Years ago, I founded a not-for-profit with an aim to buy contaminated land and create parks and gardens in “underserved” neighborhoods (read: low-income, minority places with long histories of dis-investment). Cleaning up industrial waste, creating places for children and families to gather, play, and grow organic food, making space for natural solutions to storm water, urban heat islands, and other technological challenges—this was apple pie stuff, right?

Well this was the mid 1990s and I was called-out by fellow conservationists—professionals who accused me of actually creating sprawl. (How about providing healthy landscapes and recreational and ecosystem services so people want to live in cities, thereby increasing density, eh?)

Sometime later, a utility company executive jumped at his own misunderstanding as an opportunity to spread falsehoods about me personally to friends in high places. His dislike of me and a project I advanced ended my fundraising prospects for a new park—one the local media coined, “darnn near a stroke of genius” (no, the park wasn’t originally my idea).

Then there was the time a visionary colleague at a federal agency lost his job because influential people in the resource extraction business didn’t agree with a report we jointly published. In our research, dozens of agency partners said they wanted federal government assistance in greening and cooling cities to counteract urban heat island effects and save lives. Joining forces and delivering this message cost him his job.

These happenings were frustrating and painful. But this is all blah, blah, blah—one woman’s battle scars in the great fight for planet Earth. Every seasoned environmentalist seems to have their share of stories; often, we are the walking wounded. Worse, besides painful personal histories, we advocates suffer from the knowledge that things are worse-off than when we started: the global population continues to grow unabated, there is much less biodiversity than in our childhoods (entire species expire at unprecedented rates), the oceans are nearly fished out, and there is no end in sight to global warming. Collectively, we’re not winning. Sometimes, it’s enough to make professionals or citizen activists despair.

But hold on.

We advocates are more than social and political animals; we are spiritual creatures. Before we call it quits, we’d be wise to explore how to mend and maintain our oh-so-human hearts and minds by skillfully feeding and watering our spiritual selves. I had something of a breakthrough in this regard when after years of meditation and Buddhist study I fiddled around with and rewrote a classic Buddhist text: the Heart of the Prajnaparamita. I’ll publish what I call the Earth Holders’ Heart Sutra in my next post.