Dalai Lama - Our Only Home: A Climate Appeal to the World

PRAISE FOR A CALL FOR REVOLUTION

Powerful.... Packed with wise advice and perceptive observations.

Parade

Impassioned.... An excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with the Dalai Lamas simple-seeming teachings for improving a complex, globally interconnected world.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Fascinating.... A global leader encourages young people to revel in the cause of peace.

Booklist

[A] call to action...for anyone seeking reflections on the social issues challenging the human condition and inspiration for how to attempt to resolve them.

Library Journal

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has spoken: its time for a compassion revolution.

Tricycle

Also by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

A Call for Revolution: A Vision for the Future

The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

An Appeal to the World: The Way to Peace in a Time of Division

My Spiritual Journey

His Holiness The

Dalai Lama
and
Franz Alt

Our Only Home

A Climate Appeal to the World

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was born in 1935 in Taktser in the northeastern part of Tibet. After the occupation of Tibet by the Peoples Republic of China in 1959, he fled to India, from where he has since worked for a mutually acceptable solution for genuine autonomy of his homeland. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Benevento most recently published his Der Spiegel bestseller Be Rebels of Peace (2018).

Franz Alt , born in 1938, studied theology in Freiburg and Heidelberg. In his long-term career as a journalist, he has repeatedly made his mark as a critical spirit who questions current interpretation of environmental and peace policy issues.

Contents

I am also an ardent supporter of environmental protection. We humans are the only species with the power to destroy the earth as we know it. Yet, if we have the capacity to destroy the earth, so, too, do we have the capacity to protect it.

It is encouraging to see how you have opened the eyes of the world to the urgency to protect our planet, our only home. At the same time, you have inspired so many young brothers and sisters to join this movement.

This is what the Dalai Lama wrote to teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg on May 31, 2019.

In the meantime, Thunberg has been received by the Pope and by former US President Barack Obama. She spoke before the United Nations, before the French Parliament, at two world climate summits, as well as at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize, was invited by the US Senate to speak and honored with Amnesty Internationals Ambassador of Conscience Award. But what has really changed? When young people were taking to the streets every Friday, where were the adults?

Barack Obama said to the shy, calm and serious young lady: You and me, were a team. Her simple answer: Yes. Her motto seems to be: be humble. Before the UN summit, however, amidst tears and in a trembling voice, she flung her anger at politicians across the world:

You have stolen my childhood. You are failing us. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. With clenched fist she went on: We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you continue to look away and come here and say youre doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight? Gretas curse! For a moment politicians had become students to whom the riot act was read, and the student had become a teacher.

In Germany, however, politicians straightaway suggested demonstrating on Saturdays, respectfully leaving the matter up to the old pros. This complacent reaction showed how powerful courageously spoken truth can be. The young protesters see through politicians who sell their responsibility for profits of large companies.

Up to now, outrage expressed by adults at the destruction of our planet is far from being loud enough. Global warming is a worldwide catastrophe, unprecedented in human history, because we are pursuing growth for the sake of growth. So we are growing poor. Prosperity gains are decreasing, while economic growth is still increasing. We have forgotten to ask: Growth, for what and for whom? We have been blind to the ecological consequences of this drive.

Greta Thunberg and her followers aim to wake us up. Maybe just in time.

A tsunami is rolling toward us. But many of us are still closing our eyes, plugging our ears and covering our mouths in the face of the danger, like the three famous Japanese monkeys.

After Gretas speech before the UN, the magazine Der Spiegel wondered: Could this be the only sensible person in a crazy world? They suggested that her words may one day be considered a key speech of the early twenty-first century.

In developing countries, in the first half of 2019 alone, millions have lost their homes as well as their belongings due to the effects of global warming. The poorest in particular. Global warming has already reached them; they have to fight for survival in the greenhouse. How can a religious leader and spiritual teacher help in such a situation?

Over the past thirty-eight years, I have been able to meet the Dalai Lama forty times and conduct fifteen television interviews with him on the subjects of peace, human rights, environmental and climate protection. This book appeals to the world to support the young climate activists to take a more active role in protecting this planet and to politicians to urgently tackle the global warming caused by climate change.

Besides Greta, wise and courageous women like Kenyan scientist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai or Indian agronomist and Alternative Nobel Prize winner Vandana Shiva motivate us to implement ecological transition and develop a sustainable ecological market economy, according to the motto, eco-social instead of radically free-market.

In our conversation, it was against the spiritual background of the current problems that the Dalai Lama emphasized that we must re-examine ethically what we have inherited, what we are responsible for and what we will pass on to coming generations.

Seldom in fifty years of journalistic experience have I spoken with such an empathetic, likeable and humorous person. No one has laughed more than he did. It is no coincidence that surveys show he is considered to be the happiest person worldwide. To this religious leader, interreligious ethics have become increasingly important in recent years. And what he says today distinguishes him from other religious leaders: Ethics is more important than religion. We are not born a member of a particular religion. But ethics is innate in all of us. In his lectures worldwide, he speaks more and more frequently about secular ethics beyond all religions. Albert Schweitzer called the same concern Reverence for All Life. In this book, the Dalai Lama speaks of ecological ethics.

This code of secular ethics breaks down national, religious and cultural boundaries and outlines values that are innate in all people and generally binding. These are not external, material values, but inner values such as mindfulness, compassion for all creatures, mental training, as well as the pursuit of happiness. There is no justice without compassion and mercy. If we want to be happy ourselves, we should practice compassion, and if we want others to be happy, we should also practice compassion. We all prefer to see smiling rather than glum faces, the Dalai Lama says.