"Climate crisis results from mankind's primitive tendency to consume": Acharya Prashant pushes for solutions

India Gazette

25-05-2025

New Delhi [India], May 25 (ANI): Acharya Prashant, a philosopher and spiritual teacher, explores the problem of human consumption amid the ongoing global climate crisis in his new feature piece published by The Sunday Guardian, where he argues that humanity faces an unprecedented crisis, which he labels as 'the sixth mass extinction', driven by human actions and 'mankind's primitive tendency to consume.'
He explains that Operation 2030 is an emergency call to raise awareness about the climate crisis and the urgent need to address it. His central argument is that true climate transformation can only begin when material excess is replaced with inner wisdom.
In his column with Sunday Guardian, Acharya Prashant wrote that the PrashantAdvait Foundation has initiated a campaign by the name of 'Operation 2030', where the understanding is that the climate crisis wasn't merely a political or technological problem, but stems from a deeper psychological tendency toward excessive consumption and a flawed philosophy of happiness based on material excess.
'We at the Foundation have been of the realised view that the Climate crisis cannot have a purely political or technological solution. The Climate crisis is a situation resulting from mankind's primitive tendency to consume, which reflects in population explosion, per capita consumption, and the global pop philosophy of maximising happiness through consumption. The crisis is therefore firstly inside us,' Acharya Prashant writes in his feature published by the Sunday Guardian.
He explains that Operation 2030 remains an emergency call to raise awareness about the climate crisis and the need to address it. Acharya Prashant's main argument remains that true climate transformation begins when we replace material excess with inner wisdom.
In his Sunday Guardian column, the author states that Operation 2030 urges inner transformation, climate accountability, and citizen-led change to combat ecological collapse. Focusing on the motives of Operation 2030, Acharya Prashant argues that the campaign is a call to address the long-standing urgency of the climate crisis.
'It was a collective promise made during the Paris Agreement at COP21 in 2015, to protect the future. But now, in 2025, that promise lies broken. The 1.5C threshold we aimed to avoid until 2030 has already been breached -- with global temperatures now already exceeding 1.5C above normal. The alarm rang -- but we were too distracted to hear,' he writes in his feature published by the English daily, The Sunday Guardian.
Calling this a 'premature breach', Acharya Prashant advocates the need to have such an operation in order to address the climate crisis.
He advocates calling out elites, who he says are the 'real culprits', for leaving high carbon footprints. Operation 2030 supports public declarations of carbon emissions and collaboration with data-driven organisations for accountability, the author states in his column at The Sunday Guardian.
In democratic societies, meaningful climate action requires citizen pressure, Acharya Prashant writes in his article, adding that Operation 2030 aims to make climate a political issue by empowering individuals, especially youth, since 'they are not just future victims but present agents of change.' (ANI)