New York: At what was once a Capuchin monastery on New York’s Hudson River, Zen archers were out in force members of a group celebrating 10 years of study with a retreat at what’s now the Garrison Institute, a New Agey organization that tries to meld contemplation and action.

The idea of the Zen archery is to combine intention and action, focus and carry-through. It’s not much of a stretch to go from the visiting Zen archers to the institute’s own initiative, an ambitious programme this month which will look at how the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi relate to current environmental issues, particularly climate change.

Central to Gandhi, after all, was the notion that the truth, power and moral force of a movement are inseparable from the truth, power and moral force of its actors.

So there’s nothing unexpected in the current melding of Gandhi and climate change, tied to the Metropolitan Opera’s first staging of Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha (The Power of Truth), beginning April 11. That will be followed by a free public event on April 13 in Manhattan which will include including scholars, environmental leaders and artists, including Glass.

The guiding notion is that climate change today calls for the same kind of collective will, shared destiny, moral purpose, personal responsibility and strategic acumen as the other great movements, and that Gandhi’s ideas and achievements are entirely germane to what needs to happen now.

“The environment and nonviolence is like a marriage made in heaven,” Glass said.

“If we treated the environment with non-violence we wouldn’t have the polar ice cap melting away.” Remarkably, almost a century ago, Gandhi’s writings were full of thoughts on the environment:

“The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed”

“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West... If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts”

“This little globe of ours is not a toy of yesterday”

“We may utilise the gifts of Nature just as we choose, but in Her books, debits are always equal to the credits.”

“He had an ability to find a very simple symbol that could mobilize a great number of people; think of his Salt March,” said Gandhi’s grandson and biographer, Rajmohan Gandhi, referring to the 1930 protest against the British tax on salt.

Al Gore cited both Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln in a speech on climate change in 2007. He noted Gandhi’s sense of satyagraha and a statement of Lincoln’s during the depths of the Civil War.

Source : DNA