The Dalai Lama on vegetarianism (NPR)

Noel King, Reena Advani (Morning Edition, 11/11/20); CC Liu, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The 14th Dalai Lama sits on his ceremonial chair as he presides over the inauguration of the Tibetan Namgyal Monastery School in Dharamshala, India, 11/2/17 (Ashwini Bhatia/AP via NPR).

I always wanted to be a cowboy at home on the Tibetan range with buffalo...until I found out that they are ranchers raising animals for slaughter then killing and eating the corpses. Not thanks.

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The Dalai Lama offers a fresh take on climate change: "Promote vegetarianism"

Our Only Home (Dalai Lama)

The Dalai Lama, [who is neither king nor the "Buddhist pope" but just] Tibet's spiritual leader, is 85, and he wants to warn us of something: We must take care of our planet.

"It's logical," he tells NPR's Morning Edition on a video call from his home-in-exile, Dharamshala, India. He just co-authored Our Only Home, a book about climate change.

In Buddhism, trees are sacred; they sheltered the Buddha during his birth, his enlightenment, and his passing into final nirvana.

In the Himalayas, where the Dalai Lama now lives, glaciers are melting. Billions of people in China and India depend on them for water.

Killers are being killed by their killing (Dan Piraro/bizarro.com)

One step toward helping to combat climate change, he says, is to stop raising, killing, and eating meat. Cattle produce burps and flatulence full of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas and contributor to global warming.

It also takes a lot of land to grow food to feed livestock, making meat production a leading cause of deforestation.

"Not only is it a question of a sense of love [of these animals] but itself, you see, very bad for ecology," he says. "The beef farm, I really feel very uncomfortable. Large number of animal only for food. We should promote vegetarianism as much as we can." More

If cowboys weren't invading Christian settler colonialists, might they have lived differently?

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