Each autumn we celebrate Earth Day, an opportunity for the Sangha to come together to honour and help our planet. Our ceremony includes chanting, prostrations, and a monetary offering that is donated to an environmental cause chosen each year. After the ceremony we generally take on a community project, such as tree-planting, gardening, or rubbish clean-up.  Earth Day is a special day of celebration. However, given the scale of the climate and ecological crisis that we face, every day really needs to be an "Earth Day". Recognising this, the Centre has recently declared a Climate Emergency. This declaration is a way of affirming (to each other and to the wider community) that we are committed to the difficult work of facing the current climate crisis, exploring its roots in human greed, fear and denial, and its social and ecological consequences, and then doing what we can to alleviate suffering. By declaring a Climate Emergency, we commit to:
In making this declaration, we join hundreds of other Buddhist communities, faith groups, councils, cities and nations around the world, in order to serve our living planet and all its beings as best we can. In the coming weeks, months and years we will be working to keep this declaration alive and central in our practice and in our day-to-day activities. The Centre is also a signatory to the Buddhist Climate Change Declaration (see PDF attached below) and Sensei has addressed environmental issues in a number of talks and articles including several published in Zen Bow (see PDF attached below) .  |
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