A crisis of climate within each of us || Bard College (2022)

Questioner (Q): This discussion today is a followup to a conversation between Acharya Prashant and my colleague, Dr. Evan Goodstein, the director of Bard’s graduate programmes on sustainability and the ‘Solve climate by 2030’ program. In a conversation we held earlier, you gave my colleague an answer from a deep spiritual perspective and stressed the need for personal transformation. Yet, as we are looking at the climate emergency, it is on us right now and we are running out of time. We have named our project ‘Solve climate by 2030’ because the time is running short, as identified by the IPCC. So, we will start the conversation with an “easy” question. How can we reconcile the need for immediate action with deep personal and societal transformation that often takes longer than the time that may be available to us?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Thank you, first of all, for having this discussion. Yes, it’s an easy question about a difficult situation. You said inner transformation processes are often long-winding and deliver results only in the long term. It’s not really so that inner transformation will necessarily take a long time, an inordinately long time, considering that we are looking at 2030 as the threshold, as the cut off year.

You see, look at it differently. Apart from the inner transformation route, we have tried everything else. That there is a climate catastrophe upon us is not new information; you have known it since at least four decades now, if not more. What have you been able to do in these four decades? Not only has the climate crisis worsened, the rate of worsening has actually accelerated, so we are sinking at an increasing rate of sinking per year. That’s how we are doing. If that is what we are getting from our conventional routes of crisis mitigation, it surprises me how we still hold so much trust over them.

We talk as if the other routes—which includes legislation, regulation, and so many other things—are tried, tested, and have delivered results beautifully till now, and we assume as if the spiritual process is untrustworthy, unreliable, and will necessarily take a long time, if at all it delivers any results. I am saying, I repeat, keep the spiritual route aside and let’s objectively, factually look at what the other routes have given us except frustration, disappointment. Our confidence in our own methods needs to be checked, verified, and we really need to test whether our confidence in our governmental processes, legal and technical processes is really well-founded.