Cornerstone EcoDharma

We consider the following articles (in no particular order) to be representative and fundamental to our view of EcoDharma. These are a good starting place to get to know our perspectives.

EcoDharma
EcoDharma

A Conversation with Dekila Chungyalpa

What might be ecodharma’s unique and essential contribution to the environmental movement? Dekila Chungyalpa braids her Buddhist, Indigenous, and scientific traditions in this timely interview with the Dharmadatta community.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

Mindfulness and Compassion as Pathways to a More Sustainable Future

In this essay, Christine Wamsler explores an overlooked driver of ecological crises—the feedback loop between the human mind and planetary systems. How might a deeper understanding of this connection transform our relationship with Earth?
Practice
Practice
Kaira Jewel Lingo offers a set of practices to help us cultivate individual calm and support community connection, and encourages us not to give up on our collective capacity to effect social change.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

Foundations for Guiding Understanding and Response

What are the Dharma principles that can motivate and inform our response to ecological crises? In 2013, a group of more than 30 teachers from various Buddhist traditions offered this list.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

An Open Letter from Rob Burbea

On the third anniversary of his death in May of 2020, we share this letter from Rob Burbea challenging dharma leaders to embrace the full implications of its ethical demands.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

Report from Standing Rock

"What one is bequeathed through the gift of Standing Rock is a clarified, strong, heart, burning with a light of commitment and hope in the face of incalculable odds."
EcoDharma
EcoDharma
On May’s full moon, Buddhists around the world commemorate the birth, enlightenment, and death of Gautama Buddha. In 2019, Bhikkhu Bodhi marked the occasion with a passionate call for a systems-wide climate awakening.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma
Out of love, Insight teacher Rob Burbea asks us to boldly investigate our agenda for practice. What are its risks and and possibilities in supporting our response to a suffering world?
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

Facing Climate Change (Part One)

Skillfully blending compassion and dispassion, Bhikkhu Anālayo explores early Buddhist texts to discover the fundamental role for mindfulness in meeting even the suffering of global climate crisis in this first of a two-part series.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

What is the place of politics on The Path?

John Peacock asks us to courageously question all that we are leaving out when we constrain the scope of the Dharma to be merely the personal.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma
Following the People's Climate Mobilization, we might ask "was that effective?" or "what next?" In her warm and wise letter to new activists, long-time engaged environmentalist, Sarah Vekasi, addresses the importance of a mindful approach to becoming and staying engaged.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma
Eco-Dharma...must confront whiteness and privilege in order to "create earnest inter-dependent communities that understand that different people have different privilege and abilities," and seek to act on that understanding.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Trainings for the Mind

The founding principles of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Order of Interbeing may provide clarity on how to be for those of us bewildered, demoralized, and faithful to the practice of inquiry on the right orientation for engagement with this moment.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

Discovering Our Collective Place in the World

"We cannot return to nature because we have never left it. " In this article, Buddhist scholar and Zen teacher David Loy explores the parallels in our individual and collective predicaments and the parallel paths that might heal.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma
As another year fraught with uncertainty and peril draws to a close, Roshi Joan Halifax explores the power of wise hope, free from attachment, to bolster our engaged practice.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

Facing Climate Change (Part Two)

The mind faced with difficulty often makes matters worse. In the conclusion of our two-part series, Bhikkhu Anālayo clarifies the role of mindfulness in managing our own potential for harm as we endeavor to respond to the cries of the world. 
EcoDharma
EcoDharma
Ecodharma pioneer David Loy identifies the essential dharma teachings that can support practitioners in robust and sustainable collective action.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma

A Call for Renewal, Resistance and Radical Change

In this fundamental ecodharma teaching, organizer, educator and ordained Triratna Buddhist Guhyapati asks: by rooting more in solidarity with one another than in fear, “what kind of dharma can we offer the world?”
EcoDharma
EcoDharma
Mental suffering caused by the climate crisis—or the coronavirus pandemic—calls on us to offer kindness and company. In this article, Kaira Jewel Lingo invites us to transmute the otherwise unbearable.
EcoDharma
EcoDharma
All views are poetic. All understandings of reality, including "Nature," are interpretive. In this article, Gaia House teacher, Rob Burbea, explores how Western culture's views of "Nature" contribute to ecological crises and our opportunity to move beyond those limitations.

(Yoast version)