Excerpts from Matthieu Ricard’s preface to Didier Ruef’s “Recycle”
The future does not hurt… for the moment.

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama has repeatedly stressed, interdependence is a key concept in Buddhism that leads to a profound under¬standing of the nature of reality and an awareness of the universal responsibility that we bear all. Considering that all beings are interrelated and that all, without exception, want to avoid suffering and yearn for happiness, this understanding is the basis of altruism and compassion and leads us naturally to the practice of non-violence towards all human beings and animals and respect for the environment.

People react strongly against an immediate danger. It is difficult however to feel emotionally involved with a problem that will occur in ten or twenty years. They rarely feel the need to change their attitudes to a situation that will affect them in the future or which will affect the next generation. They say: “We’ll see when it happens.” They dread the idea of foregoing immediate pleasures only because these rewards will have disastrous long-term consequences. Their actions are motivated by the desire to avoid stress in the immediate future.

All this stems from an inveterate tendency towards indifference to danger which does not threaten our selfishness in the present moment. The future does not hurt, at least not yet. Should we welcome the call to ignore the future - or appeal to wisdom and altruism in order to have more consideration for those who suffer from the proliferation of waste and those who are likely to suffer even more in generations to come?

Excerpts from Matthieu Ricard’s preface to Didier Ruef’s “Recycle”
Blind Selfishness
Imagine a damaged ship in which it would be necessary to use all the power of the engines to pump the water out from its holds. Where first class passengers want to continue to use air conditioning and other facilities, and where the sole concern of second-class passengers is to upgrade to the first class. Soon, everyone sinks, after using the air conditioner for a few hours longer, instead of everyone being saved. On a normal boat, a captain takes the necessary measures to prevent the ship from sinking. But here, the passengers insist on being their own leaders and taking their own decisions.

The balance of forces confronted with environmental problems and other pressing challenges of our time resembles that of tribes competing for the benefits of a sinking ship, a forest in fire and a time bomb.
A research group of British engineers stated recently that, assuming that all engineers operating in the world dedicated themselves to developing technologies to produce renewable energy, such an effort would not be enough to slow down global warming.

A member of an English green party recently explained on the BBC that: “The whole problem of climate change lies in the fact that it is debated on an intellectual level by people who live in cities where everything is artificial. These people do not experience the changes that occur in reality. Billions of people are now city dwellers cut off from natural cycles, they are not able to see for themselves the processes involved. However, if you talk with community members who live in the rainforests or with the poorest people who are trying to grow grain in Africa, they say that climate change is dramatic, it is happening very quickly and has serious implications for nature and their livelihoods.” The same can be said of the proliferation of waste.

Global problems can only be addressed by transnational institutions. In a global world, heads of states should play the role of governors of provinces, who administer local affairs and delegate to a transnational authority the fate of the planet.

(to be continued)

Excerpts from Matthieu Ricard’s preface to Didier Ruef’s “Recycle”
The high price of materialistic values
An American psychologist Tim Kasser and his colleagues at the University of Rochester have shown, through studies spanning two decades and within a representative sample of the population, that individuals who focused their lives on wealth, image, social status and other materialistic values promoted by the consumer society, are less satisfied with their lives.

They are more depressed and anxious, prone to headaches and stomach pains. They drink more alcohol and smoke more cigarettes. They prefer competition to cooperation, contribute less to the public interest (being primarily focused on themselves); they give little attention to environmental issues. Their social ties are weakened and they have fewer friends. They show less empathy and compassion towards those who suffer, are manipulative and tend to exploit others according to their interests. Even their health is poorer than that of the rest of the population.

In our contemporary world, we are more often seen as consumers than as citizens, roles which imply very different patterns of behaviour.

These studies suggest that it is those who consume the most who are most indifferent to the amount of waste they produce and the consequences of such waste on the quality of life of populations and environments. They are also less interested in solutions that require an overview of problems and a spirit of cooperation.

(to be continued)

Excerpts from Matthieu Ricard’s preface to Didier Ruef’s “Recycle”

As Didier Ruef wrote, “While the re-use and recovery of waste is part of everyday life in developing countries, our consumer society has turned waste into garbage, by taking away its economic value.”
I have witnessed this transformation in a country that 25 years ago had never even seen a bottle of Coca-Cola. When the first plastic bottles appeared in eastern Tibet, there was no question of discarding them. Once the drink was quickly ingested, the light airtight container, was carefully preserved. The bottles, whole or with the top part removed, were used as a drinking cup, a receptacle for milk, a butter jar, a pot to collect small objects, vases to put flowers on the altar as an offering to Buddha or to protect objects from the weather, etc. If by chance a few not environmentally conscious travelers threw empty plastic bottles on the roadside, nomadic children were quick to seize this precious bounty.

Twenty-five years later, the plastic bottles are neither rare nor precious in Tibet. They are scattered amidst the meadows of wild flowers. Tibetans no longer attribute any value to them and have not yet grasped that as they are not made of cloth or leather, or wood, or any other natural material which, when thrown away, will soon disap¬pear, eaten by animals, dissolved by rain or disintegrated by time.

However, in one of the valleys in which the association with which I am involved helped to build a clinic and finance the activities of a school, a remarkable man, a specialist in traditional medicine, who is also a writer and an artist, has in the course of a whole year explained to the farmers and nomads that this waste will continue to litter the fields and rivers for a century, disrupting the sacred geography and harming the health of living beings. He placed almost every¬where containers for collecting the garbage which was once simply abandoned. A year later, this valley was as clean as a park in Switzerland.

Tools which at first helped us to survive, but their unbridled development and the waste they produce now threatens our survival. We have now moved from a world where one produced to meet the genuine needs of society to one which strives to “create” artificial needs. In this way the consumer society of today was born.
As Didier Ruef notes, “it is time to change our behavior and our way of social functioning.
(to be continued)

Excerpts from Matthieu Ricard’s preface to Didier Ruef’s “Recycle”

Recently, I had the opportunity to swim in the middle of around thirty whale-sharks off the Mexican coast. But amidst the sun’s rays that lit up the shimmering ocean and the sharks around us, floating like great bubbles of mineral water were plastic bags and waste of all shapes and sizes as well as, strangely, an airport baggage check.

The development and usage of tools is such that, for the first time in the history of mankind the proliferation of manufactured objects is likely to cause irreversible damage to our ecosystem.
Indeed, the benefits we have sought have had undesirable side effects on our lives and our natural environment. Manufactured objects and waste proliferate, chain reactions are generated by the substances released, changes in the surface and the atmosphere of the earth are a direct consequence of the waste released as well as of the complex tools that we use today and discard in the environment.

From plastic debris that swarms in the ocean (some planktons have been found to contain up to 30% of its weight in residues of plastic micro particles, which are then absorbed by all cetaceans) to radioactive fall¬out from the 468 nuclear explosions which have occurred in Kazakhstan at the time of the Soviet Union in the utmost contempt of the fate of the local people. Even today, the number of cancers and leukemia in adults and children is. frightening as well as the continuing number of deformities in newly born infants. Everywhere waste has produced a damaging effect on our lives.

Twenty-five years after the Bhopal chemical disaster in India, tens of thousands of survivors still suffer after-effects of pesticides released by the industrial explosion that killed over 10,000 people (of whom 3,500 died instantly). They have received only meager allowances from the American company Union Carbide, which, from the locals’ perspective, remains totally indifferent to the human tragedy that it has caused far from home headquarters.
(to be continued)