Contemplating the Bottom Line

© 2010 Jane Fulton Alt ~ No Life Guard on Duty

It has been a wild ride with the proliferation of Crude Awakening across the internet. I am thrilled with the exposure the photographs are getting as the state of affairs with our environment is grave... hopefully this work will facilitate more discussion.

I was interviewed briefly yesterday morning by a talk radio show in Dublin, Ireland. I hung up feeling a bit disparing as the host inferred that our collective greed had gotten us into this disaster as he referred to BP's "bottom line" and consumers seeking low cost products. I don't really know how to reconcile this as it seem that greed has been a trait of human nature thru out time.

I started to think about Buddhist teachings and came across an interesting quote by the Dalai Lama. "Because self and others can only be understood in terms of relationship, we see that self-interest and others' interest are closely interrelated and there is no self-interest completely unrelated to others' interests. Due to the fundamental interconnectedness which lies at the heart of reality, your interest is also my interest: in a deep sense, "my" interest and "your" interest basically converge."

My friend, Paul added...
"How, in the Buddha's terms, a thought becomes a word, which becomes an action, which becomes a disposition. So, too, of our motivations, so that this oil spill is inextricably tied up with our own desires and needs, and we cannot honestly condemn the spill unless we are willing to acknowledge that it is not separate from ourselves: not just the consequences (which is why your pics are being picked up), but not separate from our own appetites."