Dr. Raj Bal (2:12)

Welcome back to the podcast, Chris.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (2:14)

Thank you. Good to be here, Rush.

Dr. Raj Bal (2:16)

Yoga and the Environment. Embodied Ecology. What is the. What is the. What is the subtale behind this book? How did this come into being?

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (2:23)

Yeah, it's as with, I think, any authority stemming from personal experience and then broadening out from a spark of interest into inquiry. And from that inquiry, gathering memories, reflections, interviews, translations together, and the spark of interest. I grew up in rural New York State, opposite Toronto, near the shores of Lake Ontario, and wandered, wandered in the summer, wandered in the autumn, wandered in the deep of winter, wandered each spring and in the fields and the forests and as most, maybe not all Canadians know. But as soon as you get across the Peace Bridge onto the Ontario side, you're in the equivalent of Southern California, because most Canadians live in that arc around Lake Ontario over to Toronto. But on the New York State side, it's depopulated. And so many people like myself moved to California so that the farmland and the orchards go for miles and miles and miles, just stunning. And even remnant virgin forests left over from when the settlers came in that part of the States is an interesting place because the Haudenosaunee, or otherwise known as the Iroquois Confederacy, held that land as their own for 250 years, keeping the French, keeping the British at bay. And the land retains that memory of the First Nation peoples, as they say in Canada. And my father, in fact, had been adopted into the Ojibwe peoples on Bruce Peninsula as a young man, as a lacrosse player. And he really shared that connection with land directly and indirectly, with all six of his children. So we knew how to listen and how to see birds. We knew the characteristics of emergent trees. And one beautiful afternoon, I remember going deep into the forest and just seeing this gleaming honeycomb. And it really created within me a love for the earth. Then, as I found yoga, as it turned out, our particular teacher from Calcutta, like myself, a transplant to Long Island. And like myself, she was figuring out the changes in climate, the subtle differences in my instance, but very profound differences. She having moved from Calcutta and developed a seasonal pattern as Pujari that I presided over for many, many years. We really noted and celebrated the arrival of fall. We really note it and celebrate it. The darkness of the winter, the return of life in spring and the abundant warmth of summer. And the meditations themselves. Starting back in 1973, the meditations were grounded. I came many years later to learn. They are called the Bhuta shuddhi. But our practice brought us in direct connection with soil. 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night for a full month. That was the month of October, and then the same with water, November, fire. So we would light the darkness with our candles in December, wind. And again the cold winds of January in the northeast, and then February, the shortest of months. And the most difficult of months in that particular environment was about finding our space. And in that wintry climate, the space very inward, very inward, and then moving to California and bringing those meditations here, sort of translating this into, again, different seasonal cycles. But the power of observing that connection is well documented at the base of the meditative experience taught by the Buddha, taught by The Jinnahs taught by the yogis. So that predisposed me during my first trip to India in 1981 to question why are the factories here so polluting? Why are the rickshaws so promoting of this black. So why? And these questions had not yet arrived in India as I was growing up as a child, I remember my mother reading when I was seven years old, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. And because we lived near Niagara Falls, we were very aware of the tragedy of Love Canal and the assault on the environment that industrialization had foisted upon nature itself. And in India.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (8:29)

Shortly after I came home asking all those questions, the industrial accident happened in Bhopal. And I returned again and again.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (8:42)

Finding folks who had put this.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (8:47)

As the core of their life work. People such as.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (8:53)

Vandana Shiva in the north and.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (8:58)

Dr. Mehta, the remarkable lawyer who campaigned early, early for the cleaning up of the air around the Taj Mahal and then sued. It took 17 years for those autorickshaws to abandon their smelly kerosene blend and go over to compressed natural gas. And this was a period of great delight. I was actually in India on April 1 of the year when this went into effect. And I believe it was 2001. And it was just so heartening. And it increasingly remains heartening to see that the development of solar power has eclipsed both coal and nuclear within India and that there are really important policies put in place to make war friendly human earth relationships in India that are now becoming a model for the world.

Dr. Raj Bal (10:07)

So there are a number of very rich chapters of Prize's book and perhaps we'll go through them in order at some point or at least some highlights. But let me ask my usual silly, purposely naive questions. You know, what does yoga have to do with environmentalism? Chris?

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (10:24)

Okay, the word yoga means yoke. And we harness things with meditative body based yoga. We harness ourselves. But yoga also refers to yoking the plow to the oxen. It refers to really the birth of agriculture itself. Agriculture leading to experimentation, agriculture entwined with the exploitation of the earth. A very nice book came out by Kristin Novetsky and Sunila Kale where they define yoga as power and control. And what pioneered most likely in northern Turkey. And you know, around 10,000 years ago, with the rise of agriculture, we gained power over food production in ways that became quite totalizing. And if we look at the island of Madagascar for one instance, within just 50, 60 years, so much has been burned and controlled and yoked in a negative way by human presence. So just as the Karma metaphors or the Karma philosophies of India say, we have to disconnect from our afflicted impulses. So also, just as we have brought the earth under our domination and control, we need, as Krishna advised Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, we need to discover and perhaps rediscover Sthita prajna that stabilized steady wisdom and insight that allows us to pull back, to pull back those reins, to return that control to a place of origin that is reasoned and reasonable. So, yes, yoga is the problem. Okay? We have controlled the earth and yoga is the solution. I'm arguing that we need to control and pull back ourselves.

Dr. Raj Bal (12:51)

Fascinating. Perhaps a turn from Parvati Nirvati or some cross pollination. So you already mentioned this in passing, but I would love to highlight a bit of what you say in the Ecology in the Mob Art and the Bhagavan chapter. I just serendipitously, I happen to do one of the tutorial talks that we both do every semester at the Ochs this morning, and it was on.

Dr. Raj Bal (13:14)

Just because I happened to be doing a course on this. It was fresh in my mind. I was presenting on the Bhagavad Gita and its response to times of tumult and above and beyond situating socioculturally, which we need to do with all of the texts we study, but associating it in psychologically, spiritually, in terms of response to times of tumultuous at all times. And one of the really fascinating questions in the discussion was, you know, so what does the Puerto Rita have to say with regard to biology, issues of eco activism? And at some point I have to follow up with an email to the student and suggest your book. But go on and you tell us, so what does it have to say?

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (13:55)

Yeah, I think there's a twofold answer. The first part I gave was, we need to recover our steady wisdom. And then the second part is the theology of the Bhagavad Gita. And in chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, Krishna reveals his nature as divine. But it's not a divinity that is removed. It's not a divinity that sort of says, okay, I created the world. It's a mess. You figure it out. It's not a world where even Krishna says.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (14:38)

In a sense, he says this, do what I say. But he says, do this, do this, do this, do this. He gives so many different options. So again, the theology of this, as we read into the lines that are spoken by Krishna, says that wherever there is a Beautiful tree, there I am. Wherever there is free flowing potable water, there I am. Wherever there is the glimmer of a flame, the glimmer and the gleam of the sunrise, there I am. And this translates into a theology of panentheism. And by panentheism, where do we find Theos? Where do we find the God? We find the God N in Pan, all things. And if God, if the divine is to be found in all things, then all things must be understood, all things must be revere, and all things must be held as sacred. So what the theology of the Bhagavta calls us to do is find that divinity, that wisdom within, and then do what needs to be done to repair that world. Which even during the Mahabharata, we know that there was a great deal of ecological destruction inflicted by human development, including by the Pandava brothers themselves as they burned the forest. And we know that they took great glee in that conquering of the land that we now know as the city of Delhi. And what we need to do is to, you know, look at the, look at the balance, look at the scale of human presence, which used to be rare and now human presence is overwhelmingly creating a burden on the carrying capacity of Mother Earth herself.

Dr. Raj Bal (17:03)

Tell us about Gandhi and some of these Gandhi inspired activists.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (17:08)

Yeah. Some years back, we had a series of events commemorating the publication of Hind Swaraj and I think wistfully back to the India that I first encountered more than 45 years ago. And in that India, which had been more or less scripted by Gandhi in very, very fundamental ways, there were very few comforts.

Dr. Raj Bal (17:40)

Okay.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (17:41)

Transport, which Gandhi in Hind Swaraj. Swaraj calls into question, was minimal. There were taxis and there were buses and there were trains, but the personal automobile was very, very rare. People lived near where they worked and if they needed to go somewhere, they would take. Take a train. Gandhi, like Thoreau in Walden Pond, Thoreau says, what is that noisy thing that's putting out all that smoke? And Gandhi said, it's the really benefit to being able to move quickly from one place to another. And Gandhi had a vision of small scale economy. Gandhi had a vision that every village could be self sustained, produce its own food, produce its own living, produce its own bricks as needed, produce its own houses and that, you know, we just need to think small. And there was a famous gentleman, an economist, Schumacher, who wrote a book called Small is Beautiful, and he called it Buddhist Economics, but it was actually Gandhian economics. And what Gandhi in this book says, and this is rather jarring, by modern sensibilities. But he said, not everybody needs book learning. For many people, they need to know the language of the soil. And to this day.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (19:26)

Nearly half of the people of India are directly involved with agriculture, whereas in the United States, in my lifetime, it's gone from probably 25% down to less than 2%. And as we lose touch with our food, we lose touch with what the Upanishads proclaims, that food is God, Anam Brahman. And Gandhi was fastidious in thinking about the food process, about digestion, about proper diet, and about developing strength through abstaining from food. Applying the tuppence which in my yoga practice we were instructed fast one day a week. And that has been a wonderful, wonderful.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (20:28)

Sort of, I guess it's no longer a secret, but sort of a secret power that every Monday I get, you know, a real reserve of energy having fasted on Sunday. So that Gandhian approach.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (20:44)

Was reinterpreted by Nehru in a way that did not deny the importance of village economy and food based economy, but also suggested there needed to be engineering and at least centralized industrialization.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (21:04)

Then what happened was.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (21:08)

Gandhi's spiritual successor, Vinoba Bhave, developed as a counterpoint to the older feudal system, a campaign which he called Bahu Don. And he trained people to walk from village to village to village to village to meet the large landowners and to invite them to donate their land for the cause of allowing everybody to have enough to sustain. Now, the movement was not overwhelmingly successful, though. I think more than a million acres were donated and redistributed. But it had an effect on land ceiling. And in India, and this has been really an important piece of India's ongoing agricultural integrity. In India, you're not allowed to own more than 12 acres. And this has staved off. This is the opposite of what happened in China, where the state took over all of the land and collectivized and inflicted famine on millions and millions and millions of people in China. But in India, what this did is that it staved off agribusiness. It disallowed and continues to disallow the aggregation of farms. And where I grew up, the farms used to be 50 acres. And that was true. When my great grandparents settled in Canada, they had a 50 acre farm which I've since visited. It's really quite beautiful up in near Georgian Bay. But what happens with agribusiness is that things get automated, they get amalgamated and pretty soon the seed companies take over, the fertilizer companies take over, the pesticide companies. Take over. The herbicide companies take over. Not that that hasn't happened in India, but it's on a much smaller scale. So that's the beginning of a Gandhian legacy that in fact does continue. And then with Gandhians such as MC Mehta, who I mentioned earlier, they retained this healthy suspicion of the power of industry and came up with legislation to hold things in check. But then Yeshiva noticed that the farmers were being trapped by the amalgam of pesticide, herbicide, all of those seed purveyors that operate on the global stage and saw the sad rise of farmer suicide when they made over their head with debt. And then also the sadness of Cancer Alley, particularly in the Punjab, where these pesticides and herbicides, even the fertilizers themselves, have caused a very, very high level of cancer. And she is trained. It's not enough, but she has trained a hundred million farmers in agricultural practices that are grounded in organics. And she's been a great promoter of ragi, which is.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (24:47)

A barley that requires little in terms of soil emendations and is very, very hardy, both in terms of its growth but also in terms of its protein load. And she has done remarkable work in India to educate people. And I brought a group of students at their request, and we cleaned turmeric. We ate this most amazing food at Navdanya, which is also called Bijavidyapeet, and it's the learning laboratory for agriculturalists outside of Dehradun. So those are two Gandhians that I interview and talk about within the book. And I think that.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (25:39)

The decentralized nature of Gandhi's message means that there are countless people doing small things that in the aggregate add up to a wonderful positivity.

Dr. Raj Bal (25:54)

Thank you. How do you disambiguate between American environmentalism and indic. Environmentalism?

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (26:03)

Yeah, Indira Gandhi had been.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (26:07)

Interested in the national parks of the United States. And as I've written in the book, the national park movement, which unfortunately displaced indigenous people, disrespected indigenous people, put under lock and key millions and millions and millions of acres coast to coast, mainly in the west, because this movement started at the turn of the last century when Theodore Roosevelt visited John Muir and went up into the forest and into the Sierras. And then we have Yosemite, we have Yellowstone, we have the Grand Tetons, we have the Cuyahoga River national park in Ohio. We have the national park honoring women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York. It's one of the smallest national parks, but nonetheless is part of that vast agency and Sadly, Indira Gandhi was doing the same thing in India. She was removing tribal people from their homelands in order to create these vast preserve areas. And this brought lots of people into conflict. And what eventually happened was compromises were made. And India is well documented, has been very successful in.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (27:38)

Stabilizing and growing populations of tigers. Some of the bird preserves in India are really a model for the world, but because of the overwhelming human burden upon that subcontinent, it has to look very, very different. I've been to the Periyar Preserve, which is in Kerala, up in the Western Ghats. And it's fascinating because the elephants are there and the otters are there, and the humans are still dwelling in the forest in company of. And one of the people that I talk about in the book.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (28:21)

Divek Menon, has created a nonprofit for wildlife in India. And it's so exciting to give his latest update about the elephant corridors and the preserves for the tigers and the Sundarbans. But so much really creative, innovative work is being done with careful attention that, yes, we have humans as well. And of course, there are.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (28:53)

More than three times as many humans in India as there are in the United States. And the square miles of the United States are three times the square miles in India. So we have to literally tread lightly, even as we're trying to live lightly on the Earth.

Dr. Raj Bal (29:13)

How would you characterize the key takeaway or transformation or message of the book?

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (29:20)

Well, I'll fast forward to the last chapter. And what many writers have done, including Naomi Klein and Kim Stanley Robinson, is that they have discovered aspects of India that are noteworthy. I'll just say noteworthy. And there's a book and a movie that Naomi Klein put together that is called this Changes Everything. And it's about global climate change. And for her, A bright light was the rising up of a village in India. And it's documented in the movie and mentioned in the book that said, no, we do not want that coal plant here. And they used all of the tried and true Gandhian techniques of protest, of fasting, of demonstrating, of striking and undid this government scheme to open yet another coal burning plant. And it really goaded both local, regional and even federal governments to really develop sustainables, renewables, particularly solar, because most of the year India is just filled with lots and lots of sun. So Naomi Klein I mentioned toward the end of the book, and then Kim Stanley Robinson writes this remarkable novel. And it's a novel and it's science fiction, but it's eerily prescient and feels so real. And at first, when I read the first chapter, I thought, oh no, I can't read this. But it opens with the death of 20 million people around Lucknow in northeastern India during what's called a what bulb event. And it's where because of temperature inversions that are naturally occurring, the earth does not cool at night. And that 120 degrees that India experiences periodically, that fortunately, generally, and I've lived through many, many summers in India, it cools down to the 80s at night and you're just sort of like, oh, this is so nice. Then it goes out. But no, it's sustained day after day, night after night at 120 and people literally baked alive except for this one American. And I thought, oh no, the American, the white hero, the savior. This is horrible. But no, he turns out to be quite the tragic fib here. And he makes a whole bunch of mistakes along the way. Ends up as the book sort of shifts from what a contrast from India to Switzerland. And what becomes revealed in the book is that children of Kali systematically monkey wrench industrial development and lo and behold, pretty soon people, as Gandhi had advised, start really producing and consuming local goods, sort of giving up on those big ocean liners. They also remarkably, and it's not pretty how the change is affected, but they begin to travel by dirigibles, hot air balloons, like the Zephyrs of a hundred years ago, rather than fuel consuming airplanes. And a whole bunch of different changes come about. The only person in the book that is real and named as a real person is Bandana Shiva. So food also becomes an important component in this transition. So I think that as we sort of project forward into the next century and reflect backward. My own father grew up without running water, grew up without indoor plumbing, grew up in Canada without central heating, grew up without the automobile. And think of all that we now come to take as normal was not even yet invented. He grew up before the radio. And now if we think how the radio has exploded into social media and how these little triangles or rather rectangles that we carry around have more computing power than it took to get to the moon, that what will the next hundred years look like? And we're going to have to pull back, we're going to have to retain and regain steady wisdom in order not to undo the gift and the beauty of what it means to be human. Beautiful.

Dr. Raj Bal (34:43)

Is there, I don't know, I mean there's so many chapters.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (34:46)

Is there anything else that you'd like.

Dr. Raj Bal (34:47)

Hopefully we would touch on today? Or are there particular chapters or texts or ideas that most deeply resonate with you?

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (34:55)

Yeah, I think animals and what in our yoga training, it was 12 years with yoga Anand Ashram, founded by Gurani Anjali. We have a wonderful website, guaranianjali.org where you can see the chronicles of this remarkable community that flourished in the 1970s and 80s and continues up into the present. But what we were given as an assignment after doing the elements was to abide and gaze upon and come to understand animals. And this was so in keeping with my upbringing and so in keeping with what my father had received from the Ojibwe.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (35:49)

That it really made my heart soar. And I got involved with animal academic activism in the 80s, and I remember going to this Keystone conference in London. It was Religious Perspectives on the Use of Animals and in Science. And we were. This was 1984. Tom Reagan, the organizer, just full throttle, brought in all of the data about how many billions of animals are sacrificed for food and in the name of science every year. And the stunning data that continues to come to light that the human weight on the planet combined with the weight of all of the animals that are awaiting or being bred for and awaiting slaughter, utterly dwarfs the weight. I mean, it's like 98% and 2% are animals in the wild. And just to think of how far we have come from the proverbial Garden of Eden, how far we have come from the Pratvi Sukta's praise of the bounty of Mother Earth, that one way, in addition to those elemental meditations, is to not fetishize. Okay, so I'm holding back. Like, I'm not really advocating.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (37:25)

The adoration of the cat or the dog, but what I'm suggesting is that people can find great meaning in becoming acquainted with the birds that fly down, the birds that migrate, the birds that visit. And I remember a tradition which probably is becoming less so, but we used to practice this for our gathered festival seasonal meals at the ashram, is that we would always prepare a little plate of food and put it on the windowsill and wait until one of the sparrows or one of the starlings came and took a little bit of food and flew off to heaven before we would nourish ourselves. And I've seen that practiced even today in India, where there's an acknowledgement, an abiding acknowledgement that the world is more than human. One of the differences between China and India is that when you're in India, and I'm thinking of the black buck in Rajasthan, there's just animals, wild animals, domestic but integrated, walking in the company of humans. And in China, no visible presence of animals. And certainly in the United States. One of our sad experiences here in California is driving north on the 5 interstate. And now there's more than one. Seeing the feedlots where all of the cattle are herded, just standing on their own manure, waiting in line for slaughter. And.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (39:19)

It'S hard for a person not to be moved as they reflect on how our yoking of those animals and domination of those animals who overpowered are the gentle heart. And it becomes an invitation to, as I said, watch the birds go whale watching, go down to watch the dolphins. I'm close to the Pacific Ocean here and Lake Ontario, those minnows that come in abundance and those fish that periodically die off. It's a natural phenomenon on Lake Ontario. But to let things be and let things speak to us.

Dr. Raj Bal (40:06)

Final question at the comments. Embodied Ecology. Of course you've been talking about this all along, but tell us about this title, the significance of Embodiment of Ecology.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (40:16)

Yeah, Tantra and the Yoga Sutra before the Emergence of Tantra talks about how our body is a microcosm of the universe. And that as we like with Kabbalah, as we feel those energies of wisdom, reason and the transcendent within our head, as we feel our pride and our humility and our shoulders, as we feel our accomplishments and our stability at our hips, as we feel the love in our heart, procreative part of our human energies, as we feel our feet upon the earth, we develop a sense that this body itself reflects the entire universe and that by leading a meditative, purposeful life will be able to rise to the occasion of those yoga precepts of abiding with nonviolence, of speaking truth from the heart, of recognizing the jewels of our digestive powers that will honor that power of reproduction that is so, so profound and that we'll recognize that relationship between the stuff of the earth and the stuff of our body. And that with that we will move with dignity and we'll move with reason in a way that is body friendly and earth, water, fire, air and space friendly.

Dr. Raj Bal (42:11)

Thank you very much for putting on the podcast today.

Dr. Christopher King Chopper (42:14)

Thank you for this opportunity.

Dr. Raj Bal (42:16)

For those listening, we've been speaking with Dr. Chris Chappell on this brand new mandala publication as part of the Oxford Center Studies Mandela Publishing series called Embody the College of Yoga and the Environment.

Dr. Raj Bal (42:33)

Fascinating time publication. Check it out. The link is in the podcast. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading and keep contemplating the future of this realm and your part in it. Take care.