Climate change is being discussed in Copenhagen in terms of numbers, money and technology which often ignore people and the truth that the earth is a living system. By looking at symptoms and failures of these systems we reduce and dissect ourselves and our world into boxes that don’t fit together.
Many people see the failures to understand the interconnectedness and the relationships between the parts and processes of the living systems as part of the problem. The fragmentation of systems, governments and institutions keeps citizens minds fragmented and disorientated and therefore disempowered.
Never before has the planet faced such an unprecedented emergency, and the need to join up our thinking is now more urgent than ever before. The issue of climate change brings together and exacerbates all the crisis of humanity; poverty, hunger and disease, desertification, loss of forests, lack of safe drinking water, drought and weather related disasters.
Many indigenous peoples share a spiritual vision, that the earth is a sacred, unified and interrelated living organism, rather than a toy or business to be exploited for financial gain or political power.
The poorest and most vulnerable people on the earth are suffering the most and disproportionately from climate change. Already 26 million have lost their homes, some 20 million of them are women. The future predictions are catastrophic for the worlds poor and COP15 is reluctant to discuss solutions that are people based rather than technological or financially based.
This lack of humanitarian and holistic vision is the core problem of our system. Caucus groups for indigenous people, women, youth and poor were under-represented, considered a sideline rather than a central issue. This further alienates and ignores those very agents of change that can create solutions and human scale visions.
Brahma Kumaris is one of the worlds leading spiritual organisations with a women led and women’s focus to their mission. They were founded in 1937 by 97 women in India and now have branches in over 100 countries. Their humanitarian work has been recognised by the UN where they have consultative status with ECOSOC and UNICEF. Their solar feeding programme in India supports tens of thousands of people in poverty and projects include teaching positive thinking to prisoners across the world.
The intellectual leader of Brahma Kumaris, and one of only a few female spiritual leaders with such a global platform, Dadi Janki, was in Copenhagen and asked for a new consciousness, a profound shift in awareness and thinking to include an inner dimension, to transform the quality of conversation and the possible agenda for action among stakeholders. She asked us to expand our vision to see the whole delicate system instead of being blinded by our own desires.
