Dalai Lama on our climate: Go veggie (audio)

Noel King, Reena Advani, Morning Edition; Ananda (DBM), Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The 14th Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual and former political leader, waves.

Our Only Home: A Climate Appeal to the World

The Dalai Lama, 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 Dharamshala, northern India.

• Our Only Home: A Climate Appeal to the World, by the Dalai Lama and Franz Alt (Hanover Square Press)

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 entrance into final nirvana as he passed away.

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

One step toward helping to combat climate change, he says, is to stop eating meat. Cattle produce methane [due to atrocious diets because of industrial-scale farmers' greed for profit], a greenhouse gas and powerful contributor to global warming.

• Buffalos were not producing anywhere near the amount of methane as their ruminant-relatives the farm cows that replaced them after the genocide of the Native American population. Bison were the most plentiful animals on the prairie. Bring back the bison, or feed cows a natural (non-industrial) diet and stop slaughtering them for food.

It also takes a lot of land to grow cheap feed to fatten livestock, making slaughtered 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," says the Dalai Lama.

"The beef farm, I really feel very uncomfortable. Large number of animal only for food. We should promote vegetarianism as much as we can."

He doesn't see the world in terms of countries, and he wishes we wouldn't either. Our Mother Earth, he says, is teaching us a lesson in universal responsibility: The Dalai Lama offers a take on climate change: "Promote vegetarianism" (NPR)

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