Roseleen Shanley / Gandhi’s Platform

This week a colleague and I visited the Scottish Parliament for a WWF Footprinting event. Here many celebrated all the hard work that was being done to reduce our country’s footprint and there were many fine examples of how people were living in a more sustainable way. So much great work is being done yet, we still have a long way to go and there are many obstacles to overcome.

As I travelled by train to Edinburgh, I recalled an event from the life of Gandhi. This event he later described as his most humbling, creative and  productive moment.

Gandhi had bought a first class train ticket by post to travel through South Africa. He sat on the train unaware of the apartheid law which forbade anyone other than a white person from sitting in the first class compartment. The train guard was called and he demanded Gandhi occupy the seats set aside for other ethnic groups. Gandhi refused to move and was thrown off the train at the next stop. He spent the night alone on the train platform. He thought about the injustice of apartheid and became determined to challenge the system that demeaned people because of their race or colour. On his return to India, Gandhi wishing to end British involvement in his country, immersed himself in nature and travelled around India studying the landscape and the people.These events triggered the birth of the human rights, peaceful protest movement and the rest is an amazing historical story which did so much good for humanity.  Great change cannot happen without knowledge of the environment, your place and the place of others within it. Gandhi built teams of change around this philosophy and his work is still ongoing in his absence.

I think we have all experienced the Gandhi platform - Ouch!!  I guess our efforts to bring about change are also much more basic.                      

The Natural Change Project has given us all that the opportunity to “get off” and break away from our hectic lifestyles. It has enabled us to stop, think, reflect and gather our ideas on sustainable lifestyles and attitudes. Our isolation days put us on the Gandhi platform. Immersing ourselves in nature has stimulated our thoughts, creativity and drive to protect. We have to respect ourselves and others, but also our beautiful world. Nature has been our teacher and has enabled us all to believe we can make a difference.

Perhaps we all have to jump off the busy and sometimes hectic train of life from time to time. Spend time on the platform contemplating and making sense of our individual journeys. However, we all have to be clear what the purpose of our journey is and travel together to find the most effective route to take in our quest for living in a more sustainable way. We cannot do this alone as Gandhi also found out.

We all need the platform of nature to catch the train and make the journey of change together.