Archive

Religion and World Politics part 15
Fundamental Buddhism

It seems a very strange thing to label Buddhism as some­thing fun­da­men­tal­ist. As if by being fun­da­men­tal­ist it might also be accused of caus­ing the same kind of car­nage and dif­fi­cul­ty that we asso­ciate with fun­da­men­tal Islam. And yet the very gen­tle reli­gion, the reli­gion of peace, the reli­gion of com­pas­sion, is also a reli­gion which is just as capa­ble as oth­er reli­gions of caus­ing car­nage, of caus­ing atroc­i­ty, and caus­ing great loss of life. 

The Conversation #22 — Wes Jackson

You’re deal­ing with timescales that are beyond humans’ inter­est. I mean, it’s sor­ta like glob­al warm­ing. The heat that we have now built up, that car­bon was burned thir­ty years ago. It’s going to take a while for the cor­rec­tion process. So, if you have the ele­ments of the phos­pho­rus, the potas­si­um, the man­ganese, and so on, it can be built back pret­ty fast. But a short­hand way of putting it is that soil is as much of a non-renewable resource as oil. And, more impor­tant than oil. I mean, we’re talk­ing about stuff we’re made of. So that’s why I’ve said that the plow­share has destroyed more options for future gen­er­a­tions than the sword. 

The Conversation #6 — Jan Lundberg

If we are look­ing at what oil real­ly pro­vides to soci­ety, and what keeps us going for essen­tial ser­vices and goods, then our life sup­port sys­tem is in jeop­ardy. We are not prepar­ing for peak oil. We are not reor­ga­niz­ing our­selves for a degrad­ed ecosys­tem. So we are head­ing head­long into col­lapse, and this is some­thing that is not being dis­cussed. It is taboo to imag­ine that the whole growth scheme some­how comes to an end or that there is some­thing like peak oil that does­n’t trans­late into some tran­si­tion of renew­able ener­gy to make pos­si­ble a green con­sumer soci­ety with this lev­el of population.