ISKCON's Voice for Mother Earth

Hare Krishna, everyone. My humble pranams to all the Vaishnavas and Vaishnavis at ISKCON Communications Europe 2024. I am grateful for this opportunity to briefly address you who are participating in this conference.

In the context of discussions about ISKCON's engagement with environmental issues, my aim is not to offer definitive statements, so much as to raise questions in a spirit of friendly challenge and stimulation for discussion. I'm calling this presentation: ISKCON's Voice for Mother Earth, to suggest that it is important for ISKCON to have a voice and for our voice to be well-targeted, to have a positive influence and benefit for the Earth, which we regard in personal terms as mother, as a person who gives and can also withhold nourishment for all living beings.

I've been asked to touch on three points, namely, first, to give a brief overview of the environmental crisis, recognizing that some of us may be less than convinced that there is such a crisis. Second, why it is important for devotees to care and to act in response to such a crisis, presuming it exists. And third, to consider why it may be especially important for communicators—devotees to take this issue seriously and to use their influence. Again, I'm going to approach each of these three issues in the form of several questions.

So, the first general question is, is there an environmental crisis? How and to what extent is it reasonable for Vaishnavas to value empirical evidence for, for example, anthropogenetic climate change, resulting apparently, for example, in melting tundra and resultant release of toxic gases and microbes, unpredictability of parasitic diseases, species extinction and biodiversity loss, extent of soil degradation, deforestation, desertification, destruction of ocean environments, microplastic spread, and air and water pollution? To what extent is it reasonable for Vaishnavas to value empirical evidence for these things?

A related question is, how and to what extent is it reasonable for Vaishnavas to value empirical evidence for the number of animals slaughtered for human food consumption, estimated at approximately 80 billion land animals per year globally, not counting the possibly trillions of sea creatures killed annually?

Or, we may ask, are Vaishnavas right or wrong to acknowledge that industrial agriculture is a major generator of greenhouse gases? Or, are we right to quote the film, the documentary film, “Kiss the Ground,” in which the statement is there, “The problem is not the animals, the problem is where the animals are at.”

And I move already to our second general question: Why is it important for devotees to care and to act in relation to environmental degradation? With this question comes more specific questions. What arguments might we make that it is not important for devotees to care and to act with regard to the environment? Or, if we generally agree that it is important for devotees to care and act with regard to the environment, how might we conceive of, or specify, the nature of such caring and acting? Is it enough that we practice and promote a lacto-vegetarian diet of sanctified food? Is it possible that devotees are part of the problem rather than, or more so than, that we are part of the solution? Though we like to think that we are part of the solution, or even we are confident that we are part of the solution, or we are the solution, is our contribution to the solution that significant? If devotees are part of the problem by our routine consumer middle-class ways of living, what would it mean to admit it? What would be required for us to be part of the solution? What would it require to be a significant, even measurable, part of the solution?

Further, is it enough for devotees to care and act for the environment to continue or expand present activities of our mission, such as book distribution, prasadam distribution, harinam sankirtan, farm development? We presently have some 100 farms worldwide with some 5,000 cows, 4,000 in India, cows and oxen, keeping in mind that it's been reckoned that we would need some 68,000 cows and oxen to supply our present temple deities with protected cows’ dairy.

Do we need to be offering so much dairy? And the same question may be there for the development of varnashram. Is it enough for devotees to expand, to continue or expand present activities of varnashram? Or is it imperative for devotees to engage more directly in environmentalist initiatives on local, national or regional levels, by initiating research projects, connecting our farm projects with, for example, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, as Radhakrishna Prabhu is now doing as a PhD research project in connection with New Vraja-dham, Hungary. Or by creative engagement with social- and mass-media.

Which brings us to our third main question, namely, why is it especially important for ISKCON Communications devotees to take this issue seriously, to use their influence and so on? Is the issue important because we are worried about the survival of our present communities in troubled times? If so, can we communicate the value of learning from other more experienced groups, such as the Mormons, about emergency food storage, or the Amish, or African villages, about farming methods, about simple living? If so, can we communicate that we, as a Society, have yet to grasp the necessity of developing genuinely sustainable farm communities, for which we may not yet have any viable models? If so, can we communicate, by example, that plain living and high thinking can be an alternative, can be an attractive and satisfying way of practicing devotional service, devotional life? Or is it important because we are confident that we can have significant influence to change the present direction of environmental degradation if we focus on communicating our solutions to the public, such as communicating the isavasya principle and communicating Lord Krishna's—what Srila Prabhupada calls “the peace formula”? Or is it important because ISKCON communications devotees can favorably influence the direction of ISKCON with regard to the environment by focusing on the importance of caring and acting for the environment within devotee communities? If so, what exactly needs to be communicated? How would environmental education for devotees look? What is the ideal outcome for internal communication on this issue? Or is it more important for ISKCON communication devotees to focus their efforts outward to the public? What would be the ideal outcome for external communication on this issue? And again, is it enough to think in such terms? Is it enough for ISKCON communications devotees to highlight troublesome statistics about the environment to urge the public to change their ways? For example, statistics such as that one acre of land can yield 113 kilograms of beef compared to 22,000 kilograms of tomatoes or 24,000 kilograms of potatoes, and so on. Or that the mass of plastic in the earth's oceans is expected to be equal to all biomass in the earth's oceans by 2050. 

In order to help think about developing ISKCON's voice for mother earth, I've taken three questions and expanded them into approximately 32 questions. The sense of challenge and uncertainty we might have from articulating these questions is intentional. I want to suggest that we may have a lot of homework to do if we want ISKCON to truly become positioned in meaningful ways with regard to present concerns about the environment.

There are two opposite possible directions to go that would be easy. One is denial of climate change, denial of soil depletion, denial of desertification, and so on. The second direction opposite to the first is the doomsday way of thinking that the end is nigh, there is nothing that we can do, and in any case we don't belong in this material world. Both scenarios justify status quo thinking. We chant Hare Krishna, we keep a lacto-vegetarian diet, we have a few farms with a few cows, and we invite a few people to visit them.

Alternatively, we may take up the issues seriously of environmental degradation and the practical ways of reversing this trend, seriously endeavoring to create models of alternative living that are viable alternatives, anticipatory communities, that inspire emulation on all levels, beginning from how we treat the soil under our feet, Mother Earth, to how we serve each other in serving the Lord who is the complete whole. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna!

-From the (online) address to ISKCON Communications Europe 2024 on the ISKCON's engagement with environmental issues by Krishna Kshetra Swami on May 28th, 2024 in Radhadesh, Belgium.