I'm not sure how to post this while keeping with the etiquette of the forum, but I feel it's important enough to do it anyway, and I hope contributors and mods will forgive me if they feel I'm breaking kosher.
Where I live, we experienced weather today that is completely alien and unprecedented (at least in the records we have). Everything was brought to a stand-still. Flights couldn't fly because runways had melted. Trains crawled around the country at snails pace for fear that tracks could no longer hold the trains. Millions of people with no air conditioning dripped sweat and waited it out in their homes.
It brings my attention again to the idea, increasingly realistic, that 2-4 billion people may die in our lifetime because of causes related to climate change (wars, disasters, social untangling), and millions of animal species are likely to go extinct in that process.
As an admirer of Zen chutzpah, one side of me feels that this is just an imbalance that needs to be corrected. Perhaps 2-4 billion just need to die, aye or nay, for an unstable system to become stable, with the collateral damage of the extinct species, and the enormous human suffering that will unfortunately come with it.
But another side of me thinks that, a small cause can lead to great effects. Improbable things happen all the time. The right call to action on the right website, with the right branding and marketing, could convince many people that they don't absolutely need foreign holidays, petrol-engine cars, or beef dinners. When the stakes are high, betting on low probability events is smart.
I'm curious what other Zen students feel in their gut about this situation. After all, there is no record of the Zen canon on Pluto.
I'm not impressed by my expression of doubt. It would be far more useful to just act.
Submitted July 20, 2022 at 04:29AM by Jamalwherewithall https://ift.tt/XrqlgUz
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