Global Ethics Films Documentary Series

The Global Ethics and Religion Forum is in the post-production phase of making an extraordinary documentary of BBC quality entitled "Patterns for Peace: India as a Model for Peace in a Multi-Religious Society."  This documentary will advance interreligious understanding with a focus on the multi-religious society of India and the heritage of Gandhi, bringing international attention to India's heritage of peace and nonviolence in an extremely diverse society.

In the wake of recent tragedies and violence around the world, it is essential that there be open discussion of paths which can lead us into a more peaceful and harmonious future.  To move toward such a future, the international community can draw on India’s centuries of experience of diverse communities of Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, and Buddhists living together in peace, and on India’s deep religious and Gandhian heritage of nonviolence.  This heritage has already touched the world, inspiring the fight against Apartheid in South Africa and the movement for civil rights in the United States, but it is needed now more than ever, as war and civil strife increasingly threaten our global community. 

We have been able to respond to this need by collecting over 55 hours of outstanding footage for the documentary.  This footage was shot by two exceptional young filmmakers primarily on location in the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan.  Among the many people interviewed for the documentary are: His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama; Father Cedric Prakash, S.J., Director of the Center for Human Rights, Justice and Peace in Ahmedabad;  a group of low caste singers from Rajasthan; the Maharaja of Jodhpur; Colonel Fateh Singh, who both fought the India-Pakistan wars and was a UN Peacekeeper in the Middle East; the Sikh economist Surjit Singh; and Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, an 83 year old scholar of the Quran, internationally recognized for his dedication to issues of peace and interreligious understanding.

"Patterns for Peace: India as a Model for Peace in a Multi-Religious Society" will be the first in a series of films focusing on serious ethical challenges facing our world today.  The second film, "The Sacred Planet," is in the production phase and addresses the environmental crisis. This documentary is being shot in Japan, England, Southern California, and the Yukon Territory in Canada. The third film in the series, "Global Voices for Human Rights," examines the call for human rights across the world's religious and ethical traditions. The documentary is also in the production phase with principle filming completed in Barcelona, Spain at the 4th Parliament of the World's Religions. 

The Sacred Planet vividly documents that humans need to regain a sense of the sacredness of the planet if we are going to solve the environmental crisis..  The degradation of the environment by humans has reached a crisis point. We look to science to help us with these problems. However, while technological solutions are promising and important, any long term prospect for sustainable human life on the planet will depend on major shifts in our view of our relationship to nature.  The Sacred Planet explores the broken relationship of human beings with the natural world and moves us toward new models of sustainability.  As Aldo Leopold says in A Sand County Almanac “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”  The World’s Religious Traditions can reinforce this insight and offer fundamental resources to right this broken relationship.

A key to this transformative change is taking a global perspective and coming to understand the interdependence of the entire planetary system.  Or as John Muir puts it “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”  This film illustrates our human global interdependence with location filming in Japan, the Yukon Territories, Canada, and Southern California.  After showing the beauty of nature and then its current degradation, interviews with ordinary people, scientists and environmental planners will first explain potential technological solutions to the environmental crisis – including hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear power - and then present three intrinsically spiritual models for sustainable living.  For a scientific, technological understanding is not sufficient to address the environmental problems facing us.  The deeper problem is that the majority of humans have lost their sense of the sacredness of nature and their understanding of the interdependence of natural and human flourishing.  In the Yukon we see the Christian environmental tradition interacting with the First Nations traditions, in Japan we see primarily Buddhism, but also Confucianism and Taoism, interfacing with the indigenous tradition of Shintoism, though there is a significant Christian influence, and in Southern California we find a highly pluralistic culture with all of the World Religions present, including Buddhism and Christianity. 

The three models for sustainability are 1) the new direction in the Yukon to build co-operation between First Nations oral tradition and spiritual approaches and scientific Christian culture approaches to sustainability.  This approach is particularly relevant in an area of the world where First Nations peoples make up a sizable portion of the minute population (30,000) of the vast Yukon territories.  The limitation of this approach for global application is the contrasting high population density of most of the world and low percentage of indigenous religious populations.  (2) Southern California is densely populated and offers a highly technological, multicultural but primarily non-religious approach to environmental concerns.  While this is representative of a “First World” approach, the positive resources of the World’s Religions have been little accessed.  3) Japan, and the city of Toyama in particular, offers a middle, globally applicable approach.  Here a highly dense population with advanced technology is strongly and more overtly influenced by an indigenous religious tradition (Shinto) and a major world religion (Buddhism).  For instance, trees are sacred in Japanese culture and partially as a result of this Japan has the highest percentage (about 70%).of reclaimed forest land of any First World nation.  And a deep sense of the importance of modesty and thrift built on a combination of Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist heritage means that the Japanese maintain the same standard of living as the U.S. on half the energy consumption.

The City of Toyama, on which the Japan portion of the film focuses, is surrounded on three sides by the steep, mountainous terrain of the Northern Japanese Alps.  With fertile, rolling plains at its heart, Toyama borders Toyama Bay and the Sea of Japan. Ranked number one on the central island of Honshu for its amount of natural vegetation, Toyama is a medium sized city of 420,000 people with major high-tech, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies surrounded by agricultural land, and is one of the eight model environmental cities in Japan.  In the documentary The Sacred Planet, this modern, environmentally conscious city with its ancient Shinto and Buddhist roots, provides a model for sustainable living and spiritual connection to nature between the extremes of the virtually pristine nature found in the Yukon Territories, where there is only a tiny human population, and environmentally conscious coastal Southern California, burdened by a massive human population. 

Since the approval of the Central City Revitalization Basic Plan in February 2006, Toyama City has been working on formation of a “compact city” where people can live comfortably without relying on cars, by controlling sprawl, bringing back population to the core district of the city, and consolidating urban functions and services necessary for daily life. Toyama City has Japan’s first full-scale LRT (Light Rail Transit) as its leading project, and is making efforts to address the global environmental problems through forest restoration and the promotion of recycling, and is the first Japanese city to ban free plastic bags.  It is also a Japanese “Eco-town”  Under this system, comprehensive and multifaceted support is provided by the central government to local public bodies when their eco-town plans (environmentally harmonized town planning) utilizing their local characteristics are approved by the central government.  Based on the “Zero-emission Concept” – a concept to shift all wastes generated from one particular industry to be utilized as material in another industry sector, and aimed at removing any types of wastes – the Eco-town project aims to construct an environmentally harmonized community.  Finally, Toyama serves as a headquarters for the U.N. project “Action Plan for the Protection, Management and Development of the Marine and Coastal Environment of the Northwest Pacific Region” (NOWPAP).  NOWPAP brings together China, South Korea, Russia and Japan to “the wise use, development and management of the marine and coastal environment so as to obtain the utmost long-term benefits for the human populations of the region, while securing the region's sustainability for future generations”.