Buddhist Psychology of Climate Denial

Welcome to the end of the year, the end of the decade, and the last episode in GG Season Two. From the creator’s side, GG Season 3 looks like the best is yet to come.

It’s been a challenging year globally in so many ways. And certainly climate disruption tops the list of 2019’s human failures: We utterly fail to comprehend the consequences of our continued denials, delayals and complacency. America is truly the worst offender and I suspect this is because temperature rise is always described in Celsius; a numbering system Americans don’t relate to conceptually or emotionally. We speak Fahrenheit. A 1° Celsius rise doesn’t sound like much to Americans. A correlative 33° Fahrenheit rise sounds terrifying.

This is a dharma talk I gave in September 2019, which lays out the hard truths of inhabitability that come with climate disruption and temperature rise (all numbers are given in Fahrenheit) and offers a Buddhist psychological view of humanity’s continuing denials of and complacency about climate disruption. None of what you are about to hear is conjecture or climate science’s worst case scenario. Nonetheless it is alarming. And I try in this talk to make sense of what about our human evolutionary wiring and our kleshic perceptual habits, that makes it so hard for us to truly comprehend the enormity of destruction we are causing our planet and its inhabitants. I pray this episode inspires others to renounce denial and fully embrace individual and collective actions in this next decade that can, in some way, mitigate the horrors of climate disruption.

Visit Lisa’s website to download more of her dharma talks, view her 2020 Bay Area Teaching schedule, and learn more about her psychotherapy practice and publications.

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