Tetsunori Koizumi, Director
Grumbling about the weather is something that we humans have been doing for a long time as many human activities depend on weather conditions, including farming, fishing and logging. We know very well how farmers pray for rain as the source of water for their crops. On the other hand, there are people who become impatient about rainy weather lasting for three days, as Benjamin Franklin noted in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in June 1733: “After three days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy.”
In the geographical areas where there is the rainy season lasting more than three days—for weeks, even for months in some places—people have learned to adjust their living to take advantage of it—like farmers who plant their rice ahead of the monsoon season and Buddhist practitioners who go into the rains retreat. While people expect the rainy weather to last for a long time during the rainy season, they certainly would not want to see rain becoming too heavy or lasting too long. People also would not want to see the rainy weather occurring outside of the normal rainy season.
What is worrisome about the weather these days is that it has become too erratic and too extreme, depriving people of the opportunity to conduct their normal activities, whether farming, fishing or any sort of outdoor events. While meteorologists around the world provide us a reliable and timely weather forecast every day and at all times, knowing about the weather condition does not prevent us from becoming victims of extreme weather such as hurricanes, floods, and wild fires.
As a matter of fact, incidents of extreme weather seem to be happening more often and becoming severer in recent years. The heat wave, a yearly event in American states like California and Nevada, expanded this year to Canada from late-June through mid-July, with the highest temperature reaching 49.6℃ in British Columbia. In August, the rain clouds that are normally observed during the rainy season of June covered the western region of Japan for more than a week, producing the weather phenomenon known as “training” that is known to cause heavy rains, thunder storms, and flash floods. Prefectures in the Kyushu region were hit especially hard by this late rainy season, with people losing their homes to floods and landslides, not to mention loved ones.
“Everybody talks about weather, but nobody does anything about it” is a statement attributed to Mark Twain. It is certainly incumbent on us to disprove Mark Twain, who made this statement back in the nineteenth century. What can we do about these extreme weathers, then? Daily news about the casualties of extreme weather around the world should be a wake-up call for all of us to start doing something about the weather, not just grumbling about it.
International organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are calling us to action, for extreme weather events happening in the world today are symptoms of the climate crisis, which we humans have a lot to do with. Scientists working for other research and academic institutions are also telling us that the climate crisis today is mostly man-made in that the way we have been conducting our living with little regard for the environment is responsible for such climate changes as air pollution, fresh water depletion, rising sea levels, and top soil erosion.
What is behind the climate crisis that we face in the world today if we humans have a lot to do with it, if it is mostly man-made? It is the view of the world that has guided our thoughts and actions for the last couple of centuries. As Fernand Braudel, a French historian known for his work on civilization and capitalism, points out in his A History of Civilizations (1993), “In every period, a certain view of the world, a collective mentality, dominates the whole mass of society. Dictating a society’s attitudes, guiding its choice, confirming its prejudices and directing its actions, this is very much a fact of civilization.” What has been behind our collective mentality, dictating our attitudes, guiding our choices, confirming our prejudices and directing our actions for the last couple of centuries is the view of the world that sees the natural environment as the storehouse of resources that can be exploited for the production of goods and services to increase our material standard of living.
To the extent that the view of the world that has guided industrial civilization is behind it, the climate crisis is the spiritual crisis as well. The climate crisis is the spiritual crisis because there is inner weather as well as the outer weather. Recall what John Burroughs, an American naturalist, said about the weather in his 1877 essay titled Is it going to rain?: “I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.” John Burroughs craved for rain sometimes because, for an essayist like him, “rain is necessary to the mind as to vegetation”, as he put it, and his thoughts became thirsty without moisture. Recall also what Robert Frost, an American poet, said about the weather in his 1928 poem, “Tree at My Window”: That day she puts out our heads together, / Fate had her imagination about her, / Your head so much concerned with outer, / Mine with inner, weather.
What is needed today is for all of us to re-examine what the world around us is like and what our relationship to that world ought to be. This is the reason why we need to listen to what spiritual leaders such as Thich Nhat Hanh (in his 2008 book The World We Have) and the Dalai Lama (in his 2020 book Our Only Home) have to say on the climate crisis. What they have to say, as is to be expected, is the need to embrace the Buddhist view of the world. What they are advocating can also be called the ecological, or systems, view of the world, which sees the natural environment not as something separate from us, but as the evolving web of interdependence among all the living and non-living systems. Only when we wake to the reality of delicate balance among causes and conditions that link these systems to one another can our thoughts and actions be directed towards preventing the climate crisis from escalating into a real catastrophe for human civilization.