Krishna Consciousness & Ecological Awareness

By Madhava Gosh dasa

Astottara sata dasa is Alexander Petroff (Asto), who was raised at the ISKCON Gita Nagari Farm in Port Royal, PA.  After studying economic development at Hampshire College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College, he worked as an intern at the Namalu Ox Hire and Ox Training Center in Uganda.  Furthermore, as an intern at Tillers International in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he trained others how to work with horses and oxen.

In college, Asto wrote an 80-page thesis called Village Of Hope: A Model for Self-Sufficient Village Development In Africa. In that paper, he took the ideas of Srila Prabhupada, Gandhi, and E.F. Schumacher, and formulated a step-by-step economic plan for transitioning an economy from the current capitalist model, to a varnasrama model based on the grain-based currency and ox power model suggested by Srila Prabhupada.

His work in Africa is an incredibly hard struggle, but step-by-step, progress is being made. Asto is taking his inspiration in particular from a lecture of Srila Prabhupada’s on January 11, 1977 on a train ride to Allahabad, wherein he indicated that if we offered work, people would be attracted, and thereby we could introduce them to Krsna consciousness.

Since 5.5 million people have died in Congo due to war, they are more open to accepting new ideas like this, as they have nothing. The people in Ruzizi Valley are very hard workers and have a natural love of cows, as evidenced by the fact that although starving and malnurished, they have hunted all the snakes and rats in the area while entire herds of cows remain protected.  Asto named the project “Working Villages International” to keep in mind the central role of work in the project. The basic philosophy is centered on a verse in the Bhagavad Gita (18.46) that advocates making your daily work your prayer to God. 

Check here to visit Working Villages International.

Every autumn the Food For All team travel around the sacred land of Vraja in Northern India, distributing books, pencils and bananas to thousands of children. Each evening the crew arrive in a new village on a bull cart which becomes transformed into a mobile cinema, showing traditional Indian movies based on the ancient histories, as well as short awareness-raising documentaries about animal and environmental protection.

Click here to watch their documentary.

One morning we were walking on Juhu beach while birds were flying overhead in perfect formation.  These birds would fly in a line or make a u-turn all together.  So I asked Prabhupada, “How do these birds fly in a perfect formation? How do they communicate with each other?”  And Prabhupada’s response was, “They are not less intelligent like you are.”        

-Lokanatha Swami, Memories: Anecdotes of a Modern-Day Saint

Srila Prabhupada said, “We should always be considering, “What is my duty?’”  I thought, “Duty.  Okay.”  I was hearing-impaired since I was young, and between Prabhupada’s accent, my inability to hear, and the psychedelics residually floating in my brain cells, I was having a hard time understanding.  Prabhupada pointed to his coffee table and said, “Do you see this ant?”  I looked carefully.  I knew that Srila Prabhupada was the external representative of Supersoul, and if he said there was an ant, then there was an ant.  But there was no ant.

I didn’t want to say “No” and appear stupid to not see the spiritual or whatever ant that was there, and I didn’t want to say “Yes” and be proven a liar because I couldn’t see the ant.  Srila Prabhupada looked at me intensely, as though the ant issue was now solved.  He wanted to get on to real business.  He said, “My job is to understand, “What is my duty to this ant?’”  Not only was there there an ant that I couldn’t see, but now I had a duty to it.  Prabhupada looked at me almost beseechingly, “Somehow I have to help this ant.   Maybe I can chant Hare Krishna to it or feed it a little prasadam.  If we can help one ant become Krishna conscious, then our whole movement is a glorious success.”

-Nara Narayan, Memories: Anecdotes of a Modern-Day Saint

This is a trailer for Ben Stein’s new film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary on the resistance of the academic and scientific community to allow open debate and public discussion on the possibility of intelligent causation.  Ben Stein interviews some of the world’s leading scientists, mathematicians, and theologists to uncover an unprecedented state of modern science where such theories of Darwin and Richard Dawkins are dogmatically left uncontested despite mounting evidence of new probabilities. 

Article found at Permaworld Foundation

The meat industry is one of the most destructive ecological industries on the planet. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cows, sheep, turkeys and chickens not only utilizes vast areas of land and vast quantities of water, but it is a greater contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than the automobile industry. The seafood industry is literally plundering the ocean of life and some fifty percent of fish caught from the oceans is fed to cows, pigs, sheep, chickens etc in the form of fish meal. It also takes about fifty fish caught from the sea to raise one farm raised salmon.

We have turned the domestic cow into the largest marine predator on the planet. The hundreds of millions of cows grazing the land and farting methane consume more tonnage of fish than all the world’s sharks, dolphins and seals combined. Domestic housecats consume more fish, especially tuna, than all the world’s seals.

So why is it that all the world’s large environmental and conservation groups are not campaigning against the meat industry? Why did Al Gore’s film Inconvenient Truth not mention the inconvenient truth that the slaughter industry creates more greenhouse gases than the automobile industry? (more…)

Prabhupada asked, “Why is the sand crab running?”  Scientists would say, “The sand crab is running away due to instinct.  His instinct is to go to his hole.”  But Prabhupada said that there is no such thing as instinct.  Instinct is a word that’s been coined by the scientists to cover up the fact that there is Supersoul, there is God and there is past experience.  He explained this is detail, and it finally dawned on me that, “I have been taught Darwinism in school all my life, and even though I had been a devotee for seven years, I was raised to think that the birds and beasts are operating by instinct.”  Day after day Prabhupada blasted this philosophy in great detail. 

Prabhupada said, “Suppose you know where the privy [bathroom] is, and twenty years from now you return to the same house.  Because you were here twenty years ago, you still know where the privy is.  Similarly, you have been in the body for many lifetimes, so you know to look for the mother’s breast.  The baby animal is nudging for the mother’s breast.  It’s past experience, the past lifetime, and it’s the Supersoul within the heart that guides the living entity.  It’s not instinct.  There is no such thing as instinct.  Instinct makes no sense.  What does instinct mean?  If you stop to think about it and analyze it, you will see that it means absolutely nothing.  Yet the scientists have convinced everyone that the whole of nature is moving by instinct.  But the whole of nature is not moving by instinct.  It’s moving by Supersoul.”

-Govinda Devi Dasi, Memories

“In the rainy season some of the roads are not frequently used and become covered with long grasses, and thus it becomes very difficult to see the road. Similarly, in this age the transcendental scriptures are not properly studied by the brahmanas. Being covered by the effects of time, the scriptures are practically lost, and it becomes very difficult to understand or follow them.”

-Light of the Bhagavata, Verse 13

“At the heart of the Mahabarata is the dialogue called the Bhagavad Gita, or “Song of God,” in which Krishna teaches his warrior friend Arjuna. The soldier faces an awful dilemma; whether or not to fight against his own family and friends  in a battle to reclaim his kingdom. He turns to Krishna and says: “I’m confused and frightened. Please advise me.”

Arjuna’s position has parallels with today’s environmental crisis. We have developed a civilization based on the pursuit of material pleasure. Nature’s way is pleasure that is hard to come by, while suffering is plentiful: we are born to experience birth, disease, old age and death. Yet the modern hope is that the further we can roll back these obstacles, the closer we will come to the peace and happiness we yearn for. We are doing our best to overcome nature, which means to consume more and pay less.”

-Vedic Ecology by Ranchor Prime