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Climate Interactive and the Dalai Lama: “Shouting, Shouting"

By Ellie Johnston
November 7, 2014

Climate Interactive and the Dalai Lama: “Shouting, Shouting”.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama recently participated in a dialogue at MIT on the challenge of responding to climate change.

In this video excerpt, MIT Sloan Professor John Sterman, together with the Dalai Lama and audience, creates a climate success scenario using the C-ROADS interactive simulation from Climate Interactive.

Prof. Sterman, together with Professors Deborah Ancona (MIT Sloan), Rebecca Henderson (Harvard Business School) and Marshall Ganz (Harvard Kennedy School), showed that there is an urgent need to cut fossil fuel use around the world, that it is technically possible to do so, and that the costs of doing so are small.  The problem is not scientific, technical or economic­­—it is political.  The panelists and the Dalai Lama then discussed the challenge of creating grassroots movements for change.

His Holiness, in his reflections on the simulation and panel, stressed the importance of collective action at the grassroots level, including nonviolent action to demand change.  To illustrate the importance of direct, nonviolent action, he spoke of his experience in India with a movement to protect human rights, recalling that he told the organizers “This is a serious matter. So if you decide to organize such things then I will join, shouting, shouting. I will go there, really. This is not for selfish reasons, but for the well-being of human beings, of humanity.”

The MIT event on 31 October 2014 was sponsored by the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.  The interactive simulation is available for free use at /tools/c-learn/

The full video of the panel and event with the Dalai Lama is available at thecenter.mit.edu/thevisit2014/liveweb.  The panel is introduced by Center director, Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, at 1:09.  Prof. Sterman’s remarks begin at 1:17:46.