Une personne peut-elle faire une différence ?

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Can One Person Make A Difference?

With One for All, All is One

Like Mahatma Gandhi, Satish Kumar has believed one person can make a difference since the age of nine, when he renounced the world and joined the wandering brotherhood of Jain monks. At 18, an inner voice told him to leave the Jain and undertook an 8,000-mile peace pilgrimage, walking alone from India to America without funds to deliver “peace tea” to the leaders of the four nuclear powers.

Since then, Kumar has authored books and edited Resurgence magazine, promoting peace, non-violence, sustainability, appropriate technology, and holistic philosophy.

“The time has come when we need to integrate personal with political change,” says Kumar. “We need the environmental movement and religious organizations to work together.” That is the goal of this year’s Resurgence conference, Earth & Religion, to be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, June 9-12.

“Leaders and activists in the environmental and social justice movement often consider spiritual and religious organizations irrelevant,” Kumar explains. “They see religious pursuit and practice as being too self-centered and not engaged with the real world. In the same manner, religious leaders and organizations look upon the environmental and social justice movements as a waste of time. They believe that the only real change is personal change and if all human beings behaved well and lived religiously then the world problems will sort themselves out.”

Instead, says Kumar, these positions are polarized and therefore only achieve “partial” goals. Of course, Kumar admits, “personal transformation is essential. As Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’” However, he points out, “there are social and political institutions, governments, and business corporations—they have a momentum of their own and even good individuals within them are incapable of influencing their directions. So, social and institutional transformation is as essential as personal transformation. But on the other hand, mere social and institutional transformation will not be sufficient. Personal values and how we live in the world in our every day lives is as important as working for a better world.”

In the end, Kumar believes that living Gandhi’s teachings and integrating environmentalism with religion, and the individual with the institution, may be our only and best hope. “The 20th Century was the century of economic growth, industrial expansion, consumerism, and materialism,” he says. “Let the 21st Century be the century of the environment, of a holistic worldview, and of personal and planetary coming together.”

Resurgence magazine promotes peace, non-violence, sustainability, appropriate technology, and holistic philosophy. In 1991 Kumar helped found E.F. Schumacher College, an international center for the study of ecological and spiritual values, which he now directs. He won the Jamnalal Bajaj International Award for Promoting Gandhian Values Abroad in 2001, and has published two books about his spirituality and life’s journey: Path Without Destination (William Morrow, 1999), and You Are, Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Independence (Green Books, 2002