Orion Magazine - January-February 2009

can be proud. Perhaps business can be graceful. If that transition is happening in one corporation, it can happen in others.

And the business community is indeed slowly moving in this direction. It started, in part, with books like Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce and his and Amory and Hunter Lovins’s Natural Capitalism. Their argument was that capitalism is wonderful, but it has never been practiced. We’ve always discounted the value of the natural (and human) world and the costs of our impacts on it. Making the costs of air pollution, climate change, and >sheries destruction part of the business equation—and recognizing the true value of the natural resources we use as feedstocks—would in fact be a divine act: it would mean the business community >nally seeing not just the bottom line but the entire world as sacred. It would mean seeing the dignity of the world, the harm in damaging it, and the vision of a sustainable future.

It is there. It has always been there. Can we see it?

THERE IS A MOVEMENT within many religions called the contemplative tradition. Contemplation, or contemplative prayer, is a form of meditation, the goal of which is to cultivate an understanding of and relationship with the divine—the life force, the ultimate reality of the world. That ultimate reality might be a dignity that includes not just all living things, but all things. Father Thomas Keating has called the entire contemplative tradition simply “a long and loving look at what is.” He’s now eighty->ve, and living at the St. Benedict Monastery in Old Snowmass, Colorado, not far from Aspen Skiing Company’s slopes.

I decided to meet with Keating, a leader in this >eld, because the practice of contemplation is in e=ect the same thing as the practice of trying to solve climate change; both are an e=ort to pursue the divinization, the making sacred of the world and of ourselves. That’s couched in religious terms, but pagans like me might simply call that state of grace “global sustainability.” It’s the same idea, though markedly less poetic.

You could argue that the world today is utterly missing the clarity Keating’s contemplation is meant to provide, and that’s why we haven’t moved more quickly on climate change. You couldn’t get farther from what Keating calls a “radical participation” in the reality of the world than, for example, Star magazine and Us Weekly. Those magazines—just like a public obsession with sports or video games—simply take our attention o= what matters. If the public at large needs a clearer view

of the world, so do businesspeople and politicians, who both base decisions on short time frames—quarterly reports or election cycles that are meaningless without any kind of broader worldview for context.

To someone who asks, “I want to establish a relationship with the divine. Can I come to your monastery?” Keating might reply, “You can have that relationship anywhere, and should.” My conversation with Keating reminded me of the many phone calls I get from eager, young, well-educated college graduates who desperately want to get into the “sustainability >eld.” My response is that given the scale of the problems, every job must become a sustainability job. So one approach is to look for ways to turn your own position into one that addresses climate change. If every job doesn’t become a climate job, we’re not going to solve the problem. Even if you work for the worst of the worst—let’s say it’s ExxonMobil—we need people inside the beast. We need moles. And there isn’t a job in the world that doesn’t somehow in?uence the changing climate.

My forays into religious thinking revealed to me, above all, a desire within humanity to live in a digni>ed world. This is Walter Bennett’s vision while holding his grandchild; it’s what Bob Janes aspires to when he warms up his truck each morning in Juneau. Their urges, hopes, and desires are the deeply rooted, very powerful forces that have been part of human experience always.

This is a hopeful concept: maybe humans are hard-wired to durably engage, participate in, and relish the challenge of solving climate change, because it o=ers us a shot at just this dignity.