Mission: Possible - activists celebrated - Brief Article

Gandhi once said: You yourself must be the change you wish to see in the world. These days, as the stories below reveal, there are more and more ways to heed that advice creatively

Idealism in America used to have only a few outlets: teaching or the church or writing books. In our more secular age, however, expressions of activism have become almost as infinite as the Internet.

Activists are now as likely to make downloadable documentaries or travel the world healing the environment as they are to stay at home teaching and writing. And even the teachers and writers are defining their roles differently. They've not only become technologically sophisticated; they've become realistic. The following group of activists pursue their missions in seemingly disparate ways. So what unites them? Among other things, their lack of greeting-card sentimentality. As one of their number, the writer bell hooks, says, "love is such a rigorous thing."

Michael Roach

Somehow it's difficult to believe it when American Buddhist teacher Michael Roach describes his childhood in Phoenix, Arizona, as "perfectly normal." A choirboy in his Episcopalian church, Roach later attended Princeton, where he majored in religion and Russian. In 1974, during his senior year, his mother and father died of cancer in quick succession, and then his brother committed suicide. Devastated, he went to India, searching for relief among the Tibetan Buddhist exile community there. He ended up being ordained a monk at Sera Mey monastery and staying for twenty-two years, becoming the first American ever to attain the degree of geshe, an honorific term signifying a master teacher status.

He returned to New York in 1981 and began teaching Buddhism via a radio show on WBAI. In order to pay the bills, Roach managed to secure a $50,000 loan, with which he and some friends started a diamond company called Andin; the company quickly grew into the second largest diamond business in the world and now brings in $125 million a year. Roach quit Andin and gave all his money away, but not before establishing an endowment that feeds 2,000 monks at Sera Mey ("They're eating the interest," he says.)

These days, Roach runs the Asian Classics Institute on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which offers free courses on Buddhism and Tibetan language. He also hosts a TV show on Manhattan's public access television and a weekly TV show in Mongolia, which is watched by half a million people. He's also created a program whereby hundreds of Tibetan refugees input ancient scriptures into computer databases, which are given out free as CD-ROMS. So far, he's given away about 10,000 of them. "We try to achieve a blend of ancient wisdom and modern technology. The big thing we want to teach is that modern people can practice Buddhism even at the level of a geshe and still have a job and family and go to clubs at night. Buddhism is really a frame of mind."

This month Roach's first two books will be published simultaneously, both by Doubleday. One, The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Strategies for Managing Your Business and Your Life, is about how one's career and spiritual practice can be merged. The other is a parable called The Garden. Like Roach, the book's protagonist meets many great Buddhist thinkers and learns all the essential principles of Buddhism, translated into secular philosophical terms. At the end of The Garden, the main character ends up becoming enlightened. Whether Roach's real life will imitate his art remains to be seen, but you can't say he isn't putting in the effort: This month he begins a three-year silent retreat.

Billy Karesh

Billy Karesh, a wildlife veterinarian, has had his finger inside the reproductive slit of a South American crocodile, been charged by elephants, and on one particular night while tracking wild tapirs in the rainforest of Bolivia, found himself face to face with a jaguar. His job requires that he spend way too much time in small airplanes, and if the wild animals don't get him, he is constantly at risk of being killed by angry poachers, rebel armies, and infectious diseases. "I'm very careful," he says. "I'm not trying to die."

The veterinary Indiana Jones was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. Now forty-five, he spends his few months a year in America in New York, at the Bronx Zoo. He earned his doctorate in veterinary medicine in 1982 at the University of Georgia and has worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society for the last eleven years. His book Appointments at the Ends of the World (published by Warner Books last year) details his efforts to save remaining wildlife populations. As you might expect from a guy who spends most of his time healing animals in the wild all around the world, Karesh is a pragmatist. His interests reflect his practicality. "Extreme consumption of the earth's resources is an issue," he says. "The landscapes of the planet are being changed dramatically and my goal is to help people reduce the impact of those changes on wild animals and wild places. It's not about me or what one person can do. It's about reaching out to a group of people that traditional conservation hasn't touched. Avoidin g being killed by an elephant is simple compared to convincing influential people to take care of their environment, for their own future. It doesn't take a genius."