20140125環保茹素度世間 Recycling to Save Our Planet
Thank you, blessings to you. Roads are hilly here in Xiangzhi. Many places can only be reached by foot and not by car. Thanks to Master’s support and teachings, our volunteers are happy doing this. They go to the mountaintop or temples to collect recyclables and store them in a place where. Brother Shatian can come and pick it up in a car.
At first, they didn’t know what recycling was. Now, everyone knows. This is Tzu Chi’s Great Love. It’s for relief aid. Finally, everyone has realized. Everyone says this is compassion and are happy doing this. Thank you, brother. Thank you.
Our recycling work in Quanzhou City. China is truly very touching. Our volunteers collect recyclables from each family and carry it sown the fills on their shoulder. They truly shoulder a mission of love and cultivate a field of blessings. It is a lot of work and is physically demanding, but they all take it on willingly and joyfully. It’s because they see that these are all resources from nature and don’t want them to go to waste. If recycled, these can be remade into other goods. Otherwise, if dumped into a landfill, plastics won’t biodegrade and will pollute the land.
The way these people love and respect Mother Nature and cherish resources is truly touching and inspiring. Indeed, they all understand the need to protect the environment, and they are all faithfully doing it I am grateful that these locals have karmic affinities with Tzu Chi and even deeper affinities with me which is why after watching my talks on Da Ai TV, they took the teachings to heart and started practicing them and are very happy doing it.
The people there are very simple and own-to-earth and their hearts are very pure and sincere. Where they live is a coastal area. So, they used to all have livelihoods connected to the fishing industry. But, after learning the Dharma, they understood it’d be better to discontinue that line of work and help protect the environment.
That is the kind of simple goodness they have. They are very willing to give of themselves. It’s very moving. Truly, we should learn Dharma like this, where after hearing the teachings, our compassion comes forth and we work to contribute to the common good. If all of us can think of the common good and just be a little bit more mindful to wash out the bottles, cans, etc. we use after what was inside has been used up, before bringing these to a recycling station, that would really do a lot of good.
Let us all actively promote this idea and practice instead of just working on collecting trash to be recycled. We ought to be more proactive in working on the source of the problem by getting every family and every person to clean the items after use and recycle them. That’s the most effective and thorough way to benefit the environment through recycling.
This is also for the sake of conserving water. We should know that conserving water is very important because humans have been over-pumping groundwater. See, when water is removed from fruit, it will shrivel and dry up. In the same way, when groundwater is pumped out, the land sinks. Meanwhile, with ice melting in the south and north poles, the sea level is also rising. What do you think this will lead to? So, we have to conserve water.
In order to both recycle and conserve water, we have to promote the practice of keeping bottles, etc. clean after use, so that when the recyclables are collected, a lot of water doesn’t need to be used to clean them. So, I really hope everyone can cherish and protect our earth’s resources, including water. Everyone, please encourage the people in your family and others as well to recycle and do it thoroughly by keeping the recyclables clean to being with.
Also, we see flooding in Indonesia, which I have been mentioning for the past few days. After the floodwaters receded, the streets were left with mud and debris. The flooded area was in total disarray. How do we help them to recover quickly? Besides distributing relief aid, our volunteers also learned from the example of our work in the Philippines which really helped survivors.
So, they’ve begun inviting survivors to join our cleanup program. Instead of bemoaning the disaster and complaining about the bad situation, it is better to take constructive action.
Doing this has helped the survivors’ hearts’ to open and helped bring out their resilience. Everyone is starting to smile again and all are pooling their strength together to help each other instead of feeling at a loss as to how to recover because the cleanup seemed too massive to accomplish.
By themselves, how could they clean everything? But once we organized them to get together to help one another clean up, it is like: “I help you clean up your home” “and you help me clean up my home” With that, everyone has started to smile again. Although our cash aid is not a huge amount, aid recipients are satisfied and happy, and full of gratitude toward one another.
Our program gives them the motivation to move on and brings out their energy. Whether it’s cleaning up public streets or private homes, our program revitalizes the disaster areas. So, encouraging survivors to contribute to the recovery work is the way to go for recovering from disasters. Not just for Tzu Chi, this practice should be able to work anywhere.
We also saw that in Germany, Tzu Chi volunteers from northern and southern Germany, who live hundreds of kilometers apart, came together for a year-end Blessings Ceremony to support each other on the Tzu Chi path. They also used this opportunity to invite local people to attend and shared with them on how to protect the environment, including by eating vegetarian for this allows people to not only protect the environment but also to be healthier and grow spiritually.
To protect our land, we should eat vegetarian so that we don’t need to raise so many livestock, thereby reducing waste and pollution. Moreover, eating too much meat will create burdens on our body and cause us to develop illnesses. We need to promote environmental protection and vegetarianism to people everywhere because while safe and well, we need to be alert to environmental problems and sincerely do something to help.
See how at their prayer ceremony, they seized that opportunity to promote environmental protection and vegetarianism. This is for us to practice throughout the year.
首頁 