Book Club: The World We Have – A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology

You’re invited to a series of book club discussions on Thích Nhất Hạnh’s book The World We Have – A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology.

Understanding the impermanence of all things can offer the inner peace necessary to act skillfully and to use our collective wisdom and capability to restore the Earth’s balance.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by climate anxiety, hopelessness, or burnout amid the many crises of our time, please join us in reading this book to cultivate a clear, open mind so that we can see and discuss the future we want for our planet.

Please register to attend and be sure to pick up your copy of The World We Have. To receive 20% off, order directly from Parallax and use code: OURWORLD2025

Along with this book club, we’re excited to launch the ebook version of The World We Have! Recognizing that all forms of books take resources and have an impact on our planet, we know that they each have their benefits, too. Ebooks minimize the consumption of resources such as paper, ink, and shipping, which can be an impactful way to lower the amount of waste produced.

Both ebooks and physical books can be rented from local libraries, which allows a single resource to be shared and benefit many. If your local library doesn’t carry this or other Parallax Press books, we invite you to request our titles so that they may have a wider reach in the world.

About the book

Mixing inspiring insights with practical strategies, Thích Nhất Hạnh cites projects that the Plum Village monastic community has undertaken that can serve as models for any community. Both his “No Car Day,” observed once a week, and the “Earth Peace Treaty Commitment Sheet” can positively change our impact on the Earth.

Above all, Thích Nhất Hạnh shows how acceptance of the problems is that first critical step toward a deeper understanding of the best way to care for our Earth.

Discount for book club

To receive 20% off your copy of The World We Have, use code OURWORLD2025

Discussion dates

These free, virtual, one-hour book club discussions are open to all. Please register on Zoom once and you will be able to join all of the sessions. Our discussions will not be recorded.

Register to attend

We will have three weekly sessions. We’ll focus on particular sections of the book during each session, so you’re welcome to attend any/all of the meetings.

For all of our friends across the world with various schedules and times zones who are unable to attend our discussions, we encourage you to self-organize your own book clubs and read along with us on following schedule! (Find a local sangha) Downloadable discussion questions will be added before each meeting.

Thursday, July 10, from 10:30 to 11:30 am CT. Find your local time here.

• A Collective Awakening
• introduction to page 57
• Chapters discussed:
  The Bells of Mindfulness
  A Global Ethic
  Diet for a Mindful Planet
  Nature and Nonviolence
  Overcoming Fear

Thursday, July 17, from 10:30 to 11:30 am CT. Find your local time here.

• Our Message is Our Action
• pages 61-101
• Chapters discussed:
  A Beautiful Continuation
  Caring for the Environmentalist
  The City with Only One Tree
  Transforming Our Communities
  The Eyes of the Elephant Queen

Thursday, July 24, from 10:30 to 11:30 am CT. Find your local time here.

• Practices for Mindful Living
• pages 105-140
• Chapters discussed:
  Earth Gathas
  Breathing Exercise
  Deep Relaxation
  Touching the Earth
  Earth Peace Treaty

Discussion questions

Check back here for discussion questions as they are posted each week!

From the introduction by Alan Weisman

A few years ago, while researching my book The World Without Us, I visited a tribe in Ecuador whose remaining shred of once bountiful Amazon forest was so depleted that they’d resorted to hunting spider monkeys. This was especially grim because they believed themselves to be descended from those very primates. In essence, they’d been reduced to eating their ancestors.

In this new book by Thích Nhất Hạnh, The World We Have, there is a remarkable corollary, called the Sutra on the Son’s Flesh. Its moral is that if we don’t consume with mindfulness and compassion, we will in effect be eating our children.

I am neither a Buddhist nor a sage, merely a journalist, so I am humbled to introduce this latest summons to mindful action by Thích Nhất Hạnh. I am also gratified that his venerable voice, which during a terrible war once helped our world regain its moral bearings, is raised yet again to guide us in an age of urgent need. In very separate ways, both he and I have concluded that as humans lose the links to the past from which we spring, we threaten to kill our future.

In The World Without Us, I imagined how our planet might respond if humans were suddenly extracted. How long would it take the rest of nature to obliterate our deep tracks, undo our damage, replenish our empty niche, subdue our toxins, and soften our scars? As my research revealed, many of our monumental works and seemingly invincible structures would succumb surprisingly quickly. Other matters that we’ve set in motion, however, such as all the carbon we’ve exhumed and redeposited in the atmosphere, would take nature much longer to reabsorb.

And yet, nature has all the time in the world. Scientists, materials engineers, and the Buddha concur: nothing we do is permanent.

In fact, our world has been through far greater losses than the one we’re currently perpetrating. Periodically, volcanic eruptions that lasted up to a million years and cataclysmic asteroid strikes have so devastated this planet that nearly everything alive was extinguished. Nevertheless, life, so awesomely resilient, is continually reborn in some unexpected and fertile incarnation—filling the Earth in one era with colossal reptiles, in another with magnificent mammals. This mysterious, wondrous life has recycled before, and will again.

Just as no person lives forever, no species escapes eventual extinction, and ours is no exception. Yet to be alive, as Thích Nhất Hạnh so eloquently reminds us, is both a blessing and an honor to uphold. To realize that we are part of a grand, changing, living pageant—one that, no matter how deep a wound it sustains, will always be renewed—brings great peace. But this grand perspective doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility of living and acting at the highest possible level of awareness while we are here now. On the contrary; in one of those illuminating paradoxes that a Buddhist like Thích Nhất Hạnh handles so deftly, the way to achieve enlightened freedom from the confi nes of the physical realm emerges directly from how consciously we engage with it.

One bright, cold afternoon in November 2003, I stood with five admirably engaged and dedicated fellow humans at the edge of a deep valley. We were north of Ch’orwon in South Korea’s Kangwon-do Province, staring at one of the most beautiful and terrifying places on Earth. Below us was the Demilitarized Zone: a buffer four kilometers wide that bisects the entire Korean peninsula. For fi fty years it had kept two of the world’s largest and most hostile armies from murdering each other.

Even so, each could still clearly see the other’s hillside bunkers, bristling with weapons that neither would hesitate to fire if provoked. Compounding this tragedy was the sad irony that these mortal enemies shared the same history, language, and blood.

But they also shared a miracle. After a half-century, the abandoned no-man’s-land between them had reverted from rice paddies and villages to wilderness. Inadvertently, it had become one of the most important nature refuges in Asia. Among the imperiled species that depend on it was one revered throughout the Orient: the red-crowned crane. The second-rarest crane on Earth after the whooping crane, it is repeatedly depicted in paintings and silks as a symbol of longevity, and as a manifestation of the noble virtues of Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks. Many, if not most, of these fabulous birds now winter in the DMZ.

My hosts were scientists and staff from the Korean Federation of Environmental Movement. Together, we watched as eleven red-crowned cranes—cherry caps, black extremities, but otherwise as pure and white as innocence itself—silently glided between the seething North and South Korean forces. Placidly, they settled in the bulrushes to feed.

Because only 1,500 of these creatures remain, it was thrilling to see juveniles among them. Privileged as we were to witness this, it was impossible to forget—and even harder to reconcile—that this auspicious setting owed its existence to an unresolved war. If peace were ever restored, developers of suburbs to the south and industrial parks to the north had plans for this place that didn’t include wildlife. The reunification of Korea could mean a habitat loss that might shrink the red-crowned cranes’ gene pool critically enough to doom the entire species.

Unless, that is, Korean leaders realized that amid the sorrow of this divided land lay a great opportunity. A growing alliance of world scientists, including my
hosts, have proposed that the DMZ be declared an international peace park. It would be a gift of life to our Earth, protecting this haven for scores of precious creatures. By preserving the common ground between them, the two Koreas would not only save many irreplaceable species, but also earn immense international good will.

I asked my companions if they thought this would happen.

“We’ll never stop trying.”

But three days later I realized the challenge they faced, when one of them took me to a Buddhist temple in the mountains north of Seoul. This was one of the oldest Zen monasteries in Korea, a site that monks and environmentalists alike were fighting to exclude from a plan to ring the swelling capital city with new eight-lane highways—one of which would tunnel directly under this ancient sacred ground.

Outrageous, surely. And yet, I asked the head monk, did their struggle to save this sanctuary conflict with Buddhist principles of nonattachment to material things? For that matter, might the ethos of an environmental activist like my companion, clinging for dear life to the planet he courageously defended, actually be an impediment to his spiritual progress? If Buddhism teaches impermanence, is the impulse to preserve the environment—or anything, for that matter—therefore pointless?

It is true, the monk replied, that our world is impermanent. Yet, he added, just as we need to keep our bodies healthy and pure as we seek enlightenment, while we dwell on this planet we have a duty to cherish and protect it.

I sensed an intricate lesson in this paradox. Before leaving, I had another question for the monk. In a large hall below his quarters where we sat drinking tea, disciples seated on a wooden floor were chanting. I’d glanced in when we arrived; it was adorned with carved dragons and gilded Bodhisattvas. For a while, I’d lingered and listened, not understanding, yet something within me stirred.

“What are they singing?” I asked.

“That is the Diamond Sutra.”

“What does it mean?”

He explained that what appears as form is really emptiness but that emptiness also has form. I didn’t quite understand.

“Perhaps you need to listen more.”

In this new book, Thích Nhất Hạnh invites us all to listen. He defines the Diamond Sutra as the essence of deep ecology, a description of how nothing exists as an isolated self, because it is dependent upon and connected to everything else. Just as a fl ower can’t exist apart from the sun that energizes it, the soil that nourishes it, the creatures that pollinate it, or from the rain that waters it, we human beings have no existence separate from all else. The Diamond Sutra, Nhat Hanh explains, teaches that to see ourselves only as humans is a sad limitation of our true essence. We descend not just from our human ancestors, but from animal and plant ancestors, and even from the stuff of the Earth itself; its mineral components are our own.

In a passage as unforgettable to me as the temple chanting that still resounds in my memory, Thích Nhất Hạnh reminds us that we have been rocks, clouds, and trees. “We humans are a young species. We have to remember our past existences and be humble.”

The humility he describes is an admonition to respect not just human intelligence, but an orchid’s knowledge of how to produce mesmerizing blossoms, or a snail’s ability to make a flawless shell. To respect, however, means not merely to bow before the butterfly and the magnolia, or to serenely meditate on an oak’s marvels. The World We Have is a call to act. Its subtitle—A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology—hints that those two are inextricable. Just as two warring Koreas have an opportunity in the flowering ground between them to not only give the world a gift but to draw closer to each other, so, in the epic crisis that threatens to choke our entire planet, do we have a chance to join in a common cause greater than all our imagined differences.

The environment unites every human, of every nation and creed. If we fail to save it, we all perish. If we rise to meet the need, we and all to which ecology binds us—other humans, other species, other everything—survive together. And that will be peace.

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Please email jess@parallax.org if you have any questions about this book club, or suggestions on how to support those interested in self-organizing book clubs in different time zones.