Extreme Weather Shows How Conditionality Works

Extreme weather is  disconcerting because climate change shows how far our responsibility extends

Here in Wales people say: ‘When you can see the hills, it’s going to rain; when you can’t see them, it’s already raining!’ The weather in the UK is a constant, but these days reports of extreme weather around the world – floods in California, storms in Australia and, just this week, hailstones in the Arabian desert – feel disconcerting in a new way.

Nature’s always been a vast, unknowable territory beyond our control or agency. For ancient people, droughts and hurricanes showed that the gods were angry and should be appeased. Now we track weather systems with satellites. More fundamentally, many scientists say we’ve entered an epoch in which human activity is reshaping the environment and changing the climate. They call it ‘the Anthopoecene’, an era that requires a new understanding of our place in the world. Natural forces remain powerful and can still destroy us, but in the Anthroepocene, it no longer makes sense to regard them as separate. They’ve come within the sphere of our responsibility.

Buddhists train themselves to recognise their place in the wider pattern of existence. We reflect that everything is changing, always coming into being and passing away, and there’s a pattern to how this happens. Actions have predictable consequences according to what Buddhism calls ‘the law of conditionality’. What’s more, we’re part of the pattern. For all our efforts to believe the world revolves around our wishes, we too, are conditioned beings.

Everything in our lives teaches us the pattern of existence, says Buddhism. Each time we breathe out, the body needs to breathe in again. The cross word I spoke last week affects how someone responds to me today. Everything leads on to something else. Many Buddhists reflect each day: ‘I am the owner of my actions, born of them and related through them. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.’

Extreme weather events are worrying because we see people suffer and feel our vulnerability. But they’re particularly disconcerting because we see how far conditionality extends, reaching a domain humans have long regarded as a primal mystery. None of us is individually responsible for climate change, but the aggregated impact of eight billion humans has its own awesome and incomprehensible power. Collectively, we’ve grown more powerful than the gods with their thunderbolts; and as our power extends, I believe, so does our responsibility.