A Roundabout Defense of the "Mandala Form" for the BPF National Gathering

NOTE: The recent Eco-Dharma Conference & Retreat at the Wonderwell Mounatin Refuge in Springfield, NH, featured a panel sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. After a video presentation from BPF’s Katie Loncke and Dawn Haney, the panel -- moderated by BPF board member Samantha Wechsler, and featuring Angel Kyodo Williams, Kristin Barker, and myself -- spoke on the subject of “Eco-Charity’s Pitfalls and the Biospherics of Beautiful Struggle,” following from this prompt: “Are some seemingly kind-hearted environmentalisms / eco-initiatives actually reinforcing structural racism unintentionally? How do the ‘good works’ and eco-charity models that might look nice on the surface actually reinforce and perpetuate white supremacy and capitalist modes of investment (including much of the NPIC) that structurally *can't* value people over profit (or nonprofit viability)? What are the pickles in which we find ourselves and our own organizations while trying to do this work? And what are some inspiring alternatives for beautiful anti-oppression work in grassroots EJ struggles?” What follows are the remarks I prepared, excluding some spontaneous moments and stories which will ultimately be included in video of the event.

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Those participating in the environmental movement -- and, by extension, the Eco-Dharma movement -- have a problem to address. This problem finds its roots, I think, in exactly the things that Katie and Dawn and the BPF raise with this panel: white supremacy and capitalism.

Defining these terms as completely as possible involves discussing a range of issues too vast and varied for just a few minutes of remarks, so I’m not even going to try. For our purposes today, I’d like to look at the problem of cultural hegemony within the North American environmental movement, specifically the hegemony of white male capitalists. For the uninitiated, cultural hegemony has to do with ways a ruling class, whether they are aware of it or not, dominate others: by making their own values, customs, ideas, communication styles, needs, and so on the universal norm for everyone, rather than a norm among others. With this unassailable status quo firmly in place, alternative values, customs, ideas, communication styles, needs, and so on are effectively marginalized.

So where do we see this hegemony of white male capitalists with the North American environmental movement? One place would be at the top of most organizational structures; where CEO, president, executive director, and other such senior management positions are more often than not held by white men. This seems peculiar, especially when we take into consideration that, as a demographic group, they have comparatively much less at stake here. Writing for the Guardian newspaper this summer, Suzanne Goldenberg noted that although climate change has been shown to disproportionately affect “minorities and women, the elderly and the poor,” leadership within the environmental movement has either continued to be (or, in some cases, reverted back to being) white and male. This despite such facts as these, courtesy of The Nation’s Steven Hsieh and the NAACP’s Climate Justice Initiative:

Sixty-eight percent of African-Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant, the zone of maximum exposure to pollutants that cause an array of ailments, from heart disease to birth defects. Communities of color breathe in nearly 40 percent more polluted air than whites. African-American children are three times as likely to suffer an asthma attack.

And this blunt warning from the United Nations’ Women Watch:  “Women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men.” Period. Full stop.

Research also shows communities of color to be much more concerned about the environment than other groups, further problematizing the leadership issue. ThinkProgress contributor Marina Fang points to a 2010 study from the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication which tells us that “in many cases, minorities are equally as supportive, and often more supportive of national climate and energy policies, than white Americans.” Of special note to Buddhist Americans, she also refers to the work of Grist’s Anna Fahey, who has shown that “green values stand out as particularly important” to Asian-Americans: among other things, the series of National Asian American Surveys show that “71 percent of Asian Americans consider themselves environmentalists, [which is] about 30 points higher than the national average...among some groups, including Chinese and Vietnamese Americans, the proportions are even higher.” Also important is the NAAS finding that “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are also significantly more likely than the national average to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth” -- this is especially true among “among young adults, and among Indian Americans, Japanese Americans, and Korean Americans.”

The UN adds:

Women are not only vulnerable to climate change but they are also effective actors or agents of change in relation to both mitigation and adaptation. Women often have a strong body of knowledge and expertise that can be used in climate change mitigation, disaster reduction and adaptation strategies.

But only in a few cases have women and/or people of color begun to assume leadership within some of our largest environmental organizations -- and I would certainly be remiss not to mention that these exceptions include one of our conference partners, 350.org, whose executive director is May Boeve. At the moment, however, the Sierra Club, the Climate Reality Project, the National Parks and Conservation Association, the League of Conservation Voters, the World Wildlife Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defence Council, and the Nature Conservancy -- to name just a few of the major players -- are all led by white males.

Economic inequality matters very much when it comes to addressing environmental concerns as well. Goldenberg points out that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2014 report on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” warns that those who struggle to make ends meet will suffer the most as things worsen. “People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise marginalised are especially vulnerable to climate change,” the report says. She quotes Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, who explains in part with the example of crop yields: as climate change affects a reduction in crop yields, prices will rise. The result? “People who were already disadvantaged, more of them are going to be suffering from malnutrition.” The report further notes that climate-related weather events are, as we speak, undermining aid work in areas that need it and creating “poverty pockets” internationally.

As we confront this disparity of effects between the haves and have-nots, we must necessarily look at the systems that have created haves and have-nots in the first place. But are we? As Naomi Klein has warned:

We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.

Worse still, as she sees it, many of the mainstream green organizations in North America have cozied up to this unfettered capitalist system instead of doing anything to resist it. “There is no enemy anymore," she says. "More than that, [Big Green is] casting corporations as the solution, as the willing participants and part of [the] solution.” But with corporations beholden to only their shareholders, nothing and no one else, how can we reasonably expect them to participate fully in the hard work of solving environmental problems? And shouldn’t we be talking about that...a lot?

One could argue that people who are not white and not male and not beneficiaries of capitalism are much more at risk and much more ready to address environmental problems head-on. And yet, their voices are not well represented by or within mainstream environmental groups in North America. It’s very unclear to me the degree to which people who are not white and not male and not beneficiaries of capitalism feel the modern environmental movement speaks to their concerns and needs -- and the urgency of those concerns and needs. This stands out not just for the reasons I’ve mentioned, but also when we consider the role of environmental movements in dismantling hegemony in other parts of the world. Think, for example, of the Kenyan-based Green Belt Movement, led by the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate and ecofeminist thinker Wangari Maathai. Or Vandana Shiva and her NGO Navdanya, a network of seed keepers and organic producers spread across 17 states in India.

We must start doing similar work to challenge hegemony -- indeed, as Klein notes, even scientists are telling us to do so. She quotes an article from the journal Nature Climate Change by climatologists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows:

Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.

As we seek ways to challenge hegemony as participants in the Eco-Dharma movement, I think we would do well to learn from Katie and Dawn and the BPF. And we happen to have a striking example set by them at this moment: as the organization prepares for their annual gathering later this month, participants for the limited space have been selected using a diversity tool. Every person who wished to attend was required to submit various pieces of demographic information through what the BPF called a “mandala form.” The BPF explains:

A mandala is a traditional Buddhist symbol representing the universe and its diverse components. We have 120 spaces available for the Gathering, and our intention is to cultivate diversity on a variety of dimensions.

Not surprisingly, Katie, Dawn, and the rest of the BPF leadership have received push-back. To their great credit, they note very legitimate concerns that have been raised about privacy and data security; but many of the complaints have been more of the “this is so unfair” variety.When Katie and I discussed the response, she was, again, charitable to a fault, acknowledging how imperfect diversity work can be. But something had to give. Indeed, as she put it to me in conversation: “From tokenism to the add-and-stir method, diversity is so often an afterthought, rather than a central methodology for approaching our social justice work.”The mandala form and process for registering participants for the BPF gathering represent a vital challenge to hegemony -- not just hegemony within the North American environmental movement but also hegemony within North American Buddhism. We would all do well to be open to this challenge -- and to keep opening to further challenges.Keep opening, keep opening, keep opening...