painting by: Monica Arellano-Ongpin/Creative Commons via flickr
DCL
I confess a deep admiration and affinity for Prince Charles. I know that in the more activist segments on the environmental movement—certainly if some of the rhetoric during COP15 regarding the supposed nefarious motives of the Prince's Rainforest Project are any indication—that's an unpopular view. But nevertheless, more often than not, if you listen to the words the Prince is speaking and divorce them from any prejudice against him personally or against the idea of monarchy you may harbor, he offers some important insight into our current environmental predicament.
Recently at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford University, Prince Charles gave a speech on Islam and the Environment which really brings up some themes which continue to be overlooked by the mainstream of the green movement, tragically.
A Purely Mechanistic Outlook is at Root of Our Problems
Here's an excerpt:
When we hear talk of an
In general, we live within a culture that does not believe very much in the soul anymore—or if it does, won
Prince Charles went on to describe, using several quotes from the Qu'ran, how environmental preservation has been well supported within Islam, as well as other spiritual traditions. Which is all very interesting, but not quite the thing that stood out for me.
What hits exactly the right note for me is the Prince's accurate identification at what really lies behind our twinned and ongoing environmental and economic crisis-as-norm. It is constantly searching for external solutions to problems to the exclusion of considering that, at the least partly, the issue is internal to humanity. Put plainly it is always attempt and expecting the world to adapt to our desires, rather than adapting ourselves to it.
Sure, this is a grand sweeping statement and on the individual level not always true, but whether you look at how we use energy, how we use natural resources, how we've come to construct our cities largely in the same manner regardless of whether they are well-adapted to the local environmental conditions, it does stand.
More metaphysically, it's the result of tossing out our sense of reverence, our sense of wonder, our sense of soul, and buying into happiness based on ever-changing external stimulus—when true happiness resides in the non-changing space between thoughts.
Sometimes You Have to Look Backwards to Progress...
In case I've lost you, let's go back to another important point Prince Charles made on the value of traditional knowledge:
The Modernist ideology that has dominated the Western outlook for a century implies that
Being a major supporter of keeping traditionally building methods and traditional architecture alive—often raising the hackles of modernist architects in doing so—the Prince preceded this by talking about work being done in Afghanistan to revive building with earthquake and insulating mud bricks instead of concrete.
But this passage applies to so many aspects of the green movement: For many of the issues we face the most forward-looking, the most progressive course of action is to actually face backwards and see what worked in a world where cheap energy wasn't the norm, where consumerism was not yet entrenched, where communities weren't destroyed. While not doing this with rose-colored glasses on—good old days often the product of faulty memory—there is so much to draw from and adapt to current and future needs.
And one of the most desperately needed things is a reinvigoration of soul, reverence, and awe into the environmental movement to counter dominant utilitarian, materialist and reductionist thought.
Full transcript of the Prince of Wales' speech: A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales titled Islam and the Environment, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
