I am supporting the UNESCO Biosphere proposal because my friend Chris Wragge asserts that this will be a very useful way to galvanise public vision for the future protection of Waiheke and will support and add to the existing protection. I get that if the Biosphere idea can serve as a flag and a direction which is more easily communicated to and followed by the general public to make sense of the plethora of planning jargon then it will be very useful
The election issue of the desire for greater Waiheke self determination and the need for greater public understanding of the how this can be developed are of course completely interdependent.
Greed and hatred are the cause of human suffering according to the Buddha and from my own meditation experience, so, the fact that we are looking at this issue as a race of humanity is not surprising. Our greed will lead to the demise of our race if we do not learn self control, again exactly the message of the historical Buddha. We can best serve as wise caretakers of our world.
These are the messages that I teach in my meditation group and on retreats and they are relevant to the current political debate because they are universal.
Interference with natural systems will effect them to some degree and we human are very good at interfering. The more complexity we bring into our deliberations of natural systems the less we really understand them. I have spent many years observing and working with natural systems and it is always the degree of interference that is the issue. Natural systems adapt to new conditions and become something different. We constantly decide which systems are to be kept mostly pristine and which are to be modified, which are to be restored and the degree to which we modify the natural process of restoration.
It becomes a simpler process when we jointly and openly decide on these matters. Perhaps again the biosphere will enable this discussion to be publicly transparent and reasonably free from legal jargon. People can more easily relate to visuals and maps than words which as concepts therefore lack essential reality.
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