Applying Gandhi's Ideas to Climate Change. By Peter Applebome, NYTimes, March 30, 2008. "What was once a Capuchin monastery on the Hudson River... [is] now the Garrison Institute, a New Agey organization that tries to meld contemplation and action... Central to Gandhi... was the notion that the truth, power and moral force of a movement are inseparable from the truth, power and moral force of its actors. Hence Gandhi nonviolently freeing India from the greatest empire of his time, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. overturning segregation in the South, Nelson Mandela ending apartheid -- intention wedded to action, focus leading to carry-through, evolution resulting from perseverance and discipline… So there's nothing unexpected in the current melding of Gandhi and climate change, tied to the Metropolitan Opera's first staging of Philip Glass's opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha ('The Power of Truth'), beginning April 11. After that is a private conference at the institute, followed by a free public event on April 13 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan including scholars, environmental leaders and artists, among them Mr. Glass. The guiding notion is that climate change today calls for the same kind of collective will, shared destiny, moral purpose, personal responsibility and strategic acumen as the other great movements, and that Gandhi's ideas and achievements are entirely germane to what needs to happen now."
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