Forms and Opportunities for Engaged Practice
Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake. But how can we submit to despair while the land is saying "Help"?
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
No small part of our challenge is the pervasive poverty of agency. How often do we hear, including from ourselves, “but I’m just one person”? Yet both Dharma and sociology disagree. Our words and actions matter so much and indeed they are all we have.
Yet whether or not our actions make a big difference that we can actually see, feel, and touch is, in a way, none of our business. Our opportunity is to meaningfully respond. We can speak in ways that actually help. We can act in ways that are deeply rooted, skillful, strategic, and unattached to specific outcomes.
Featured Calls to Digital Action
International
- Read: “New York Buddhists support detainee Mohsen Mahdawi” and if in the USA, write to Congress for his immeadiate release.
- Sign: Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
- Listen: A 10 minute summary of Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”
- Act: Join a local clean-up with the Great Global Clean-up
- Read: What is BDS?
- Attend: “How to Prevent a Coup: Lessons from Korea” a virtual event on April 25th
United States
- Act: May Day National Day of Action “Trump and his billionaire profiteers are trying to create a race to the bottom—on wages, on benefits, on dignity itself. This May Day we are fighting back.”
- Read: How to Join the Buy-Nothing campaign
- Act: with the American Meterological Society and call your representative to save NOAA’s ocean and climate research.
- Act: with New York DSA and call your representative to demand the release of detained student-activist Mahmoud Khalil.
- Read: “As the politics of climate change shift, how can ordinary people respond?”
- Act: Oppose the SAVE Act voter suppression bill with the Third Act
- Read: “Hopescroll through stories of people’s noncooperation against Trump’s coup.”
- Act: Email foreign minister Melanie Joly to call on her to block General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems’ large artillery propellant delivery to Israel.
- Join: Climate Reality’s Green Ink Book Club “Our community is bound by a shared passion for environmental sustainability, social justice, and creative expression. Through our monthly gatherings, we explore literature that sparks conversations on climate action, ecopsychology, systems change and social justice.”
“The Earth might see me.” — Haida proverb
Past Campaigns
Faith Climate Action Week 2024
- Katie Benvenuti
Regenerative Solutions for the Living Earth Community
- Katie Benvenuti
Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It's not enough to grieve. It's not enough to just stop doing bad things.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
Stories of Engagement
Buddhism, Social Change, and Skillful Means
- Melvin McLeod, David Loy, Mushim Patricia Ikeda and Joan Sutherland
A Community Renounces Fossil Fuels
- Steve Seigan Miron
Demand for Statehood and Ecological Protections in Northern India
- Justin Whitaker
