Jill and I went out to Santa Fe for a Zen Buddhist retreat called Rohatsu, which celebrates the Buddha's enlightenment and is Dec. 1-8 every year. It was quite warm this year, and I could be outdoors in a tee shirt in the afternoon sun. My teacher, Roshi Joan Halifax gave a Dharma talk in which she noted how Rohatsu in Santa Fe used to be really cold and snowy (I recall her leading us in walking meditation outdoors in the snow). As she touched on climate change, her pithy assessment of the change in the weather was "greed ate winter".
A foundational aspect of Buddhist teaching is that suffering comes from greed, hatred, and delusion, hence the reference - our collective greed leads to excess consumption, and therefore emissions, and therefore climate change.
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