Interview with Georg and Brenda Feuerstein about the Environment
Every day some 150 species are becoming extinct because of environmental factors caused by humans. That’s about 50,000 species a year and includes billions of individual life forms. In a 1998 survey of 5,000 scientists, two-thirds of them thought that we were in the throes of an unprecedented biological catastrophe, which has been dubbed the “Sixth Mass Extinction.” The previous mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs along with 70 percent of all other life forms. The present mass extinction is feared to prove even more devastating. If so, humanity will definitely be among the extinct species.
When Georg Feuerstein, an internationally renowned author who wrote more than 30 books on yoga, became aware of the global environmental crisis, he stopped his literary and historical research to focus on this pressing issue. With his wife Brenda, he wrote Green Yoga as an attempt to mobilize the 15 to 20 million yoga practitioners in the U.S. to take action.
Q: What is Green yoga?
GF: We understand Green yoga as reflecting the core ethical concerns of traditional yoga, which are intrinsically environment friendly. In other words, the lifestyle advocated in traditional yoga is, to use a modern term, sustainable. “Sustainable” means that something can be kept going without doing running the risk of collapse. It is really the opposite of the typical modern lifestyle.
BF: Green yoga simply highlights the inherent positive environmental values and attitudes of traditional yoga, which is important in view of the present threat of biosphere collapse. It is traditional yoga insofar as it focuses on the core ethical teachings of traditional yoga that enable us to relate harmoniously to the environment. It is not traditional insofar as it is not an independent path like, say, Raja yoga or Hatha yoga. In other words, Green yoga is an orientation that permits us to practice traditional yoga in the most meaningful way possible today. Today we are facing the most serious environmental crisis humanity has ever had to face, which could lead to the extinction of our own species and most or even all other living creatures. That’s what is meant by “biosphere collapse.” We are busy undermining the very conditions that our planet needs to create and sustain life.
Q: What time frame are we talking about?
BF: Unless the present trend can be stopped, my own generation (I’m in my early forties now) will experience the first severe repercussions of global warming and other related environmental difficulties. Certainly, the next generation will harvest a host of serious predicaments.
GF: Some biologists and environmentalists think that we have about 10 years left to get our act together, to universally adopt a green lifestyle. Even then, the present imbalances in the environment would take 150 or more years to attain a new dynamic equilibrium. So we must prepare for paying our collective karmic debts regardless.
BF: Our message in Green Yoga is that it is never too late to make a wholehearted effort to turn things around. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to our children and their children and so on. In fact, we owe it to all living beings on our beautiful planet. The present crisis is not just a human crisis. It concerns all living species–from grass and trees to ants and dragonflies to penguins and polar bears to us humans–the entire biosphere. We realize that many, if not most, people will not make the necessary changes in a timely fashion. It is human nature to wait until the last moment. But that’s not the point. Yoga practitioners are supposed to live consciously and responsibly in the world. Today more than ever this means living in a sustainable fashion.
Q: Don’t many yoga practitioners already have a green lifestyle?
BF: Not at all. Perhaps they are conscientious enough recyclers of glass, cans and paper. Perhaps they are offsetting their carbon footprint. But, in our experience, few are living in a truly sustainable way as yet.
GF: Our book is designed to make readers aware of the magnitude of the present crisis. It also spells out just what needs to be done primarily on an individual level. We ought not to wait for governments or commerce to take the initiative. Commerce is interested in maintaining the status quo, which is better for business. Governments don’t like to introduce policies that are bound to be highly unpopular. Still, sooner or later, governments will have to take more rigorous action to deal with the hardships stemming from the repercussions of global warming.
We are witnessing the first evidence of global warming in terms of unpredictable and unpleasant weather patterns. Scientists are now warning us that there is a lot more to come. You throw a pebble in a still pond, and it will create ripples all the way to the edge of the pond. Environmentally speaking, we have thrown that pebble. So, we can expect the repercussions to happen. Yoga practitioners should look at the challenge before them as a challenge of practicing wisdom and compassion, two noble and very traditional moral values. This will benefit them personally and also everyone else. They will know that they are doing their part, and that’s really all that matters.
BF: We have no illusions about what most people will do. They will very probably wait until global warming affects them personally in a bigger way or until laws force them to behave differently. We expect yoga practitioners to not act childishly and irresponsibly. In fact, we expect them to behave very responsibly and adopt the traditional role of a yogic vira, a hero, that is, someone who puts aside personal preferences and fears and simply does the right thing. This is the path of Karma yoga: to do the right thing selflessly, without expecting any personal reward.
Q: What are the foundational principles of Green yoga?
GF: At the heart of Green yoga are two ethical principles or ideals. The first is derived from the yoga tradition, which is the ideal of loka-samgraha. This is a Sanskrit term meaning something like “gathering the world,” meaning “benefiting the world.” It represents a kind of altruistic behavior that promotes the welfare of all beings by giving rise to harmony, cooperation and integration. The second ideal stems from Mahayana Buddhism. This is the ideal of the bodhisattva, who is committed to serve the spiritual awakening of all sentient beings by helping them materially, socially, emotionally, mentally and spiritually in whatever way possible. Obviously, both these ideals are closely connected.
Q: How has writing Green Yoga changed your own life?
BF: There were many times when we felt overwhelmed by the devastating evidence of environmental deterioration and mass extinction. We experienced deep sadness at all the destruction on a global scale. Rain forests and their inhabitants are disappearing forever. The oceans are so polluted that some species of fish have become toxic to human consumption. Also, most larger species of fish are gone because of overfishing. The polar ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet are melting more rapidly than anyone had guessed. This is causing rising sea levels. These, in turn, are displacing thousands of islanders and devastating whole populations in coastal areas around the world. More than one billion people are without adequate access to drinking water. And so on.
GF: There is so much suffering in the world because of pollution and global warming. We in the so-called developed world are responsible for all the suffering that is typically happening in parts of the world, such as Asia and Africa, that are not industrialized or not industrialized to any significant degree. More importantly, our lifestyle causes suffering to untold numbers of nonhuman beings who are completely innocent victims. But to answer your question, working on Green Yoga has forced us to take a close look at our own lifestyle and make radical changes.
BF: We thought we lived simply enough but had to acknowledge that there was plenty of room for greening to happen.
Q: Specifically, what changes did you make?
BF: We particularly examined our energy and water consumption and are happy to report that we managed to make significant reductions in both. Fortunately, we were able to purchase wind energy from our energy service provider. We also started to compost organic waste and to avoid purchasing overpackaged goods, which reduced our garbage to one small bag a week. We buy as much produce from local farmers as we can to avoid the high environmental cost of long-distance transportation. We use our car only for occasional long-distance travel for essential purposes and avoid air travel. We also regularly contribute to reforestation programs, particularly Trees for the Future. There are many other, perhaps smaller, changes that we have made over the past couple of years.
Q: By supporting reforestation programs, are you offsetting your carbon production and thus contribution to pollution and global warming?
GF: In part, yes. Trees for the Future, does more than plant trees to help people offset their carbon production. Trees are wonderful generators of oxygen and gobble up tons of carbon dioxide. But there are not enough trees in the world to offset all the carbon produced by the developed countries of the world. Nor could there ever be. The whole concept of “offsetting,” which has been popularized by the former U.S. vice president Al Gore, is plain old wrong. We simply cannot offset the kind of lifestyle to which we have become accustomed in the industrialized nations.
BF: It is good to support tree planting projects to absorb as much carbon dioxide from our polluted atmosphere as possible. But it is far more important to reduce one’s carbon footprint, that is, to make one’s lifestyle sustainable. There are no shortcuts to a healthy environment. Offsetting is not the solution. It is even dangerous to think so because offsetting can give people the illusion that they are doing what they can and need not do anything else. We do encourage people to plant trees but for the right reason. Trees for the Future’s reforestation program has the purpose of rebuilding small communities in so-called Third World countries whose habitat has become unsustainable. Their program is giving new hope to underprivileged people. Last year we donated through Traditional Yoga Studies enough money to plant 5,000 trees in a small village of Haiti where recent hurricanes had caused major destruction. By planting trees, the land can be reinvigorated and provide the local people with sustenance and a livelihood. This program has been enormously successful.
Q: Apart from yoga practitioners making major lifestyle changes, what do you think needs to happen to prevent biosphere collapse? Wouldn’t our modern civilization as a whole have to change radically?
GF: We urgently need to revise our entire value system and the institutions based on them. The core values of our worldview simply don’t make for a sustainable way of life. Our worldview is skewed. It embodies values like control, power, exploitation and objectivism. Objectivism, on which science is based, ignores the fact that we are an integral part of Nature and even rules out true participation in Nature. It celebrates excessive individualism, or egocentrism, and belittles the interconnectedness of everything and the need for compassion and responsibility.
Q: How likely is it for any civilization to change in fundamental ways?
GF: Not very. But we cannot afford to remain lethargic. If we want to avoid the worst, we must embrace a new value system and worldview. As André Malreux, the twentieth-century French novelist, is said to have remarked: “The twenty-first century will be spiritual or will not be at all.”
BF: Even though the problems seem overwhelming, as spiritual practitioners we are called to act. We are called to transform ourselves and also our society.
GF: In the past, yoga was primarily a personal affair. A yogi aimed at attaining enlightenment, or liberation. The moral precepts took care of his or her interpersonal relationships, but there was little, if any, emphasis on transforming society as a whole mainly because society was not as messed up as it is today. It was supportive of the spiritual way of life cultivated by a minority of yogis, yoginis, sages, sadhus and so on. In many places in India, this is still the case. But with the rapid growth of India’s middle class, the tradition of spiritual seekers is declining. Our own consumer society is far too obsessed with materialistic values and goods to be supportive of values like reverence, voluntary simplicity, renunciation, spiritual transformation or responsible compassion for all beings. Yet, these are precisely the sort of values we ought to cultivate in order to overcome the environmental crisis.
BF: One of the principles of Green yoga is that everything is interconnected. We don’t live in isolation. We are not separate from our society. We have grown up in it and are shaped by it. A big part of our adult life continues to be dependent on it, even if we choose to live a fairly secluded life. It is reasonable to want to help create a better society, one that is supportive of a holistic, spiritual lifestyle. Everyone wants to live in a neighborhood that is free from crime, free from aggression, that is more harmonious, where they can find quality teachings, with people who are kind and considerate rather than chronically rushed, competitive and breathless.
GF: The amount of money that nations spend on their military is well over $1000 billion a year worldwide. This is frankly obscene. Imagine what could be accomplished if this amount were used on greening the environment and human society. It is becoming more and more difficult to live a healthy life in the midst of all the pollution. By polluting air, land and water, we are polluting the very elements that compose our body. We know of any number of yoga practitioners who have exercised religiously and consumed the right sort of diet, but suddenly were diagnosed with cancer or some other major disease. Pollution is rampant and is getting worse, because the measures taken thus far are quite inadequate.
Q: Do you have a final message for our readers?
GF: Act responsibly. Act now.
BF: Act in the best interest of all present and future beings.
For more information, or to purchase Green Yoga, visit www.traditionalyogastudies.com or E-mail email@example.com.
Thank you, this is inspiring and a lovely reminder of our interconnectedness and action required now. Many blessings to you and your projects
Thank you for your comment. May we all act in the best interest of present and future beings.