Interconnected: Embracing Life in Our Global Society, by the Karmapa

Everything is Interconnected: Objectification

So What grows where you live? becomes Why are there so many of us? This leads into the question of who controls women’s bodies. Those of us who actually are women? Or are women just another resource for men to use, in their endless quest to prove their toxic masculinity and breed soldiers for civilization’s constant state of war? The masculinity and the war—against people, against the planet—together have created a perpetual motion machine of domination and destruction of the land and human rights. We will need to stop both to save this planet. This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue.

Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning place of objectification, the process of turning living beings into things. The rain, the river, the long stem grasses—are they members of your community? Do you live inside your foodshed, or is the living land just topsoil to be used until it’s dust? Are your human neighbors in other countries participants in a common project of care and connection, or are they labor units to assemble your cell phones, and how many soldiers will it take to keep them assembling? If you are a man, do women exist to make you dinner and sons? If you are a woman, you must surely burn for more. And for all of us, the planet is dying under civilization’s regime: what will it take for us to fight back?

What grows where you live? One small question that could save the world.

(From The Vegetarian Myth)