Video: William Belden Noble Lecture Series: Dekila Chungyalpa
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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: William Beldon Noble Lecture Series. March 22, 2023.
MATTHEW POTTS: Good evening, everyone. My name is Matthew Potts. I'm the Plummer Professor here at Harvard Divinity School. And on behalf of the Divinity School and of the Memorial Church-- which I'm also the pastor of and which is sponsoring this lecture series-- and the Buddhist Ministry Initiative here at HDS, I'd like to welcome you to our third Noble Lecture of the academic year.
William Beldon Noble, after whom this lecture series was named, was an 1885 graduate of Harvard College. He began studying ministry out of admiration for Phillips Brooks, a beloved preacher here at Harvard College and the Bishop of Massachusetts. But William Noble was forced to disenroll from seminary shortly after starting his studies due to illness. He was in poor health for about a decade before dying of heart failure at age 35, after which his widow, Nannie Yulee Noble, established this series of lectures in her late husband's honor and memory, hoping to promote, by their legacy, the work that William was unable to devote his life to-- that is, to the service and the ministry and the upbuilding of humankind.
The scope of the lectures, the original bequest reads, should be, quote, "as wide as the highest interests of humanity". In the past 125 years, the church, through the Noble lectures, has hosted professors, ministers, monks, artists, filmmakers, novelists a president, and two senators as our Noble lecturer. And if the scope of these lectures, as the original bequest reads, are to be as wide as the highest interests of humankind, then humankind arguably has no higher interest today than addressing the climate crisis.
And so this year, we are taking, as our theme in this series of four lectures, the global climate crisis and religious responses to it. Last fall, author John Green spoke to us beautifully about the end of the world. You can see that lecture online if you haven't already. Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke University spoke about the possibility of hope. You can see that online also if you like.
Next month, the Ugandan Roman Catholic theologian, Emmanuel Katongole, will offer a lecture that explores the relationship between post-conflict reconciliation and environmental sustainability. Please keep your eye out for that lecture in April.
But tonight, we are honored to welcome Dekila Chungyalpa as our Noble lecturer for our third lecture in this series. Dekila is the founder and director of the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Loka Initiative is an education and outreach platform for faith leaders and religious institutions that supports faith-led environmental and climate efforts by building the capacities of faith leaders and of the culture keepers of Indigenous traditions. And it also promotes new opportunities, outreach, and partnerships in a wide variety of settings.
Dekila is a well-known innovator in the environmental field, and the Loka Initiative is only the latest of her many impactful projects. She has over 20 years of experience directing faith-led environmental and climate partnerships, of managing biodiversity projects, of landscape and river basin strategy design, and community-based conservation. Her work has ranged from the Amazon, to the Himalayas, to the Mekong Delta in Southeast Asia, to East Africa, and to the United States, including at Yale University, where she was awarded a prestigious McCluskey Fellowship in 2014.
It is our deep honor this evening to welcome Dekila back to Harvard Divinity School. I learned today that she's been here before. To welcome her back to Harvard Divinity School and to learn from her this evening as our third Noble lecturer of the academic year. Please join me in offering her our warmest welcome.
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DEKILA CHUNGYALPA: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. Hello, everyone. I would like to start by saying thank you to Matt Potts, to Janet Law, to all the people that brought me here. I'm so grateful and honored to be part of the Noble lecture series. And I want to start by paying homage to the Massachusett people and the lands that is sacred to them.
When we talk about indigeneity, it really starts with the land and the water that the people are from. That defines indigeneity. And so I thought I would start by showing you Mount Kangchenjunga. I come from Sikkim in the far-eastern Himalayas. It is mostly wilderness. It is famous for being the first organic state of India. And this mountain is our guardian deity. He defines us as a people. I am Bhutia. We also have the Lepcha and the some Limbu people. And he is sacred to us.
The mountain also is the third-tallest peak on the planet. But probably, most of you have never encountered it before, and there's a reason why. It's because we refuse to let him be climbed. We turn down every mountain-climbing expedition you can think of. We turned down incredibly lucrative deals that are made to us by the central government, by other governments from all around the world, by corporations. And it's because he's sacred to our Indigenous people, we've been able to protect him.
Having someone climb him and putting a flag on him would be desecration for us. And this is really important when you think about where biodiversity resides today. 80% of biodiversity is in Indigenous-managed lands. And that is because we see land as sacred, as having inherent value, of having independent value from humans, of having the right to live as we think humans have the right to live.
I grew up in a very traditional Tibetan Buddhist family. My mother and my grandmother both took their vows later in life. And I belong to the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism-- for those of you who are Buddhist scholars. And my tradition is especially known for throwing up Saints that gain enlightenment in wilderness areas, which meant that I had a very strange childhood. I spent a lot of time in wilderness areas with my mother, a lot of times in caves, a lot of times in monastic lands that were protected.
And from a very young age, I had this deep love for wildlife. I just loved observing them. I loved seeing bears. I saw all kinds of species. And so to no one's surprise, I became an environmentalist. I came to the US when I was fairly young to study. I did environmental science and policy all the way and went on to work for the World Wildlife Fund.
This photo was taken in 2006, I believe. And at this point, I was sort of-- for a Brown, Indigenous, Himalayan woman, I had kind of reached the epic levels of success that I could imagine. I was the director of WWF US's Greater Mekong program. I managed a huge team. I spent most of my time in forests and freshwater landscapes and got to design a lot and help design a lot of WWF and conservation initiatives in the region.
I was also experiencing acute panic attacks and depression and anxiety. Now, for the longest time, I really struggled to tell anyone what I was experiencing. I had a recurring nightmare. I would wake up sort of heart pounding from this dream that I was in a forest. The forest was burning, and I was the only thing alive. And there was just nothing else that was living. It was just me and ashes.
And it took many, many months before I was willing to tell any of my colleagues and friends what I was experiencing and then found out that everybody else was going through something like this. Everyone else in the team among my community of conservationists, climate scientists, workers was experiencing panic attacks, depression, anxiety, fear, rage, you name it.
Now, this is in the mid 2000s, so the terms eco-anxiety and climate distress simply hadn't come up. All I could think of was, oh, I see signs of PTSD. And I still remember going back to D.C. and telling a bunch of people that I think our field teams have PTSD and having them literally laugh me out of the room. Conservationists are the last bastion of patriarchy in the science world. We're not allowed to have emotions that way.
And so it meant that I was trying to think through how I could address these emotions, not just for me but for my peers. And I was really failing to do so. Now, when you talk about eco-anxiety and climate distress, what do I mean? For me, one of the most challenging issues I've worked on is biodiversity loss. Just in the US, last year alone, 23 species were declared extinct. For those of you who are NPR fans, that included the Red-bellied woodpecker. So many of you might have heard that series of radio programs on it.
When we these species have gone extinct, what we mean is they are never coming back. They're gone for good. There are over a million species that are at risk of extinction right now-- over a million simply because of the way we live, simply because of the way we do business because of what capitalism has decided is the world order for us.
The other issue, of course, is climate change. Just this week-- many of you probably saw the headlines for this week-- the IPCC, which is the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released its sixth report. Some of you might have seen it. So we know where we're headed with climate change. The cutoff line for us is 1.5 centigrade, which is 2.7 Fahrenheit. That's as much global warming above 1880s and 1900s that we can manage right.
We are right now at course to go double that because we simply have not managed to figure out, and our governments are not willing to negotiate and actually cut carbon emission targets. So we keep playing around. We have these meetings. We have media conferences. We have all kinds of policy measures to get governments to actually come up with targets that means that we can stay under 1.5 degrees centigrade.
Now, why does that number matter? That number matters because once we cross that threshold, we no longer-- the science community no longer knows what comes next. Because what's going to happen is knock-on effects. So as global warming happens-- for example, we have methane bubbles that are, right now, trapped under all that ice in the poles. That releases. We don't know what happens when the methane enters the atmosphere. We can only guess. So these knock-on effects are not even measurable for us. And that is incredibly frightening for the science community and should be very activating for the public.
Now going back to what I was saying about eco-anxiety and climate distress. If you weren't feeling that way, I'm sorry that this talk is going to make you feel that way right now. But I think one of the things that became really obvious to me was that in the way I had entered Western education and the way I'd been brought up in Western education, I had actually done myself a disservice. I had kind of bifurcated my identity. And I had become a professional and a scientist by day and a practicing Buddhist by night. And I had introduced this dualism where I wasn't able to even deal with the grief where I was presenting as a half person in many ways.
And I think for those of you who are especially studying religious studies or theology or are in Divinity, you know what that feels like-- that moment where you're taking the most personal part of you and sort of allowing it to come to light. But I was in this place where that was something that I was really hiding. And in that frame of mind, I happened to have this meeting with His Holiness, the 17th Karmapa, in 2008. And he asked me to create environmental guidelines for the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries. And I often joke that I said yes because all I could think of was instant-karma credits into my karma bank. That was all I thought about. I was like, oh, my next life is secure as a human.
So I said yes, and I went immediately to the Himalayas, took leave, worked with very senior Khenpos and senior monks and nuns, and created these guidelines. And we distributed them across to the monasteries. Now, none of us anticipated that the monks and nuns would have a reaction. And the reaction was they wanted training. So I was called back, impromptu, had to create a six-day workshop for all these senior monks, the tulkus, all these high lamas.
And then thought, again, it was over and then found out that the monasteries that participated in that conference-- there were 22 monasteries that sent delegates-- decided that they were going to organize themselves into an organization, and that is how Khoryug was born. Khoryug means environment in Tibetan, and it's a movement across the Himalayas. We have over 50 monasteries and nunneries that do very tangible, measurable, environmental and climate projects.
So this photo, what you're seeing is actually the monasteries picking which issue they want to prioritize the most, based on their geography. They began doing reforestation of Indigenous saplings all across the habitat in the Himalayas. They incorporated wildlife-protection messaging in all of the rituals that they did. They did river cleanup. This is after the [? Brahmaputra ?] River flood in, I think, 2007 I want to say.
And so what they ended up really focusing on, however, was climate change. And the way they approached it was thinking through disasters in the Himalayas. Now, in 2015, there was a terrible earthquake in Nepal. And the monasteries that felt that they were best equipped for that work was the monasteries that had sent delegates to the Khoryug training. We had been doing lots of trainings on disaster preparedness. And those monasteries were much more ahead than the other monasteries. They had secured water. They had stored medicine. They had stored food. And they just were much more prepared than the other monasteries.
So based on that experience, all of the 50 monasteries for Khoryug came back to me and said, we want to focus on disaster preparedness. We think this is where the monasteries can make the biggest difference. And so lo and behold, being a WWF scientist-- environment-- I came up with the guidelines. And then we started this training. And that's what they've been really excelling on to the point that all of the community knows where to go when there is a disaster.
So you're seeing them demoing what it's like to take their zen, which is their long robe-- it's about 7 meters-- and turn it into a stretcher in five minutes and then how you place somebody on the stretcher. They are actually teaching other monasteries how to do this kind of work. As a case study, Khoryug proves that a call to action from a senior faith leader can lead to incredible practical change on the ground. The more specific the call, the more impactful and sustainable the work has been. So every time there is a specific call to action-- not just save water but saying, we want you to have rooftop water harvesting-- what we see is that the monasteries react very promptly, and then they continue to do the work.
Well, why should it matter? Why should it matter that there are Buddhists in the Himalayas doing this work when Buddhism makes up a very small percentage of world religions? This is why. What you're looking at is the water towers of Asia. These are all the large river basins that originate from the Tibetan Plateau. So left to right, what you're going to see is the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, Salween, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers. These are all the rivers that originate from Tibet. Everything that happens in the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas impact the people that are in the basin downstream.
We know that at least half of the ice in Tibet is going to disappear by the end of this century. That means immense numbers of suffering, immense numbers of drought, immense numbers of people who suffer, species that are going to die out. We're talking about a level of impact that is unimaginable right now. And so having Tibetan Buddhist leaders actually say that this problem that they did not create is going to be something they address is incredibly important. They are actually teaching communities to protect themselves in the face of disaster that is definitely going to happen.
So doing this work with the monks and nuns meant that it started really changing how I saw what I was doing as a conservationist. And I was able to convince WWF to create this program called Sacred Earth, and I went on to work with the Catholic Church, and the Muslim Council, Indigenous leaders, and work in different parts of the world. What I was trying to do was test the hypothesis that working with faith leaders would actually shift the needle on conservation issues. And this program was very successful.
To scientists, I had to make a very different set of arguments. And my arguments usually was this-- 85% of people in the world follow a spiritual faith. They are the largest stakeholder group on the planet. Faiths collectively own 8% of all habitable land. They set up 50% of all schools. They are the third-largest category of financial investors. The Catholic Church is the third-wealthiest property owner. How is it that we haven't been seeing them as a stakeholder up until now? How is it that we have had this blind spot when it comes to religion?
And then there is a much deeper reason why the environmental science world needs to work with faith leaders. Bill McKibben put it best. They are the only ones that still posit some reason for our existence other than just materialism. We can have a much deeper debate about what it means to be human, and what is the purpose of human existence in this universe.
Now, why did I pick this topic? When Matt invited me to come give a talk, I knew instantly what my title was. I really wanted to talk about sanctuary because when we imagine sanctuary, we immediately imagine a place where we're safe where no one is going to harm us, and we don't harm anyone else. I mean, historically, we've always known that this is where someone that is escaping the law can go to and find temporary refuge. But over time, it's also meant other things. We have things like sanctuary cities where immigrants can come and hide from what might be the law but what is not morally right. We have wildlife sanctuaries where wildlife are protected. So over time, it's actually evolved to mean something much deeper than what was specific to one place. It is actually an entire concept in itself.
And the second part of the title was, what is the Anthropocene? So when we talk about the Anthropocene, what we mean is the current geological time, the period we're in right now where human activity has completely altered the geology, the biosphere, and the climate of the planet. it's pejorative, but it doesn't have to be. The Anthropocene could be a time where we actually heal ourselves and heal the planet. It is not predestined that this is the era where we destroy everything and burn up into flames in a big fire.
When we talk about the impacts of the environmental and climate crisis, one of the most overlooked things is the psychological and emotional impact. I described what I and my colleagues were going through in the mid 2000s-- sort of the PTSD symptoms. Well, now we do have terms to describe what it is. We know what eco-anxiety is and climate distress is. And we know children as young as eight are experiencing it.
There was a study that was carried out in 2020 that studied over 10,000 children from all around the world. And what they found out was over 75% of them are experiencing some measure of eco-anxiety. Almost 50% of them said that it is debilitating to them on a daily basis. That is incredible. That is mind blowing. And it is something that those of us who are working with youth really need to understand.
The thing about climate change and environmental degradation is at the root of it is inequity. So what we look at when we think about-- this headline really bugged me when I saw it because nobody has cared about the eco-anxiety of people of color, of people in the global south, all the people that have been suffering all along. It's sort of become an issue now because climate change has arrived for the wealthy nations.
The other aspect of it that we have to address is that the racial injustice that drives climate change also leads to more racial injustice. This is something we know that poor people, communities of color, and Indigenous communities here in the US are most likely to be living in environmentally dangerous and vulnerable areas. So not only were they already made vulnerable, they are going to be made much more vulnerable. We cannot address environmental and climate issues without centering justice for that reason.
Now, underlying all of this is polarization. I was fascinated to see that there was a study a couple of years ago that looked at affective polarization and found that the US is more polarized than any other developed nation. And the polarization is happening along the lines of political party, religion, and race. Those are the three things that is driving our polarization. Now, what does that mean? That means if you're a Democrat, you're very likely to not trust Republicans or like them. If you're a Republican, you're very likely to not trust and like Democrats.
In the world that we're in right now, we need everybody to be activated and to care. We cannot afford to sit here and say us and them. And so polarization, in particular, is really important. It's fascinating to me that so often the environmental and climate language that we use is also very polarizing. We, for example, love to say, we're having a war against climate, or we're in a war with fossil fuels. We kind of pick up and use polarizing language all the time, not thinking about the deeper message that we're passing on.
And so when we talk about the role of religion in the Anthropocene, to me, the first part is this. If religion is a reason we're polarizing, how do we turn that around? How do we make it so religion is actually the reason why people come together from all political parties? And how can religion lead us to create sanctuary for everyone, not just for the us group but for everybody?
And people often say to me, OK, but you're just meeting with these religious leaders in closed rooms, and that's all that happens. In reality, religions are actually making huge strides. The numbers speak for itself. Faith communities are actually one third of all divestment right now from fossil fuels around the world. The Catholic Church, in particular-- Pope Francis and his Laudato si' has completely revolutionized how religion is approaching climate change. So he's created the Laudato si' platform, and it's really meant for anybody and everybody. You can be a company. You can be a diocese. You can be a civil society organization. There is actually a category of sustainability and goals that you can work on as part of the Catholic Church.
And then I threw the slide in there because some of you are educators. So what does all of this mean for us, pedagogically? For those of us who are in the field of education, what does it mean that this is what's coming bearing down upon us? Not just a physical, disaster-laden future, not just physical crisis, environmental crisis, but also mental and emotional crisis. That's just going to grow and grow and grow among the students that we work with.
And I think one of the things that we really have to become comfortable with is integrating theory with practical. We really have to be comfortable with taking on action, taking on activism even, and teaching that as part of whatever it is that we're teaching. When we touch environmental and climate issues, it has to be normalized. Activism has to be normalized.
So this brings me to the Loka Initiative, which as Matt pointed out, I founded and run at UW-Madison. I co-founded it with a lot of people. That's the first thing I should say. I didn't just go out there and found it and make it happen. We are a partnership of eight different departments on campus-- so everything from the Nelson School of Environment, to religious studies, continuing studies, which focuses on adult education, the Office of Sustainability, and the Center for Healthy Minds, which houses my program.
Our mission is to support faith-led efforts locally and around the world. And also, we work very closely with culture keepers of Indigenous traditions, especially Wisconsin tribes, which is where we're based. We have three main program areas-- the capacity building that we do, which is very close handholding with faith leaders and Indigenous leaders. We do a lot of public engagement and outreach. That is an image of Mary Evelyn Tucker. For those of you who don't know her, you should check her out if you're interested in religion and ecology. One of my mentors. And we do a lot of work now on research and resource development around eco-anxiety and climate distress.
The capacity-building work that we do, our criteria for who we work with is who is ignored by the environmental and climate mainstream movements. And that means the group that I work with the most are evangelical preachers. Sometimes, it is surprising to me that as a Buddhist woman from the Himalayas, this is one of my strongest partnerships. But we convene evangelical preachers and provide a safe space for them to meet with scientists, to have discussions around climate change, answer all of their questions around it and around environmental issues. And we also work on providing support to faith leaders and to pastors who feel isolated serving communities and congregations that are more conservative than them.
Among the Indigenous work that we do, this is one that comes from one of the events we did a couple of years ago called Sacred Wisdom, Sacred Earth where we only featured Indigenous moderators and Indigenous speakers from around the world. We had over 1,000 people attend online. And we were able to talk through Indigenous worldviews and talk about issues like biodiversity and climate through an Indigenous worldview. And that meant we didn't use those language. What we actually focused on was water, food, medicine, sovereignty, and spirit because in the Indigenous worldview, there is no separation between these different things.
Our vision is that inner-community and planetary resilience are interdependent. We cannot achieve any one of these without working on the other two. And that means that we really focus on connecting resilience. Now, what do I mean by resilience? The short way of describing it is the ability to bounce back after adversity. And what's fascinating to me is that it doesn't matter which field-- psychology, sociology, ecology-- we all describe it in a very similar way. When we talk about these different things-- the physical threats that we are facing, the threats our communities are facing, the threats we face emotionally and psychologically-- it's really important that we integrate all of these things.
Now, how do I do it? And how have I been dealing with eco-anxiety and climate distress that I've been suffering from since mid 2000s? So I'll tell you. These are the three precepts I use to communicate with faith leaders but to also give me courage to do this work. The first is that biologically, physically, the Earth is a closed system. That means that the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the geosphere, all of it is right here. No alien thing can penetrate it. Nothing can leave the Earth. Nothing can enter it unless it's an occasional meteor and sometimes-- I like to joke-- an egotistical billionaire.
Nothing naturally leaves this space. It's closed. Everything that happens-- the people we love, the people we hate, the parties we decide are terrible and just not worth existing, the politicians that we think are not worth existing-- all of it happens within it. We are constantly recycling within it. We are born. We live. We die. And when we die, what happens? We decompose. We literally physically become part of life, and we generate life again. So in a sense, nature's first principle is this. It's closed. We all are constantly recycling into one another.
The second is that nature knows no boundaries. There is no moment at which we can, for example, look at the oxygen that's entering our lungs right now and say where the oxygen ends and where we begin. No one can do it. None of us are able to. There are no boundaries within nature. You cannot, at any point, say this is where a river system ends, the wetlands begin, and dry earth happens. It's just completely fluid. Ecosystems are constantly flowing into one another. Species are constantly moving in ways that actually impact another species.
And finally, everything rests on something else. Life is predicated on interdependence. You cannot move a species out of an ecosystem and not see that impact. We require this magical interplay of species working and living with one another. We require it to function well for us to do well. Bees are the perfect example. You remove bees today, tomorrow, one third of our agriculture will collapse.
And so when we talk about sanctuary, there is this idea that it has boundary. I know sanctuary, in fact, from a religious perspective, it's like a specific part of the church in the old days. And when I was walking here, I saw the Memorial Church actually said "sanctuary." We kind of have this idea that it has physical parameters.
But what if we thought for a second that the entire firmament of life, Earth herself, is a sanctuary? None of us could live for a second without her. She is unconditionally providing us safety, unconditionally reassuring us that we have the right to live. How is it that we do not see her as the ultimate sanctuary? And if we were to say that-- if we were to say Earth is the sanctuary, would it change how we see her? Would we have this moment like we do when we enter a chapel where we would allow ourselves to feel her grace? We would allow ourselves to be filled with wonder. We would allow ourselves to be close to God. Thank you.
So Dekila has agreed to take questions and answers for the rest of our time. So if you would like to ask a question, just please raise your hand and I think Jonathan will run the microphone around the room.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for that talk. I found it really compelling. And as you were speaking, I was thinking about religion both as an organization and as a set of dogma. And it seemed clear to me the way different organizations can use their organization to take concrete steps that address climate change. When I thought about the dogma, I was struggling-- some religion seem to have more of an abstraction in their conception of the divine, that it's something that somehow maybe isn't completely tracking the day to day or completely present or immanent in nature.
And then other religious systems, perhaps, don't allow themselves that distance between concept and experience or the physical world and the spiritual world. I wonder when you're dealing with these different religious groups how you address dogmatic differences and how you develop a theology that people can all ground themselves in?
DEKILA CHUNGYALPA: Yeah. I was telling Matt on the way over that I never took a religious-studies course throughout my education. And if someone told me I would work with religions, I would have been the most astonished of everybody out there. And in a weird way, it has served me well because I walk in working with faith leaders saying that I'm not an expert. It's the opposite of what we're taught in Western education.
And I think offering myself in that way in as humble a way as possible means that I actually get to cut through a lot of dogma. Martin Palmer, who created the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, gave me advice very early on when I realized I was going to do this without any education and just based on goodwill and this access I had to faith leaders. He said, as long as you present yourself as a person of faith first and a scientist second, I think they will listen.
And that has been my experience. I'm very honest about who I am. It means that sometimes the conversations are really difficult. Sometimes with evangelical leaders, for example, pro-life issues come front and center. And I cannot pretend to be anything other than I am, so I'm very clear to say, I'm pro-life for myself and pro-choice for everyone else.
It really matters that I show up with integrity. And I lose a lot of faith leaders that are in the room. I lose them in that moment. But there are some who stay because what they are more interested in is that I'm showing up with integrity then the fact that they don't like what I'm saying, or they don't come from the same worldview.
We-- Loka recently convened several evangelical preachers together in November, and it was one of our first in-person events after COVID. And we were having these very beautiful but tense dialogues around climate change and talking to preachers experiences of addressing climate change in their congregations or not wanting to take it on. Some felt like they would get kicked out by the congregation if they took it on.
And one of the preachers actually just bluntly asked me, well, what is your idea of God? Do you believe in God? And I just couldn't finesse an answer other than what I knew and what I believe. And I ended up saying something like, my idea of God may not be necessarily the Christian idea of God, although I know there are Christian theologians who have described them the same way, and that is that they are unknowable. The worst thing to me would be to imagine a God that is just like the human species because, dang, we're such a short-sighted species.
And it was very uncomfortable. I mean, I was sweating when I said it because I thought, oh, I'm going to lose this pastor, and this pastor is someone I really-- he represents a fairly conservative congregation that I've been trying to build bridges with. I don't want to lose him. He stayed. He stayed until the end of the day and left the next day. He didn't stay another day. But the fact that he stayed in that conversation, to me, is enough sign of success. It's enough for me.
I think one of the things that we've gotten very used to about success is that it must be grand. It must be individualistic. It should preferably be Instagrammed or TikToked. We have this idea of success that is really linear. And again, going back to nature, evolution is not linear. There are lots of zigzags, a lot of going back and going forward. And so if I'm taking my cues from nature, it requires that I'm fluid when addressing and confronting dogma in different religions.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you so much for your presentation. And it inspired a couple of thoughts. I know we all know the stuff about the sanctuary-- Mother Earth and how Indigenous communities have always, without any so-called formal education or training or any kind of sophisticated access to information, had almost like a common sense of interdependence with it. So they've always been the bearers of the torch, so to speak.
And then as we develop, obviously, we created this mess. I liked when you said that a couple of egotistic billionaires leave the system. And I wonder if one thing that could help is to organize trips for politicians and CEOs-- one-way trip, free-- just to go out. And that may help a little bit, but obviously, it's not enough. So my question is centered around when we say education.
I am most concerned about, obviously, the generations that are now the five-year-old, the 10-year-olds, the 15-year-olds that are going to be a different demographic. So whether they're reached out, obviously, in as many ways as possible, including the faith and the congregations and all the systems that are available but, nevertheless, they are a huge number of people that are going to be around when we are not in another 30 years. Things are going to look really ugly, and they're going to be the ones that have to think and come up with survival solutions, at least.
So what are your thoughts on how we not only outreach and prepare them but transcend the subgroups, let's say, that are in place now since in another 20 years, it's going to be a different group or groups of groups? So I don't know if that's a clear question. But what do we do with the kids, basically?
DEKILA CHUNGYALPA: Yeah, I love that question. I think it's actually what drove me to really center Loka's vision on inner resilience. As an environmentalist, we're so driven by what happens physically that all our energy goes into physical protection-- wildlife species, protected areas, recycling-- even though that doesn't always work-- and so on.
We sort of are constantly putting ourselves into physical, tangible projects. And not only do we measure those, we value them because we can measure them. The intangible makes us very uncomfortable. But actually, when I think about what kids need the most to survive the world that's going to come where disasters are going to be much, much more frequent and much, much more severe, I think the things that we need to inculcate in kids is something we are just not taking on right now. That is adaptability. That is ability to decenter themselves and decenter our attachment to comfort.
When we talk about luxury, what is it we really mean? What do we mean when we talk about luxury? What we really mean is comfort. We're constantly comforting ourselves. That's what we mean. We're attached to that. I am. If someone bumped me up and put me in first class, I'm not saying no. We're attached to it in a really visceral way. And yet, we're creating a future where no one gets to be comfortable.
How do we-- first, we're going to have to teach ourselves to understand how to cut this attachment we have to comfort. And then we have to teach everybody else how they're going to have to do it. I mean, you brought up Indigenous peoples and Indigenous traditions. Indigenous elders still live this. They teach it. It's partly why Loka works with Indigenous elders because we have to find the sources of wisdom we need so that we can see the world differently, and we can behave differently.
To me, this polarization is absolutely key for that reason. Loka is small. We're a small organization that is in a large University. So why do I put all my effort into it? It's because we need blueprints to show people that it can be done. We can unpolarize. We can build bridges. We can break down these subgroups. That's ultimately, I think, something that each one of us can do in our own lives.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for this talk. I've learned so much from you. I was really surprised to learn that one of the groups that you have built the most strong bridges with is the evangelical community. I grew up in the evangelical church. And I've tried to bring this topic up, and it's not usually gone over very well in my own community.
And so you mentioned the three like topics that you bring up. But I was wondering how you even start these conversations. What's the first thing you say to people?
DEKILA CHUNGYALPA: So I have a technique, which is always start by praising them. So I always start by-- when I'm meeting with new faith leaders that don't know me or don't my work, what I start with is their track record on something they've done that's excellent. And evangelical churches are excellent on disaster relief, post-disaster. Whether they believe in climate change or not, they are part of climate-disaster recovery, and they've done it really well. They're really generous. A lot of the donations that come from post-climate disaster all around the world comes from evangelical churches in the US. So having that conversation is really important.
The other thing I do is I stop using language that creates tension. I stop using language that's going to create a knee-jerk, emotional reaction because what I'm trying to do is find that neutral space. I'm trying to create a neutral space. So it's not a problem to avoid the term "climate change" and say "disasters" instead. If I, as a stranger, came to you and said, your house is burning or is going to burn, you are going to pay attention. At that moment, you're not going to say, well, are you a scientist? Do I believe in your science? Do you believe in God? None of that's going to happen. Is just here is a fact, and now you can respond to it.
And so I think talking through the threats for the community evangelicals care the most about has been really useful. But I also really don't think of myself as a primary ambassador. I work with primary ambassadors. I collaborate very closely with pastors, including Reverend Ed Brown, who created Care of Creation. I work with the World Evangelical Alliance. I work with A Rocha. So all these different evangelical organizations that are trusted.
And I think one of the things that-- going back to this idea of individual success, we are so trained to think that success is individualized. But actually, all the sustainable activity we do has to be in community. And so for me, finding that community of faith leaders that want to work on this is critical. So what you're looking for is allies, essentially. If there's even one person at your dinner table that's willing to hear you out, talk about disasters, that means there's two of you. It's a louder voice.
And so picking an issue doesn't have to be the issue because the goal is not to solve the climate crisis at your dinner table. It is to actually create an alliance. That means that you have a lot of room to play with what issue you want to start with. And your focus is to build trust. It's no longer, I'm here to solve the climate crisis. It's, I'm just here to build trust, and I'm here to support what you do. And I think that changes the dynamic quite a bit. I'm not sure it will work, but you should try it.
AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Matta. I'm a student in Buddhist Ministry here. Thank you so much for your talk. I actually don't feel anxious after it. I feel kind of rejuvenated and hope for the future. So thank you. I wanted to ask specifically on something that's come up a lot in my studies in my life, which is a growing interest across Buddhist and Indigenous American and First Nations people in one another in a way that's not proselytizing or conversion based but genuinely a kind of mutual interest in co-constructing or rediscovering shared knowledge.
And one of the things that I noticed in your slides is your multi-site work in working with Indigenous peoples in Asia but also in the Americas. And so I'm wondering if you could share some of your insight and wisdoms that you've gained in your work about building those kinds of cross-Indigenous solidarities, specifically-- just from my own position-- linking Buddhists and Indigenous Buddhists with Indigenous peoples in nations here in the Americas, particularly as I haven't seen the solidarity building happen much or been facilitated in the realm of ecological preservation and work. But it seems to me a very potent site for potential energy.
DEKILA CHUNGYALPA: Thank you. I think the first thing I'd love to say is you should-- whenever we ask Tibetans, are you Indigenous, it's just like 500 answers. No one agrees. So I've never told a story in public, but I actually went to school in Ohio. I went to College of Wooster. And one of the lovely things about this small University was you could design your own independent-study program. And so I decided to look at decision making on nuclear dumping in Native sites and got a grant and promptly, at the age of 19 or 20, went off to a reservation and just showed up, like a fool. I don't recommend it because you guys have the internet now. In those days, we just had the phone call.
DEKILA CHUNGYALPA: And so I landed in the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, and they were incredibly kind to me. Not only did they allow me to do my research, they drove me around. They were just really excited to see what they saw as a sister from across the oceans come back to them. And one of the stories they told me was that they believed they were the First Peoples and that we Asians had left the Americas and crossed the Bering Sea and gone to Asia.
And so it was completely opposite what I'd been taught, scientifically. But it was amazing because it meant they had this wealth of compassion for me because they saw me as one of their lost ones coming home. And it taught me this really valuable lesson, which is, we don't need to question anyone's worldviews. Why can we not hold absolute truths together in one hand without saying there is only one, and my one has to be the primary one that wins and beats everybody else up? It could be that we're holding multiple truths in our hands and comfortable with it.
But it meant that I felt very strongly that I owed Native folks here in the US. And every program I've created, I've tried very hard to integrate it because you saw I started with land acknowledgment. But what I see, especially in universities, is most people are really satisfied and proud that they created one, and then they think the work is done. They just stop. And Loka-- for us, what we're doing with our Native partners is actually giving back. One of the programs we're working on is a documentary on Native resilience in the Great Lakes area.
To me, when I think about indigeneity, one of the larger questions that comes to mind is, well, if we are identified by land and water, and land and water is being impacted, many of us leave those regions. Are we still Indigenous when we leave those regions? And the answer is, yes, of course. No matter where I go, I'm Bhutia. My guardian protector is Kangchenjunga. He's going to protect me no matter where I go.
So how do I show up as a Bhutia person in the lands that don't belong to me and that I don't belong to? I want to show up in the same way that I want other people to show up in Sikkim, to give the same kind of respect that I give to my guardian deity, to the lands that I belong to. And so I think for each one of us, as we're thinking through how we build these relationships, especially among Indigenous people all around the world, first and foremost, it has to be that we show up as our true selves in a way that we want others to show up in our lands.
I think the other part to it, to me, is that we show up not wanting to take. And everything in our society teaches us to take. We're like, God, we love extracting, don't we? We're like, oh, yeah, this is for Instagram. Yeah, this is what TikTok. We can't even see something without wanting to extract it and use it for our purposes because that's what we see all around us. That's what we're taught. We're imprinted by this model.
And the communities I know that have escaped it the most are Indigenous communities because they have protected themselves. One of the loveliest parts that I see, no matter where I've been with Indigenous communities, is that our most sacred leaders are often not known to anyone outside the community. That's how we protect them, just like Kangchenjunga is not known to the world. That's how we protect Kangchenjunga where really, it means the Indigenous worldview is turning around this extractive relationship of success, meaning of success.
So I think going to Indigenous communities we want to partner with in a non-extractive way and asking ourselves what that means from the beginning to the end is really important. And I think for anyone who wants to do that-- my experience is they're really welcoming. They're very kind.
AUDIENCE: Hello. Thank you so much. Yeah just soaking in all that you shared with us today. I was wondering if you could talk more about the pedagogical components that you started to speak to in the various programs that you're running. What does it look like to surface the sorts of conversations that you're asking people to engage with and to ask people to change in real time or at least consider changing their minds or consider what it means to bring in the information that someone else is sharing with them and integrate it into their lives in some ways? Does that look different across your different programs? I imagine it does. I'm just curious to learn more about the pedagogy.
DEKILA CHUNGYALPA: So everything I showed you was success. Let me tell you about this big failure I had last year. So with a lot of confidence, I designed an inner resilience-- it was called RITA, Resilience in the Anthropocene-- course for students on eco-anxiety and climate distress. And this was because I was invited so much to speak on this topic on campus.
And typically, I avoid campus. Most of my work is outward facing. But then because of this, I thought there would be a demand. So we floated this course, and we had twice as many faculty sign up than students. Our numbers were so low among students, we decided to shelve the course. And obviously, I was devastated. It took me a few days before I was able to even touch that topic in my mind. It was so raw.
But what came out of that was something that I've learned from Indigenous elders and from Buddhist teachers, which is really understanding deep time-- really being comfortable with deep time and allowing things to slow down. I think probably the least capitalist thing we could do is slow down in every part of our lives. And it meant that I realized I had thought students are ready. I made this assumption students are ready without creating safe space for students.
But actually, it was that faculty were ready. Faculty was just like, we really need this class. We need to talk about what we are seeing among our students. And among faculty, what was interesting to me was there was another group which was religious workers. Religious workers have been just on me asking, what's the latest research showing, trying to understand and integrate that back into their pastoral care work.
And so I think one of the things that I love about pedagogical learning is that there are precepts you have to follow, and you can never jump over it. And that's what I learned was I'd sort of ignored all the precepts because I had gotten so carried away. And so now this year, this fall, we will launch an online class, not an on-site class, on resilience. And it's very much a course that's going to teach people-- doesn't matter who they are-- not just how to identify these different symptoms but to identify them within themselves and then to apply different techniques to address them.
So when I talk about creating a safe space-- a sanctuary for students-- one of the things I didn't think through is how scary those topics are if you don't have psychological or spiritual practices that help you address them. So this course is going to provide a whole variety of different practices-- nature-based practices, Indigenous land-based healing practices, Buddhist practices, meditations, prayer, all kinds of different techniques, so people actually can walk away not just learning something but actually applying a solution.
And it's an ongoing process. I think part of resilience building has to be that people feel that they are the architects of their own resilience. George Bonanno is this incredible psychologist. One of the things that he studied and proved is that it turns out, post disasters, 70% of people actually bounce back. We have this idea that resilience is something that is unnatural or hard. Actually, what he proved is that it's the easiest thing. We humans are designed to be resilient.
And so it's not that we're teaching people to be more resilient. It's that we're providing and teaching them what the conditions are to create their own resilience. And I think that-- and I'm kind of moving away from the pedagogy. But I think that's what I learned most recently about this process.
AUDIENCE: I'm a physician. And just a little tag on to what you were just discussing because I think it's the absolute critical issue. As a physician, even in the dire circumstances, you need to give people hope. And how do you balance this right now? Because knowing it's a partially religious group, there are some end-time scenarios here that some people even embrace. How do you manage-- because I think-- and I have children-- for that generation, we have to find a way to not become nihilistic ourselves and give them hope but not false hope because this is the trick right now. The most recent IPCC report looks pretty bleak if you read between the lines, and it's coming much, much faster than we thought.
So there is a sense of urgency in my own mind. Have you encountered this at all that there is this one voice who is really nihilistic and who may actually usurp the discussion then?
DEKILA CHUNGYALPA: Yeah. Something I was talking to Matt about before is the preliminary research on eco-anxiety is showing that people react based on proximity to impact-- so how vulnerable you are, how often you've experienced disaster. Whether it's proximate, approximate, so on, people react differently. And what we see, interestingly, is anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing because it activates people. It activates them to find community, which immediately means your inner resilience increases. Your sense of hope increases. You have pro-environmental behavior, pro-social behavior.
Older people are experiencing a lot of grief because we know what we're losing. And then we have a group in the middle that I worry about the most, which is people who have depressive symptoms because then they sort of go into themselves. They're not going to act. And they either become part of the problem, or they completely disengage. So how do we motivate that group?
I get asked a lot if I have hope. It's the most common question in all my public talks. And usually what I do say is, I don't think that's the right question. I think the question is, do I have courage? And this is something I really learned from some of my Black female friends, who are leaders in the environmental and climate movement, and from Indigenous elders who I work with. Because what they've said again and again is where the rest of us are now-- because we're relatively privileged-- they have been decades ago. For Indigenous people, this is the second or third climate crisis they're experiencing.
So we in the West have this real attachment to hope, not just as a sort of feel-good emotion that needs to happen for us to be resilient, but also, we assume that activates people. And in fact, I think what we need to do to be realistic is to also say, we can have hope because we are incredibly innovative as a species. We are inherent problem solvers as a species.
But we also need courage in equal measure. It's like two wings of a plane. We need both to fly. And I think that combined with looking at history of how many times we've overcome difficult situations, whether it's different communities, different nations, I think a combination of that really helps because there is no avoiding the reality of the situation and how dire it is.
Sorry I don't have a better answer. It's so hard. I can only sympathize. Thank you.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsors-- The Memorial Church of Harvard University and the HDS Buddhist Ministry Initiative.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.