The Hypocrisy of Climate Warriors

Acharya Prashant: The very urge for liberation, when it doesn’t find an outlet, becomes the urge to consume. Do you see this? Where does the tendency to consume so much come from? It comes from the misidentified and thwarted urge toward liberation. If you will not provide liberation to a man, his energies will flow in the direction of consumption.

So, these are the two things that we require: one, less population; secondly, the population that remains must be highly spiritual in its outlook. Only then can you avoid climate catastrophe. All this tamasha that is happening on the streets will not help; instead, it is making people feel good about themselves.

I look at these climate warriors, young men, and young women, some of them were fighting the police recently in Bombay, and I thought to myself, will these young people refuse to have a kid? No, that they won’t. Here, for a tree, they are prepared to lay down their lives—and I respect that sentiment, seriously I respect that—but then I want to question the efficacy of that.

You don’t want these two thousand seven hundred trees to be cut down, but then if you get one child, that is the equivalent of cutting down a lakh trees. Bringing one child into the world is the equivalent of cutting down lakh trees—maybe more; just do the maths. But you show so much of sentiment when a tree is hacked down, and you show no sentiment when you see family after family procreating; you in fact send them congratulatory messages: “Wow! Nice, didi! Good that you have your second or third kid now!” Returning from a climate demonstration, what does this young girl do? She calls up her didi and says, “So, didi, was the delivery fine?” What nonsense is this?

Climate catastrophe is a spiritual problem and it can only have a spiritual solution. All else that you see happening around you in the name of climate activism is just tamasha . It will not help. Yes, it will boost up a lot of egos; it will give fame and limelight to a lot of young people. They will become climate warriors; they will become saviors of the world. Tomorrow, one of them might even get the Nobel Prize. So much of the limelight is there, you know. “This young man, he has really brought this issue to popular consciousness. Let’s bestow upon him the Nobel Prize for peace!” All that can happen, but all that will be just symbolic, not helpful at all. Or even if it helps, it will help only to a very marginal degree.

Do you get the real solution? From eight billion, take it back to two billion. And you don’t have to kill people for that; you just have to educate and encourage people not to reproduce; even if they want to have kids, let them have at max one kid. And the second thing is, this two or three billion that finally remains must be deeply spiritual from the heart so that it does not have a tendency to feast upon the world.

But the way climate activism is going, it is going in a very blind direction. People are trying to get governments to intervene by way of legislation. What can the governments do? It’s a democratic world; the governments will only do what the people want them to do. And the people want only cosmetic steps to be taken, so the governments will take cosmetic steps.

In fact, chances are—you know, as far as this tree plantation exercise is concerned—chances are we have already crossed the threshold where tree plantation can reverse the effects of climate change. That threshold has already been crossed. Now we need stricter action. Now we need more meaningful action. Now we need real action. Planting trees might have been a useful step twenty years back, but that threshold has been crossed long since. You need to do more concrete action today, and more concrete action is not about Friday demonstrations and Friday strikes and all that stuff; all that is just a show. Real action needs to be taken.

Full article link: https://acharyaprashant.org/en/articles/dont-blindly-rush-into-good-deeds-1_6a3958c

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