Karma, from the Sanskrit word “karman” is an amalgamation of “action, effect, and fate”. In the popular sense of the word, it has come to mean that actions have consequences, and that our individual human behaviour exists in a cause-effect relationship with a vague sense of a moral cosmos. Often described as the Principle of Karma, it means that personal acts motivated by “good” intentions are eventually rewarded in kind, and that “bad” acts are also rewarded in kind.
Although karma usually applies to the cause-effect relationship of our individual actions, it might also apply to our collective actions, a more expansive understanding that is worth considering, given the consequence of the unfolding havoc we are causing on our planet.
Actions have effects. We know this from our experience as individuals, which for many has been an inducement to behave with the care, compassion and foresight that is intended to reduce suffering and unhappiness. But, if karma applies collectively as a result of our many environmental transgressions, then we need to consider the impact on humanity as a whole.
The present gives us a hint of the future, and the current one is shadowed with ominous possibilities. Our collective human behaviour has induced the planet’s sixth major extinction event, with dire consequences for all ecologies and all life. Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane from burning fossil fuels have risen to levels not known for millions of years— carbon dioxide from 280 parts per million to 424 ppm, and methane has almost tripled from 722 parts per billion to 1909 ppb. The result is a global temperature increase, the direct cause of massive fires, extensive floods, extreme storms, crop failures, and a generally unpredictable and uncomfortable life for us and everything else on our planet.
The karmic problem this presents is that humanity, when considered existentially, is an abstraction. Those who experience the consequences of our collective actions are suffering as individuals: farmers who are flooded off the land, ranchers who are burned out of existence, fishers who can no longer sustain a family from plundered oceans, townsfolk whose homes are destroyed by tornadoes. Add to this the early fire season that has brought devastation to Alberta, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and elsewhere—at least 2 million hectares of Canada reduced to ashes. At the moment of this writing, the Donnie Creek fire in northern BC is one of 250 fires out of control. It has burned about 2,500 square kilometres of forests, two times BC’s last year’s total. In Canada, 26,000 people have been displaced by fires, and the heat of summer is yet to come. None of these affected people are equally, personally or wholly responsible for the wrath than nature has inflicted on them.
Maybe, however, this is a new karmic law in action. We are all guilty in some way of upsetting nature’s sense of order, and are collectively responsible for our collective past. It began with the Agricultural Revolution some 12,000 years ago when we decided that instead of being the passive recipients of nature’s bounty, we would be the active manipulators of its potential. At that point in history, we became adversaries of nature rather than an integral part of it. Granted, the sophisticated civilizations that we invented during the last several millennia have been remarkable, but we also know that most of them were not sustainable. Then the Industrial Revolution, a mere 250 years ago, began releasing the carbon that nature had so carefully stored over millions of years as coal, oil and gas. This gave us the power to amplify the unnatural habits we had learned as manipulators since the Agricultural Revolution. Now, in a global civilization, that power seems to be accelerating beyond our ability to constrain it, even if we have cause to doubt its benefits. Nature, as we have learned, has its ironic way of turning success into failure, and our winning formula may come with a karmic price that we do not want to pay.
In the Principle of Karma, consequences mean that someone has to pay for the result of actions, and this must be individuals. Some are more guilty than others. But we have known for half a century that carbon emissions are going up, and we had even calculated the ultimate consequences. While this has changed the behaviour of some individuals, it has barely budged our collective behaviour. Despite repeated dire warnings, carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise. Our personal contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide from a return air flight to Europe from Canada is about 2 tonnes. Most of the benefits of electric vehicles have been offset by our insistence on buying large and unnecessary SUVs. Meat consumption, which is about 20 times more carbon intensive and land demanding than vegetable protein, continues to rise rather than fall. We seem to function as if the karmic law of consequences does not apply to us.
But karma might be inescapable. If we don’t reduce our flying, our luxurious driving habits, our excessive meat eating and our pathological consumerism, then we will have to endure such consequences as more forest fires, floods, storms, higher sea levels, food shortages, and the political disruption caused by climate refugees—the United Nations estimates this at 1 billion displaced people per degree increase in global temperatures, a dynamic that the Pentagon has described as a “threat multiplier”.
Karmic justice will be meted out according to rules that we won’t understand. But actions always have consequences—if not internal guilt, which dies with the individual, then collective guilt, which lives on as our future. We are each part of a whole according to Indian philosophy, and this whole functions in relationship to our behaviour. Even if you don’t believe in karma, this doesn’t mean that you won’t be affected by it. Karma or not, everything functions better when we are attentive to the possible consequences of our individual and collective actions. Presently, however, we seem to be in denial about this law of cause and effect.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: Wildfire – Photo courtesy US Forestry Service via Flickr (Public Domain)