In Memoriam Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin

In memory of Ursula K. Le Guin who sadly passed away on Monday, I reproduce below her Dao Song, which she kindly contributed to Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape (Harvard 2001). The book emerged out of a conference at Harvard in 1998, which she also attended as part of a forum that invited contemporary American practitioners and interpreters of Daoism to join in the scholarly conversation.

Acutely aware of her status as a non-Sinologist, and of the defensiveness of Sinologists towards popular American “versions” of Daoism, Ms. Le Guin wrote,

Defensiveness against cheapening and trivializing Daoism thus seems to me an inevitable, essential part of your work as scholars; and yet, like the ecologist, the conservationist, you don’t have the luxury of being absolutely defensive. Compromise is also inevitable. People will use the river and the desert. Daoist texts are popular. The barbarians are inside the gates – here I am.

Far from a barbarian, Ms. Le Guin was one of the most imaginative and sensitive interpreters of Daoist thought in the contemporary West. I am deeply saddened by her passing, and grateful to have met her, if only fleetingly, in Cambridge nearly 20 years ago.

Dao Song

O slow fish
show me the way
O green weed
grow me the way

The way you go
the way you grow
is the way
indeed

O bright Sun
light me the way
the right way
the one
no one can say

If one can choose it
it is wrong
Sing me the way
O song:

No one can lose it
for long

 

video lecture: james miller speaks on china’s green religion at the university of southern california’s us-china institute

The monumental task that China faces in the 21st century is to create a way of development that does not destroy the ecological foundations for the life and livelihood of its 1.4 billion citizens. This requires a creative leap beyond the Enlightenment mentality and the Western model of industrialization. Can China’s cultural traditions, its religious values, ideals and ways of life, play a role in building a sustainable China?

The following video was recorded at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute on November 19, 2014.

turning students into citizens, religious studies edition

The following article was first published in Religion Dispatches on December 15, 2014.

In last week’s column here on Religion Dispatches, Ivan Strenski argued strongly against American Academy of Religion President Laurie Zoloth’s call for religious studies to be “interrupted” by a focus on climate change, writing that “asking a religious studies professor to do something about climate change is absurd, or at the very least, peripheral.” He goes on to pose an important question for all branches of academy study: “Must every discipline have some significant contribution to make to every social problem we face?”

Of course climate change is not just any ordinary problem. Indeed as Evan Berry, quoting Mike Hulme, notes in his rejoinder to Strenski, climate change is “not so much a discrete problem to be solved as it is a condition under which human beings will have to make choices.” The question then becomes, what is the responsibility of higher education to prepare students to make responsible choices under this unprecedented condition?

In short, climate change is a game-changer for the whole of higher education. Laurie Zoloth realizes this, but Ivan Strenski does not.

Strenski advocates a model of higher education rooted in the disciplines of the 19th century. In this model the goal of a religion department is principally to train scholars of religion and not to engage in social activism. The same would be true for economics or physics departments: to train more economists and physicists. From this perspective disciplinary education is an end in itself and does not need to be oriented instrumentally towards some social goal.

But as universities have become providers of education for the masses of advanced societies, the narrow goal of disciplinary education is no longer fit for purpose. The academy does not need thousands of economists or physicists to keep these disciplines going; we need only a small number of brilliant minds. And yet the academy, because of its conservative disciplinary nature, insists on training legions of economists, religionists and physicists. If graduates of these programs find themselves able to enter the workforce or engage in responsible democratic citizenship, they do so in spite of their disciplinary education, not because of it.

In short the 19th century model of disciplinary education risks a staggering waste of talent at a time of global crisis. No wonder many people are wondering whether it is worth it to invest tens of thousands of dollars and four years of their lives majoring in the traditional disciplines.

In 2050 the world’s population will reach 9-10 billion, and much of its economy will be driven by hyper-dense, increasingly multi-ethnic, environmentally challenged megacities of up to 100 million people. No current economic system, scientific thought, cultural value system or political philosophy on its own has relevance for this new world. The key problems of the 21st century demand holistic thinking, multidisciplinary education and cross-cultural communications. These problems include:

  • How do we develop the economy for a world of 9-10 billion people in 2050 without destroying the ecosystems and environments that make life possible?
  • How do we discover the appropriate place for cultural differences in a multipolar, hypermodern world without resorting to fundamentalism, separatism, and ethnic violence?
  • How do we foster meaningful human relations and quality of life in a world transformed by science and technology?

The current disciplinary education model risks failing to prepare the next generation for the world that they will actually live in. For universities to safeguard the status quo is to risk their social legitimacy, and to risk disastrous consequences for the West’s future prosperity, not to mention humanity as a whole.

From this perspective, AAR President Zoloth’s demand for scholars of religion to imagine how their discipline can contribute to forming responsible citizens in a time of climate crisis is a master stroke. It immediately gives purpose and relevance to the thousands of students who are majoring in religious studies. It asks them to consider how their studies of Buddhism or Christianity will help them negotiate a world whose climate is changing rapidly and without precedent. It asks them to make a creative leap across disciplinary boundaries. It asks them to apply their knowledge to the problems of the real world.

Surely it is far more important that thousands of young people can think critically about the nexus of religious worldviews, values and politics that shapes the diversity of the world’s responses to climate change, rather than the religious ideas of Medieval Chinese Daoism (which is how I began my academic career)!

Ivan Strenski is right that the discipline of religion needs scholars who are purely focussed on the academic problems of religion. But this is not what the vast majority of undergraduates needs; it is not what our society needs; and it is not what the planet needs.

If ever there was a time when our disciplines should serve the future needs of our students, and not the other way around, it is now. While I sympathize with Ivan Strenski’s call for academic departments to advance pure academic knowledge about their fields, now is not the time to prioritize this function of higher education. Laurie Zoloth’s call for radical interdisciplinary social engagement is timely, urgent, and a model for other disciplines to follow if our universities are to prepare students for the world of 2050 and beyond.

First published in Religion Dispatches, December 15, 2014.

turning students into citizens, religious studies edition

The following article was first published in Religion Dispatches on December 15, 2014.

In last week’s column here on Religion Dispatches, Ivan Strenski argued strongly against American Academy of Religion President Laurie Zoloth’s call for religious studies to be “interrupted” by a focus on climate change, writing that “asking a religious studies professor to do something about climate change is absurd, or at the very least, peripheral.” He goes on to pose an important question for all branches of academy study: “Must every discipline have some significant contribution to make to every social problem we face?”

Of course climate change is not just any ordinary problem. Indeed as Evan Berry, quoting Mike Hulme, notes in his rejoinder to Strenski, climate change is “not so much a discrete problem to be solved as it is a condition under which human beings will have to make choices.” The question then becomes, what is the responsibility of higher education to prepare students to make responsible choices under this unprecedented condition?

In short, climate change is a game-changer for the whole of higher education. Laurie Zoloth realizes this, but Ivan Strenski does not.

Strenski advocates a model of higher education rooted in the disciplines of the 19th century. In this model the goal of a religion department is principally to train scholars of religion and not to engage in social activism. The same would be true for economics or physics departments: to train more economists and physicists. From this perspective disciplinary education is an end in itself and does not need to be oriented instrumentally towards some social goal.

But as universities have become providers of education for the masses of advanced societies, the narrow goal of disciplinary education is no longer fit for purpose. The academy does not need thousands of economists or physicists to keep these disciplines going; we need only a small number of brilliant minds. And yet the academy, because of its conservative disciplinary nature, insists on training legions of economists, religionists and physicists. If graduates of these programs find themselves able to enter the workforce or engage in responsible democratic citizenship, they do so in spite of their disciplinary education, not because of it.

In short the 19th century model of disciplinary education risks a staggering waste of talent at a time of global crisis. No wonder many people are wondering whether it is worth it to invest tens of thousands of dollars and four years of their lives majoring in the traditional disciplines.

In 2050 the world’s population will reach 9-10 billion, and much of its economy will be driven by hyper-dense, increasingly multi-ethnic, environmentally challenged megacities of up to 100 million people. No current economic system, scientific thought, cultural value system or political philosophy on its own has relevance for this new world. The key problems of the 21st century demand holistic thinking, multidisciplinary education and cross-cultural communications. These problems include:

  • How do we develop the economy for a world of 9-10 billion people in 2050 without destroying the ecosystems and environments that make life possible?
  • How do we discover the appropriate place for cultural differences in a multipolar, hypermodern world without resorting to fundamentalism, separatism, and ethnic violence?
  • How do we foster meaningful human relations and quality of life in a world transformed by science and technology?

The current disciplinary education model risks failing to prepare the next generation for the world that they will actually live in. For universities to safeguard the status quo is to risk their social legitimacy, and to risk disastrous consequences for the West’s future prosperity, not to mention humanity as a whole.

From this perspective, AAR President Zoloth’s demand for scholars of religion to imagine how their discipline can contribute to forming responsible citizens in a time of climate crisis is a master stroke. It immediately gives purpose and relevance to the thousands of students who are majoring in religious studies. It asks them to consider how their studies of Buddhism or Christianity will help them negotiate a world whose climate is changing rapidly and without precedent. It asks them to make a creative leap across disciplinary boundaries. It asks them to apply their knowledge to the problems of the real world.

Surely it is far more important that thousands of young people can think critically about the nexus of religious worldviews, values and politics that shapes the diversity of the world’s responses to climate change, rather than the religious ideas of Medieval Chinese Daoism (which is how I began my academic career)!

Ivan Strenski is right that the discipline of religion needs scholars who are purely focussed on the academic problems of religion. But this is not what the vast majority of undergraduates needs; it is not what our society needs; and it is not what the planet needs.

If ever there was a time when our disciplines should serve the future needs of our students, and not the other way around, it is now. While I sympathize with Ivan Strenski’s call for academic departments to advance pure academic knowledge about their fields, now is not the time to prioritize this function of higher education. Laurie Zoloth’s call for radical interdisciplinary social engagement is timely, urgent, and a model for other disciplines to follow if our universities are to prepare students for the world of 2050 and beyond.

First published in Religion Dispatches, December 15, 2014.

china doesn’t have an “environmental” problem

From an article on China's cancer villages at RT.com

From an article on China’s cancer villages at RT.com

China doesn’t have an “environmental“ problem. The language of “environment” continues the false notion that nature constitutes an objective reality extrinsic to human subjectivity, accessible through science, transformable through engineering. This paradigm gives us the sense that the environment is something outside us that we can save or preserve through science and technology or other modes of intervention.

The reality from a Daoist perspective is that there is no such thing as an “environment” upon which humans individually or collectively act. Conversely there is no “environment” to be “saved” or “preserved.” Daoist thought posits multiple, co-creative subjectivities rather than a discourse of subjective agents who act on passive objects. This correlational agency is visualized in terms of the interdependence of landscape and  body. Each is mapped upon the other. Qi flows through the landscape just as it does through human bodies. Both are mutually implicated, and mutually co-constituting. 

This way of seeing human bodies in relation to the natural landscape opens up the possibility for an indigenously Chinese ethic of ecorelationality and new modes of discourse for framing problems of water scarcity, air pollution and food security. Furthermore, Daoist somatic praxis can support the development of a heightened aesthetic of ecological sensitivity.

Daoist thought and practice can thus support the development of an indigenous Chinese approach  to health, food and environment aesthetically, culturally, ethically and philosophically.

To learn more, please come to hear me speak in California on November 18 and 19.

china’s green religion: upcoming lecture

James MillerThe monumental task that China faces in the 21st century is to create a way of development that does not destroy the ecological foundations for the life and livelihood of its 1.4 billion citizens. This requires a creative leap beyond the Enlightenment mentality and the Western model of industrialization. Can China’s cultural traditions, its religious values, ideals and ways of life, play a role in building a sustainable China?

You are invited to join me in California to discuss the contribution of Daoism, China’s indigenous religion, to this urgent debate.

Talks will be held at

University of California, Santa Barbara
Tuesday, November 18, 5:00-7:00pm

Humanities and Social Sciences Building room 2252
University of California, Santa Barbara
Isla Vista, CA 93117

Sponsored by the UCSB Confucius Institute


University of Southern California
Wednesday, November 19, 4:00-5:30pm

Annenberg School for Communication room G34,
3502 Watt Way
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0281

Co-sponsored by the USC US-China Institute and the School of Religion

http://china.usc.edu/ShowEvent.aspx?EventID=5228

religion and ecological sustainability in china

Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China front CoverNew research on the relevance of culture and religion for understanding China’s environmental crisis and its transition towards sustainability has just been published in a collection of essays entitled Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China (Routledge 2014). The work, by leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences from China, Europe and North America, marks a milestone in the attempt to understand the cultural roots of the Chinese social imagination of nature, and to analyze the continuing relevance of those cultural traditions in China’s contemporary engagement with local environmental degradation and the global ecological crisis.

Edited by James Miller (Queen’s University, Canada) and Dan Smyer Yu and Peter van der Veer (Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity) the book simultaneously presents new data, new analysis, and new theoretical insights on Chinese understandings of nature, environment and ecology.

“Many of the very best scholars from China and the West working in anthropology, history, philosophy, religion, and sociology are featured in this book,” says James Miller.

Put together, the essays in this work makes a vital argument about how we should understand Chinese thinking about sustainability today. They demonstrate that thinking about the place of human beings in the world is deeply informed by cultural values. When we frame ecological sustainability as chiefly a technical or scientific problem, we overlook the way that people’s basic values and attitudes towards nature are the product of millennia of cultural habits and narratives. Sustainability can never be achieved without critically understanding and constructively engaging the way those cultural habits function in modernity.

The arrangement of the book presents a narrative arc that begins with China’s dominant cultural traditions and excavates the deep and complex history of Chinese attitudes towards nature and environment. Scholars of elite traditions and popular cultural practice trace the dominant cultural forms that have come to underpin Chinese thinking about nature and environment. The pivotal moment in this narrative comes with Rebecca Nedostup’s essay on how modern Chinese ideas of culture, religion, evolution and ecology were co-constituted in dynamic flux of China’s engagement with the West at the turn of the 20th century. The second half of the book comprises anthropological studies of Chinese and Tibetan practice regarding nature and environment that demonstrate how this modern nexus of ideas regarding culture, religion, nature and environment works itself out in contemporary China. Altogether the book demonstrates that Chinese ideas of nature, ecology, and environment are richly informed by a deep background of values and habits of thinking that are historically and culturally complex.

Failure to properly understand this complexity can result in serious social and environmental problems. This is especially true in a contemporary, rapidly urbanizing China that produces a cultural deficit regarding the most sensitive ecological areas that increasingly lie outside mainstream experience. This problem is also compounded by the fact that many such areas are populated not by Chinese people but by ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uighurs who have different languages, cultures and claims to nationality.

A case in point can be seen in Chinese author Qi Junyu’s essay on the forced migration of Tibetan herdsmen away from ecological protection areas. In his analysis the application of a scientific desire to protect sensitive areas of China’s environment exacerbated cultural misunderstandings between Chinese and Tibetans because it failed to take into account the way that local ecology functioned in traditional Tibetan culture. At the same time, however, Emily T. Yeh, demonstrates how the view of Tibetans as “ecological natives” also produces serious cultural misunderstandings for environmentalists working to protect these sensitive areas.

Altogether, the book paints a rich and complex picture of the state of the environment in contemporary China. It is a picture that is ethnically complex, inflected by historical values and habits, and dynamically engaging with modern scientific theory. The urgent need to understand how China’s diverse cultures interact with modernity to constitute China’s present quest for ecological sustainability is a vital enterprise that has repercussions for the whole world.  China’s environmental problems, its struggle to find the proper place for historical traditions in modernity, and its complex and problematic engagement with ethnic minorities are key issues of the 21st century. As this book demonstrates, they are all facets of a complex and dynamic cultural process that is only just beginning to be understood.

why china will solve the world’s environmental problems

Quick! Picture China’s biggest environmental problem.

China_Pollution-00b0aI bet you saw in your mind the polluted skies of Beijing and its citizens wearing face masks as they go to work. The western news media have been filled with alarming stories of China’s poor air quality, especially in the north, where China relies more heavily on coal-fired power stations.

But a recent Toronto Star story entitled China Wakes Up to its Water Crisis gets to the heart of an even more serious problem: China has only 7% of the world’s fresh water, but 20% of its population. While electricity can, in the long run, be produced by more renewable means, water cannot be manufactured out of nowhere.

China’s massive population and its relative scarcity of natural resources magnifies the impact of China’s environmental problems. As the world marches towards a population of 10 billion people, the reality that Chinese people face today will soon become the reality faced by the most of the world. China is now beginning to export its pollution to neighbouring countries and even to Africa and Latin America, which, like the Canadian tar sands, are undergoing massive natural resource development in part to meet China’s demands.

Soon the grim environmental reality that China’s citizens face could be shared by the rest of the world.

But here’s the good news.

There is no debate in China as to whether climate change is real. While some American leaders act like King Canute watching the ever rising tides that will eventually submerge them, the Chinese are already preparing sustainable megacities, and the massive sustainable agriculture systems that will feed them over the coming century. All of the world’s leading architectural and engineering practices are undertaking revolutionary work in China on the sustainable design of buildings and cities, and the whole world will benefit from the massive experimentation that is currently taking place in China.

Comparison of Countries' Actions and Policies on Climate Change

Comparison of Countries’ Actions and Policies on Climate Change

Since 2011, China’s environmental policies have been declared better than those of North America by Oxford University’s Smith School. While not as good as some countries, they are definitely moving in the right direction.

China has accepted that lower economic growth is the price worth paying for not destroying the planet, and in March this year China’s premier declared war on pollution just as China once declared war on poverty. It’s hard to imagine Western leaders declaring that their policy objective is to have lower economic growth than in previous years. The fact that this is occurring in a developing country makes this all the more remarkable.

China’s consumers are the second greenest out of seventeen countries measured in National Geographic’s Greendex. The report measures consumers’ attitudes towards recycling, eating vegetarian food, using public transport and other important lifestyle choices. Remarkably, Chinese consumers have become even more green as they have become rich. As the Greendex report highlights:

Chinese consumers’ Greendex score has consistently increased since 2008 despite rapid development in China. Consumers in the other emerging markets surveyed, including Brazil, Russia, and India, have not seen this upward trend in scores.

If this trend continues, it will be one of the most significant developments in consumer culture in the world.

Finally, China’s ancient cultural traditions, long neglected in the rush for modernization and development, have the capacity to underpin China’s postmodern engagement with a new and more sustainable form of civilization. While American Christians go to war on environmentalism, Chinese Confucians, Taoists and Buddhists have a long and complex history of recognizing the significance of the natural world for human wellbeing, as my new co-edited book on Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China demonstrates.

In the end, China will solve the world’s environmental problems, because it has to. While Canadians and Americans debate the reality of climate change, and wonder whether they can afford to invest in public transport infrastructure, Chinese people have no such luxury. Their investment in sustainability is already taking place. If it is successful, it will be a boon for the whole world.

environmental philosophy in asian traditions of thought

Environmental Philosophy in Asian Traditions of Thought

Environmental Philosophy in Asian Traditions of Thought

Announcing a fantastic new resource for environmental philosophy, shortly to be published by SUNY press. There is a great section on China including new essays by scholars working on Daoism and Confucianism. Check out the publisher’s page here.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction

Section I: Environmental Philosophy in Indian Traditions of Thought

1. George Alfred James, “Environment and Environmental Philosophy in India”
2. Christopher Framarin, “ƖWPDQ, Identity, and Emanation: Arguments for a Hindu Environmental Ethic”
3. Bart Gruzalski, “Gandhi’s Contributions to Environmental Thought and Action”
4. Stephanie Kaza, “Acting with Compassion: Buddhism, Feminism, and the Environmental Crisis”
5. Simon P. James, “Against Holism: Rethinking Buddhist Environmental Ethics”
6. Ian Harris, “Causation and ‘Telos’: The Problem of Buddhist Environmental Ethics”

Section II: Environmental Philosophy in Chinese Traditions of Thought

7. Mary Evelyn Tucker, “The Relevance of Chinese Neo-Confucianism for the Reverence of Nature”
8. R. P. Peerenboom, “Beyond Naturalism: A Reconstruction of Daoist Environmental Ethics”
9. Karyn L. Lai, “Conceptual Foundations for Environmental Ethics: A Daoist Perspective”
10. Alan Fox, “Process Ecology and the ‘Ideal’ Dao”
11. Sandra A. Wawrytko, “The Viability (Dao) and Virtuosity (De) of Daoist Ecology: Reversion (Fu) as Renewal”
12. James Miller, “Ecology, Aesthetics and DaoistBody Cultivation”

Section III: Environmental Philosophy in Japanese Traditions of Thought

13. Steve Odin, “The Japanese Concept of Nature in Relation to the Environmental Ethics and Conservation Aesthetics of Aldo Leopold”
14. Deane Curtin, “Dōgen, Deep Ecology and the Ecological Self”
15. David Edward Shaner and R. Shannon Duval, “Conservation Ethics and the Japanese Intellectual Tradition” 291
16. Hiroshi Abe, “From Symbiosis (Kyōsei) to the Ontology of ‘Arising Both from Oneself and from Another’(Gūshō)”
17. Tomosaburō Yamauchi, “The Confucian Environmental Ethics of Ogyū Sorai: A Three-Level, Eco-humanistic Interpretation”
18. James McRae, “Triple-Negation: Watsuji Tetsurō on the Sustainability of Ecosystems, Economies, and International Peace.”

Afterword: J. Baird Callicott, “Recontextualizing the Self in Comparative Environmental Philosophy”
Contributors
Index

cross-cultural learning and ecological civilization

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Students from Fudan University and Queen’s University at their first orientation session

Below us the text of a speech I gave at the orientation day for the Queen’s-Fudan semester in Shanghai program.

Thank you for inviting me to speak at this orientation event.

Each person who participates in this program has their own reasons for being here. For some of you it may be to improve your language skills, for some, to go beyond your comfort zone, and to test yourself to see what you are capable of, for others to make friends with people from different cultures and countries. I hope all of you get from this program something of what you hoped it would be. But what I do know is that in addition to what you want, you will also get something else. I don’t know what that something else will be for each of you, but I do want you to be open to receiving it.

I first came to China more than twenty years ago. China was a completely different country then, and for those of you who were not alive then, you cannot possibly imagine the depth and breadth of transformation that China has achieved in a single generation. And in twenty years time, when you, like me are in your 40s, China may be yet again a completely different country. But it will be your privilege, just like it has been my privilege, to be part of the story of China’s engagement with the world.

Because of this program you are not simply witnessing the forces of globalization as bystanders, you are directly experiencing them in your daily life. And more than just experiencing globalization, in your classes and in your research projects, you are actually creating globalization. And by creating, and not simply witnessing globalization, you have a chance, a chance to be always ahead of the curve and not behind it.

For me, my lifetime’s work in creating cross-cultural understanding by bringing knowledge of China’s culture to the West has opened up for me a career, and more than that a rewarding life, and more than that a kind of wisdom that, like China, I can always change, I can always do more, and be more than anything that I possibly imagined when I was a 19 year old boy from a small town in northern England fresh off the plane in Beijing. And it is my hope that this program will enable you to be successful in your life and career and personal development in ways that you cannot fully imagine today.

But this program is not just about you. The world has entered an era of ecological crisis born from the pressures of population growth, development and consumerism. The Confucian philosopher Xunzi over two thousand years ago warned that without the restraints of proper civilization, natural human desires would run amok, leading to violence and disaster.

求而無度量分界,則不能不爭;
When people seek to satisfy their desires, if there are no limits or boundaries, then there is bound to be contention;

爭則亂,亂則窮。
When there is contention there is bound to be chaos; and when there is chaos there is bound to be poverty.
(Xunzi 19)

Xunzi’s solution to this key problem of the human condition was to insist on returning to the wise ways of old, the rites and customs 禮 of the former kings of the Zhou dynasty.

But the human and ecological crisis confronting the world today is without precedent. We cannot, like Xunzi, look to the past for answers. We must create new customs, new rites 禮, new ways of relating, to speaking to, engaging with and understanding each other.

This is what you are creating in this program. Not only are you learning skills that will be of enormous value to yourself in your life and career, you are also creating the patterns of cross-cultural civilization that are necessary for seven billion people to live together on this planet. To live together without 爭 contention; without 亂 chaos, and without 窮 poverty.

I wish you all the best in your endeavours and look forward to returning in December to see what you have accomplished.