A Roundabout Defense of the “Mandala Form” for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s National Gathering

That’s the title of my latest post for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s Turning Wheel Media, as well as one of my recent talks for the recent Eco-Dharma Conference & Retreat at the Wonderwell Mounatin Refuge in Springfield, NH.

Here’s a snippet:

Those participating in the environmental movement — and, by extension, the Eco-Dharma movement — have a problem to address. This problem finds its roots, I think, in exactly the things that [Katie Loncke and Dawn Haney] and the BPF raise with this panel: white supremacy and capitalism.

Defining these terms as completely as possible involves discussing a range of issues too vast and varied for just a few minutes of remarks, so I’m not even going to try. For our purposes today, I’d like to look at the problem of cultural hegemony within the North American environmental movement, specifically the hegemony of white male capitalists. For the uninitiated, cultural hegemony has to do with ways a ruling class, whether they are aware of it or not, dominate others: by making their own values, customs, ideas, communication styles, needs, and so on the universal norm for everyone, rather than a norm among others. With this unassailable status quo firmly in place, alternative values, customs, ideas, communication styles, needs, and so on are effectively marginalized.

So where do we see this hegemony of white male capitalists with the North American environmental movement?

Read the rest here. A video of the talk from the Eco-Dharma Conference & Retreat should also be coming soon.