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By Root 427 0

toward its consequences stems from the potent mixture of corporate greed, the arrogance of power, fear of collapse, and stultifying delusion. In developing nations, in contrast, reluctance to counter global warming often springs from the sheer struggle for survival. These countries see enhanced economic activity as essential to their escape from poverty. Thus cuts in carbon emissions, in so far as they hamper economic productivity, appear to them as an unwelcome impediment to their aspirations for greater prosperity. From their perspective, environmental concerns are of limited importance; many in these countries even regard environmental issues as a peculiarly Western obsession. For the population of the developing world, the chief priority is to emerge from endemic poverty, and the road to this goal is economic development. A robust economy is one that constantly produces more goods and services, and thus necessarily consumes more energy. To compel such economies to impose caps on carbon emissions is, from their own point of view, to consign them to continued poverty, a bitter fate with which they are already too familiar.

Nevertheless, even the most “productive” economy cannot flourish on a planet beset by a torrent of environmental woes stemming from runaway climate change. Now that major ecological disasters have already started to manifest, our only chance to avert a catastrophic fate is to promptly adopt sweeping and comprehensive measures to reduce global warming. These must apply equally to both the developed and developing worlds.

Major changes are needed in both our personal conduct and our economies. While in our private lives we should certainly increase our environmental awareness and adopt as many small behaviors as possible that reduce our personal carbon footprint—for example, retrofitting windows, using compact fluorescent lightbulbs, turning off unused electric appliances, driving a fuel-efficient car, eating mainly vegetarian, keeping the thermostat low—it would be overly optimistic, even naive, to believe that merely reducing our personal share of carbon waste and encouraging others to do so will bring emissions down to the levels needed to avert future calamity. Global warming is a problem of truly global dimensions, intricately related to the gargantuan quantities of energy our economies devour to sustain forward movement and support the standards of living we have learned to expect. Hence there is no alternative to a wide-ranging plan that will dramatically transform the entire economy—our own and that of the world.

From a Buddhist perspective, a sane economy would be governed by the principle of sufficiency, which holds that the key to happiness is contentment rather than an abundance of goods. Our unquenchable compulsion to consume and enjoy is an expression of craving, the very thing the Buddha pinpointed as the root cause of suffering. In the dominant market-based model of the good life, the economy is governed by a “principle of commodification”: whatever exists acquires its right to be because it is a potential commodity, something that can be transformed into a product to be marketed and sold. Such an economic model is dangerously beholden to a pervasive delusion, the tacit supposition that the economy functions in an inexhaustible, open-ended arena. To the contrary, the economy is a human field nested in the folds of the wider, more inclusive field of the biosphere. Because the biosphere is finite, fragile, and exhaustible, because it is delicate and vulnerable to damage, all economic activity occurring within its embrace must respect its finitude and fragility. The hubris of imagining the capacity for economic growth to be unbounded will eventually invite nemesis: the destruction of both the economy and the world community.

Our present economic model also presupposes that human beings are quasi-mechanistic systems driven by the repetitive cycle of desire, acquisition, and gratification. Hence the market treats people as essentially consumers, aiming to provoke in them ever-new desires