If we can’t move to eco-friendly farms, what can we do practically to live more eco-friendly?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
And belonging to the environment more harmoniously by eco-friendly communities, it’s good if we can do it, but for most of us, it’s not a practical option. So, rather than thinking of solutions in terms of digital logic, one and zero, one of the biggest, there are various kinds of temptations that we are vulnerable to. There are sensual temptations.
But there are also intellectual temptations. Intellectual temptations are basically that, this is the only solution. And if you don’t do this, then everything else is a waste.
And this can happen with any kind of ideology. So, for example, when communists took over power in Russia and USSR and China, they just destroyed everything that was existing before that because they thought it was all a part of the exploitative economy, which they needed to destroy. And then eventually what happened was, communism ended up with a hundred million corpses.
So communism actually led to more deaths than the First World War and Second World War combined together. So now, in some ways, environmentalism can also become an ideology that can become blinding. So there is a prominent environmentalist who said that the best way we could solve the environmental problem is that let all human beings be annihilated.
Then the environment will automatically heal itself. Now this is horrendously misanthropic. If somebody talked about even murdering one person, we would be horrified.
But here there is not just genocide. The word for this would be omnicide. Kill all of humanity and such person is considered, oh, you are such a broad-minded person, you love the environment.
So radical changes may not be possible for everyone. And insisting on radical changes could be just ideological or intellectual temptation that we may need to resist. So there are incremental changes we could do.
So incremental changes could mean that, say, we can look at ourselves and we can look at what do I think is my identity and purpose in the world. Now, of course, we may say I am a soul. If we have a spiritual understanding, I am a soul.
I am meant to progress towards love for God. But, OK, functionally, what all am I doing? So functionally, what all am I doing? And in my environment, how can maybe I can decrease my consumption a little bit? What could I do for that purpose? It could be maybe in a non-judgmental, in an objective way, I could encourage my friends to shift to a more eco-friendly diet, avoid meat or at least decrease meat consumption. The Food and Agriculture Organization has said that even if most of the world decreased its meat consumption to about one third, then that would provide enough food for all the starving people of the world.
So it’s complex how that food will be released. But there are incremental solutions which can have significant effects. So we could consider in my situation, how can I consume less and how can I contribute more? And in general for us, we could work at three levels.
At a practical level in our lives, we can see, maybe there is something which I can consume less. There is something which is called, just like there is alcoholism, there is something called shopaholism. Shopaholism is people get a sense of pleasure by buying.
It’s called retail therapy. Just buy, buy, buy and you feel good about yourself. Maybe I can decrease my consumption of things a little bit.
There is something which I could do at a practical level. Then there is something which I can do at a social level. There is something which I can do at a spiritual level.
At a social level, in my friend circle, I could maybe spread a message of higher awareness. And if we model a lifestyle of decreased consumption, then that can inspire others also. So at a social level in our conversations with people, again in a non-judgmental, non-preachy way, we share strategies for living more harmoniously, more eco-friendly ways.
That we are doing and that we can help others too. And at a spiritual level, if we can share the practices, the wisdom and the practices that provide us inner enrichment, provide us inner enrichment, help us to develop that inner connection, then that can help them also to find that enrichment to the connection with the divine. And that can also help them to decrease their consumption.
And who knows, we might ourselves not make a big difference in terms of say eco-friendly living. But we might inspire someone who could tomorrow do something big in terms of specific factors, specific operations in eco-friendly living. I know one friend here in India.
He belongs to a community which traditionally runs a lot of slaughterhouses. So he became spiritually minded and then he used his influence to inspire many many leaders in his community to change their profession from there to something more constructive, something less disruptive rather. So when we try to share spiritual wisdom with others, sometimes it may feel that we are not making any difference at all.
But sometimes there is some small thing that we might do can trigger a chain reaction, trigger an effect which can make a big difference eventually. So basically at a practical, social and spiritual levels, we can seek to live more harmoniously, practically by consuming less, socially by sharing as much as possible, both practical strategies and spiritual insights for how we could live more harmoniously with nature and spiritually by ourselves finding more non-material enrichment through our practices and thereby becoming more competent to do the practical and the social aspects. Does it answer your question?