Living Beyond Hope and Fear: Warrior Principle, Climate Action

This weekend in Boulder there will be an opportunity to look at climate change from a Buddhist perspective. The Shambhala Center in Boulder is hosting its second annual climate symposium: Living Beyond Hope and Fear: Warrior Principle, Climate Action.

Emily Takahashi, one of the organizers of the event has been working with the climate change salon at the Shambhala Center. She says the warrior principle in the Shambhala tradition can be applied to the current crisis facing the climate. “Of course it’s not warrior in the sense of waging war, but it’s really arousing bravery and compassion and not necessarily having answers, but being willing to address and face what’s happening and drawing from the inherent wisdom that human beings possess.”

Brett KenCairn, Senior Environmental Planner with the city of Boulder will be participating in one of sessions at the symposium on what individuals can do. He started working with the city in 2013 to help write the next steps in the climate action plan.

“When I first started working with the city, I would suggest that we were still living in and working from the perspective that we were hoping to stop climate change and that that was the pervasive social view. And I would argue now here, five years later, that what we now realize is that climate change is happening and it’s going to continue to happen, the question is really how long how intense and how we’re actually going to turn the corner on this.

The symposium will include a children’s program featuring story teller Odds Bodkin and an inter-faith forum looking at climate change from different faith perspectives. Melanie Klein, Executive Director of the Boulder Shambhala Center says the inter-faith dialogue model can be very effective in issues such as climate change.

“We’ve been working with a wonderful organization called Green Faith for some time which brings together Christian ministry and environmental work…and the Executive Director from Green Faith will be moderating our inter faith panel and the inter faith panel on Sunday morning will include Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish faith leaders and they will be talking exactly about this – what is special sort of resilience that comes out of people working together, people from different traditions working together on something like this and how that kind of strength and diversity can be very powerful, that we can look beyond our typical points of view and share the burden with each other of making important changes.”