Activism and the Devotee in the face of disastrous climate change

Sunset on te banks of the Yamuna. PC Thinking Particle

I have usually avoided talking about environmental issues on this blog. Vrindavan Today was really meant for that, and I am really happy that Jagannath Poddar is taking the environmental side of Vrindavan consciousness very seriously and is leading Vrindavan Today into a more activist direction. 

Part of the Braj Vrindavan Heritage Alliance (BVHA) strategy that I participated in was to administer the Save Yamuna to Save Vrindavan FB page that was first started by Vaishnavacharya Chandan Goswami. It is now being jointly run by me and Katie Jo WalterShoemaker. Katie Jo, like many others, is driven to distraction by the state of the world environment, and like many people whose heart lies in Vrindavan, is trying to do something about it by focusing on the Yamuna and water issues..

The more I think about it, an active environmentalism should be an essential part of the Krishna conscious movement. It is something that we can all agree on, regardless of sampradaya. It is the basis of Prabhupada's desire to re-establish Varnashram Dharm and an ethos of "simple living and high thinking." In today's sociopathic asuric consumer society. The sociopathic society.

A few days ago, I https://jagadanandadas.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-vrindavan-heat-wave-and-vrindavan.html

The Yamuna and Vrindavan are not the property of those who dwell there alone. They belong to the entire world of Krishna bhaktas.

What I have been trying, sotto voce, to say, is that those of us who are devotees of Krishna need to consider all these things, especially those of us who are not on the platform of living in Vrindavan or dedicating our lives to chanting and meditating 24 hours a day.


We see the Yamuna and Ganga, but the Yamuna and Ganga are far from the only rivers affected. The Yamuna and Ganga are sacred to us, but in Vrindavan-consciousness, all rivers are sacred. Krishna is the taste in water.

The Himalayan glaciers are the principle source of water for most of Asia – source of the Amu Darya, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Salween, Tarim, Yangtze, and Yellow. ( we don’t think of the Irawaddy, Mekong, Yellwo and Yangtze in that context, but — they are.

On the one hand, the devotional lifestyle, had it been adopted around the world -- even Prabhupada's Gandhian type of return to the soil with the Varnashram Dharma -- would this have happened?

Even if we cannot change the course of history, we can certainly do like Maharaj Parikshit and turn ourselves to a non-consumerist lifestyle. As far as that is possible in today's sociopathic world.

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