of the ego.
Man didn’t cause climate change. Man IS climate change. There would have been no climate change if man realized the wholeness that he already is. Man is not the fundamental problem, mills are not the fundamental problem, no ‘ism’ is the fundamental problem, unrealized man is the fundamental problem.
Then why did Climate Change didn’t happen before the Industrial revolution?
Because science is something that doesn’t grow instantly, it grows gradually. As one saying puts it correctly: “Each generation of scientists stands upon the shoulders of those who have gone before.”
The only reason we didn’t have the climate change in, let’s say, 900 A.C is that the science and technology wasn’t developed enough back then. Had we have the same knowledge and technology 1300 years prior as we possess today, there’s no logical reason that Climate change wouldn’t have happened then. As science kept evolving, the climate change kept getting closer.
So, the intent to eat up everything had always been there but man didn’t have the capability to do it efficiently. The Industrial Revolution was the inevitable result of a man searching for wholeness in the outer world. The industrialization gave man the forks and spoons to eat up everything on the plate efficiently.
Man is not destroying the environment since the Industrial revolution. He is doing it since he become conscious, since he formed this ego. Climate change is the most devastating and probably the final symptom of the ill-mind of man.
People complain that the solutions being introduced to tackle climate change are superficial because they fail to understand that the superficial understanding of climate change is inevitably going to lead to superficial solutions.
The most fundamental idea that man holds of himself while setting up a civilization is “me and the world.” Once man begins anything with this idea, he’s going to destroy everything. In fact, the world has already been destroyed with this idea, it’s just that the destructions has not manifested yet. The moment man has this idea of himself and the world, he’s bound to being catastrophe. As long as man thinks of himself as different from nature, the destruction would continue no matter what system we implement and we measures we take.
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