FACTS WON'T CHANGE HOW YOU THINK ABOUT THE PLANET— BUT PHILOSOPHY MIGHT

Some thoughts on how the current framework for climate action lacks spirituality and soul — making it as lacklustre as our efforts.

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WHEN HAVE NUMBERS EVER MADE YOU EMOTIONAL?

The climate crisis is the most documented threat in human history. We have the graphs, the models, the warnings. But if facts alone could change us — wouldn’t they have already? The truth is, we’re not lacking suffering from a lack of data. We’re suffering from a lack of connection.

I learned this while nursing a slipped disc in London.

Last September, I injured my lower back deadlifting at Equinox. I couldn’t do much while healing, so I took long walks through Hyde Park listening to the audiobook version of The Uninhabitable Earth. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a powerful but overwhelming dump of facts showing us just how doomed we are when it comes to climate change.

I remember tearing up one day when Delhi and Dhaka — cities I grew up in — were mentioned as places already considered beyond repair. It wasn’t a rational reaction to carbon statistics. It was a deep, heavy sadness: grief for places and communities that shaped me, protected me, made me who I am.

Months later, my disc healed naturally (screw you to the doctor who said I’d need steroids and surgery) — thanks to yoga and a stubborn belief that pain was in my brain. Back in Delhi, with pollution levels labeled “hazardous,” I watched my mother quietly take her blood pressure meds and blame her symptoms on stress. I’d forgotten most of the so-called “hard-hitting facts” from the book, until that morning — when I remembered a line linking air pollution to hypertension and repeated it to my family over breakfast like a headline drilling propaganda into their heads.

My grandma, without her hearing aid, didn’t catch it. My parents heard me, but they may as well not have. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand. They just didn’t care in the way I wanted them to. And maybe that’s fair. They’re not in denial or ignorant. They’re fully capable to leave Delhi. But they won’t. Because their friends are here. Their community is here. Their lives are here.

Rationally, it doesn’t make sense. But that’s the point. Facts, even terrifying ones, don’t make people uproot their lives. Let alone move them toward climate action.

I should have known that. I’d read a book full of climate facts, cried about it while walking through the park, and still kept my heater on full blast all winter. The same way their ears fell deaf to my data, my own consciousness has fallen deaf to the endless numbers thrown at us every day about the climate crisis. If facts were enough, wouldn’t we have changed already?

Flying back to London, my slipped disc slowly healing against the stiff back of the economy seat, I found myself stuck on one question:

How the fuck do you actually care about the planet in a way that’s meaningful — not performative guilt, not recycled facts slapped on the back of your organic jeans?

For me, the answer has come from Buddhist philosophy, not as spiritual performance, but as a way of seeing. A way of understanding the interconnectedness of everything.

Over the past few months I’ve been traveling (I know — not very carbon negative of me), meeting teachers across India, spending time with spiritual masters in Bhutan, and falling into philosophical and civilisational rabbit holes about the relevance of Eastern philosophy today. And while I don’t have all the answers yet, I’ve started (or at least think I’ve started) to at least ask better questions.

So in honour of what I’ll call the death of my imposter syndrome and the birth of my enlightened era, I want to share a few things that have genuinely shifted the way I think about the world we live in.

Before you read on, a disclaimer: This isn’t a lecture. It’s not a how-to. It’s definitely not an activist manifesto. It’s the messy musings of a twenty-something trying to navigate late capitalism, spiritual longing, her inner critic, and the kind of person she’s trying to become.

Take what you need. Leave the rest.

FACTS ARE ESSENTIAL, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT

Apart from seeing $0.13 in my bank account after a crazy weekend, numbers have seldom made me feel anything real. Of course, a bigger salary feels good for a few days but eventually you desensitise. In the same way, knowing my "sustainable" jeans saved 1,000 gallons of water doesn’t move me emotionally; it just gives me moral currency to flash as I continue navigating this depraved world.

It’s no revelation that we’ve become desensitised to numbers around death, tragedy, extinction. A simple glimpse at the news coming out of Palestine would motivate more of us to activism, but it hasn’t. The truth is, if facts alone could change human behavior, we wouldn’t still be here, hurtling toward ecological collapse.

It’s easy to say, "It’s not in our hands. It's Big Oil, Big Capitalism." And while that is probably true, isn't that a bit lazy? To accept that the burden passed onto us is a cop-out... and to double down on the cop-out by doing nothing?

The deeper crisis — the more uncomfortable one — isn’t just systemic. It’s spiritual. It’s rooted in our disconnection from the web of life we’re part of. In the self-centredness that lets us separate our actions from their consequences.

THE ROOT PROBLEM: SEPARATION

The way we see ourselves — and our relationship to the rest of life — is broken.

In the dominant Western worldview, shaped by centuries of religious and scientific thinking, humans are seen as separate from nature. We are the "subject"; nature is the "object." We are the rulers; nature is the resource.

Even our well-intentioned language about "saving the planet" treats Earth as something external to us, something we act upon.

This illusion of separateness has created a culture that excels at domination, extraction, and conquest, but terrible at belonging, humility, and reciprocity.

While reading about Eastern philosophy about our modern condition I came across a dialogue In the 1970s, between a Japanese Buddhist philosopher and peace activist Dr. Daisaku Ikeda and the British historian Arnold Toynbee (one of the most respected voices on the rise and fall of civilisations). It’s worth noting that Ikeda dedicated much of his life to bringing Buddhist thought into global discourse — speaking at universities, writing manifestos, and advocating for peace.

In their conversations, which spanned topics from war and technology to the environment, they landed on a shared concern: that modern civilization had lost its spiritual connection to the natural world — and that this disconnection lay at the root of many of our collective crises.

Ikeda argued that without true harmony between people and their environment, there can be no real fulfilment, and no real survival either.

In his words:

“It is only when human beings achieve harmony with their environment… that they can live and enjoy life together, and that there is no other way to creatively achieve fulfilment in our life.”

This leads us to the ‘solution’, and some musings on key ideas in Eastern spiritual and philosophical thought.

PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA (DEPENDENT ORIGINATION)

A key Buddhist doctrine, Pratītyasamutpāda, often translated as dependent origination, teaches that nothing exists in isolation. Everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions. You are not a fixed or separate self, but a constellation of relationships: physical, emotional, social, and ecological. Your suffering, your joy, your very existence, is entangled with the world around you.

This isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s a radical way of seeing, one that shifts us from individualism to interdependence. Applied to the climate crisis, it changes the very premise of responsibility. The planet isn’t something “out there” to save. It’s something we’re part of.

Zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh brought this insight into contemporary language with the term interbeing. A cloud becomes rain, rain becomes tea, tea becomes you. You are not separate from the tree, the soil, the factory worker, or the bird choking on plastic. You are the continuation of many things.

Pratītyasamutpāda also resonates in the Japanese Buddhist concept of esho funi — the non-duality of life and environment, which in his talks about civilisation, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda explains:

“The living entity and its environment stand in an integral and indivisible relationship... the pursuit of this all-encompassing relationship between the subject and the environment discovers the driving force of life that pulsates throughout the universe.”

Back home in India, these ways of seeing have existed for centuries, and they’re not limited to Buddhism. In yogic philosophy, especially in the Yoga Sutras, we find ethical principles like ahimsa (non-harming), aparigraha (non-possessiveness), and asteya (non-stealing). These aren’t just moral ideals. They reflect an understanding that harming others — human, animal, or ecosystem — is ultimately a form of self-harm. That grasping or exploiting what isn’t freely given throws both you and the world out of balance.

Taken together, these traditions offer more than tools for personal peace. They outline a way of life where the boundary between self and world dissolves and caring for the planet becomes inseparable from caring for yourself.

If the root of this crisis is disconnection, then the path forward begins by remembering we were never separate to begin with.

THE WAY FORWARD: A NEW HUMANISM

I close this piece by returning to Ikeda and his manifesto A New Humanism. I’m particularly drawn to Ikeda’s speeches in the 1970e because his ideas offer real, grounded possibilities for how we might live in today’s world.

In A New Humanism, Ikeda offers a framework for the future that neither retreats into rigid religion nor collapses into hollow materialism. Instead, it invites us to become creators of meaning in a world that is constantly changing.

It begins with a simple but radical idea: that each of us holds the potential to participate in the ongoing creation of life. We are not here to escape the world or dominate it — but to respond to it. To co-create with it. As Ikeda writes, human beings are “created creators,” continuously forming and reforming themselves through their relationships with others, with nature, and with the cosmos itself.

Unlike dogmatic religion, this worldview doesn’t rely on an external saviour. And unlike secular rationalism, it doesn’t reduce us to isolated minds or economic units. Instead, it offers a middle path: where spirituality isn’t about transcendence beyond life, but an awakening within it. It asks us to recognise that we are both part of the problem and part of the solution. That our creativity, our compassion, and our capacity for transformation are not luxuries, they are necessities.

This shift — from ego to interdependence, from control to co-creation — is at the heart of what it means to live sustainably. Because healing the planet isn’t just about emissions and policy. It’s about how we see the world, and whether we remember that we belong to it.

Sources:

Choose Life: A Dialogue with Arnold J. Toynbee

A New Humanism: The University Addresses of Daisaku Ikeda