Opinion | James Miller

turning students into citizens, religious studies edition

December 26th, 2014

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

December 26th, 2014

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

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

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?

First published in Religion Dispatches, December 15, 2014.

china doesn’t have an “environmental” problem

November 14th, 2014

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.

why china will solve the world’s environmental problems

May 12th, 2014

Quick! Picture China’s biggest environmental problem.

I 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

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.

cross-cultural learning and ecological civilization

September 7th, 2013

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.

the philosophy of qi in an era of air pollution

May 25th, 2013

A view over the Forbidden City in Beijing

In a recent column in Nature, Qiang Wang argues that responsibility for transforming China’s environment lies with its citizens. He points to several instances in which local protests have successfully prevented new industrial activity, and argues that this heralds the beginning of a new relationship between Chinese citizens, the state and the environment.

China is witnessing the beginnings of a civil society in which the Chinese people spontaneously defend their right to a healthy environment, independent of organizers, political goals and commercial interests.

The issue here is the scale at which people are engaging with environmental issues. Fighting against the development of a local chemical factory does not necessarily signal the development of an transformative ecological consciousness, but could simply be the result of a NIMBYism that governments across the world have to contend with.

The issue of air quality, however, is different.

Qiang Wang writes:

Chinese citizens who want to drink clean water can buy a water purifier; those worried about poisoned milk can buy imported milk. But when the air is polluted, there is no option but to fight.

The broad scale of China’s air quality problems, and the fact that smog cannot easily be evaded, means that it has the potential to engender a large scale transformation in attitudes towards environmental issues. Far from simply being the concern of local citizens for local issues, the issue of air quality is so widespread and so immediately felt that it demands transformative action.

Traditional Chinese culture views the body not as a discrete object set apart from its environment, but as a dynamic system in which vital fluids are exchanged between the inner body and their environment. Central to this view is the concept of Qi (Ch’i) 气 a complex term sometimes translated as vital breath, spirit, or pneuma. The most fundamental form of Qi is the air we breathe that gives us life.

One important connection between contemporary ecology and traditional Chinese culture, therefore, lies in the way that bodies are engaged with their environments. In both cases we can say that Qi or breath is the basic medium through which this engagement takes place. Qi is the conduit, the vital fluid, that circulates between the two in a constant dynamic exchange.

From this perspective it is easy to see that healthy environments help to produce healthy bodies. Although they are two distinct systems, bodies and ecosystems are connected at the most fundamental level through Qi, the flow of breath that keeps us alive.

The philosophy of Qi also urges us to think about health not simply in physiological terms but in broader ecological terms. Our health derives from the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. This traditional Chinese view has enormous potential to foster a broad ecological consciousness in China and across the world.

green spirituality and the limits to modernity

June 26th, 2012

In an online report on Religious Innovation for Sustainable Future (no longer available), Nina Witoszek (Oslo University) surveys a “pastoral renaissance” taking place across the globe.

Image from www.ceres21.org

This renaissance, she declares, is “not just a tide of projects and conferences, but a new-old mindset which aspires to reclaiming nature, culture and spirituality, influencing green architecture and furthering alternative models of consumption.” The report continues with four essays based in China [note: I wrote the essay on China], India, Ghana and Norway, which explore the various ways in which this pastoral renaissance is taking place. The major aspect of this development is that discussion about the relationship between religion and ecology is not simply academic but actively shaping projects, cultures and mindsets in these very different areas of the world. While this in itself would be an important observation, Witoszek probes further into this phenomenon, and ends the opening section of her essay with this intriguing question:

Does this green spirituality signify a curious “premodern turn” in Western conceptions of human progress?

That is to say, is the pastoral renaissance in world religions and cultures a step back from modernity, a retreat into the past, an end to the project of modernity, of relentless and inexorable progress?

To understand the worldview of modernity, Witoszek produces an acute observation from Daniel Bell, writing in the 1970s:

The theme of Modernism was the word beyond: beyond nature, beyond culture, beyond tragedy—that was where the self-infinitizing spirit was driving the radical self. We are now groping for a new vocabulary whose key word seems to be limits: a limit to growth, a limit to spoliation of environment, a limit to arms, a limit to torture, a limit to hubris – can we extend the list?”

Witoszek’s conclusion is that the affinity between religion and sustainability lies in the way they both regard the question of limit as a central concern. Sustainability is about living within the ecological limits of the planet and not degrading our biosphere beyond its ability to sustain life. Religions are also oriented towards placing limits on people’s behaviour: don’t eat pork; don’t have sex with your neighbour’s wife; don’t harm living beings. Of course these religious limits have also been oriented towards supporting one group of people’s power over another group of people: for example, refusing to admit women as religious leaders. Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that religion is one of the most powerful cultural forces that is oriented around not doing certain things.

From my point of view, it’s no surprise that as the world experiences the downside of industrial modernity, a healthy regard for limits should once again rise to the forefront of our cultural consciousness. In China, the quest for a sustainable future is mirrored in the “back to the future” rise of religions. For sure this is a complex phenomenon: people pray to the gods for wealth and happiness, not for a lower ecological footprint. But at the same time, Chinese religions send messages about reducing desire, non-violence to living beings, harmony with nature, and the value of balance and moderation. Is it any wonder that people should see a profound connection between religion and sustainability?

So to answer the original question, does the renewed interest in green religion signify a retreat to the past? Certainly, as Witoszek notes, the new “pastoral renaissance” can be allied with powerful nationalist forces and reactionary fundamentalist movements (see also my blog post on the rise of a Hindu nationalist ecological movement). At the same time, I remain hopeful that the new spirituality is part of an real and evolving consciousness centred on sustainability as a new form of “immanent transcendence,” one the capacity to root humanity deeply in the world.

the business of religion: buddhism, stock markets and the “authenticity” of religion

June 7th, 2012

A recent news story on Reuters, headlined Thou Shalt Not Launch IPOs, China tells temples, reports that the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) has issued an injunction against temples listing on the stock exchange. SARA official Liu Wei is reported as staying:

Chinese worshippers offer coins for prosperity while praying at Longhua temple to greet the lunar new year in Shanghai on February 9, 2005.

Such plans “violate the legitimate rights of religious circles, damage the image of religion and hurt the feelings of the majority of religious people.”

Like much reporting on Chinese religion, this story is left unexplained, as an item of “bizarre news” which lends weight to the Orientalist stereotype of China, and especially Chinese religion, as being ineluctably mysterious. To those whose knowledge of religion is limited to the West, there are two main issues that need to be explained:

Why do religious sites want to go public on the stock exchange?
What interest does the state have in preventing them from doing so?

A pervasive modern view of religion is that it is somehow incompatible with money. This sentiment perhaps goes back to the familiar Biblical texts that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10) and “you cannot serve God and money” (Matt. 6;24). There are certainly some parallels in China, notably in monastic religion where a contentious issue has always been how much time should be spent on properly religious activities such as meditation, and how much on the actual business of running the monastery. In Imperial times, many monasteries in China had significant landholdings. The rent collected from tenants was used to fund the operations of the monasteries. But from the times of the first anti-religious protests in 1922, the economic status of monasteries declined, first as tenants refused or were unwilling to pay their rents, and secondly as land was expropriated by the state (an act that bears comparison with Henry VIII’s dissolution of English monasteries and appropriation of their wealth). After the reforms of the 1980s monasteries were allowed once again to operate as religious sites under the ultimate supervision of SARA, but very little land was returned to them. As Jing Yin writes in his essay “The Economic Situation of Chinese Buddhist Monasteries” this meant that the monasteries were faced with a dilemma:

The good news is that Buddhists today have buildings to operate and services to perform; the bad news is that they have almost no money with which to work. Therefore the urgent priority for nearly every monastery is to find a way to generate revenue. Monasteries are thus trying to become economically independent and to minimize their dependence on state government.

Today, temples do not make money from renting out their land but rather as sites for religious tourism. Many are located in sites of outstanding natural beauty and have become ecotourism destinations in their own right. But probably the most successful religious site in China today is Shaolin Temple, in central Henan province, home to the famous martial arts school. Shaolin has been remarkably successful in marketing itself as a tourist destination, and as a site of global Buddhist pilgrimage, and has generated huge revenues that have benefitted the local economy. According to the Reuters report, there was an outcry when Shaolin contemplated an IPO three years ago, which led to the ruling reported on recently. To many, running the temple as a profit-making activity implies that it cannot also be a religious activity. But as André Laliberté notes, this view is often the view of outsiders rather than insiders.

Buddhist devotees may criticize the activities of organizations like Shaolin because of its emphasis on martial arts, but they do not fault the management of the temples because they appreciate the fact that the temples are wealthy. In the moral economy of Buddhism … donors can gain merit by contributing to the building and furnishing of a monastery … . It is therefore non-Buddhists who are more likely to object to Buddhist temples gaining wealth.

In the case of local Daoist religions, the link between religious life and local economic life can be quite close. In rural China, local Daoist temples came to be owned and funded by the collective rather than by priestly lineages. Thus in contrast to affiliation-based religions in which people pay tithes to a religious organization that is distinct from secular society and governed by a special class of religious professionals, Chinese people founded community associations (hui) or common management organizations (gongsi; now the term for “corporation”) in order to manage their collective religious lives (see Schipper 2008). As a result the gap between “religious” activities and other local economic, educational or charitable activities becomes harder to discern. These communal associations, for instance, became significant managers of local wealth held in trust for the benefit of the community. In keeping with their originally religious motives, some of these funds are typically devoted to religious activities, but in many cases a significant proportion could be channeled into local enterprises or educational activities. Adam Yuet Chau (2005: 38) writes:

Besides being a site of both individual and communal worship, a temple is also a political, economic, and symbolic resource and a generator of such resources. A beautifully built temple and a well-attended temple festival attest not only to the efficacy of the deity but also to the organizational ability of the temple association and the community.

Chau goes on to note that such temples have been involved in local development work such as paving roads, planting trees, and building schools. The lesson to be learned from this is that the line between “religious” and “nonreligious” activity has no self-evident boundary. Rather what has happened in China is that the modern state has moved to create such distinctions, defining for religious institutions what constitutes proper religious activity.

By now the answers to the questions posed above should be somewhat clearer. Religious sites want to list on the stock exchange because it is in their interest to secure funds for their continuous development and expansion. Religious activity is not simply “spirituality” but requires buildings, staff, management, cars, roads and other infrastructure. In contrast, it is in the state’s interest to emphasize the modern definition of authentic religion as “personal spirituality” so that it can continue to limit the material base that religious institutions require in order to develop and expand. In China religious activities can only legally take place in spaces that are authorized religious sites: they may not take place in the public sphere. The stock exchange is clearly viewed as public space, and to allow religions to list on the stock exchange would be to permit the encroachment of religion into the public sphere. This is something that the Chinese government is clearly not willing to tolerate.

permanent agriculture and the anthropology of waste

February 12th, 2012

This term I have the privilege of co-teaching a new seminar course at Queen’s (with Emily Hill) on the topic of Green China: Environment, Culture, Politics. The course examines the intersections between religion, culture, politics, and the natural environment in China over the past century.

One of the first books we read was Farmers of Forty Centuries or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan, a travelogue by the American agricultural scientist Franklin Hiram King (1848-1911). The book extols the virtues of what we might today call “organic farming” or “sustainable agriculture,” practices that King observed in his eight month travels to the Far East in 1909. (Note how the publisher of this new version on the left has changed the subtitle to make it more relevant to a contemporary market.) His designation of this form of agriculture as “permanent” was meant to differentiate it from the “orthodox agriculture” advocated by the USDA, and signals what the Oxford scholar John Paull terms a “clash of ideologies … which remains to this day.” In recent years, interest in King’s book has multiplied amongst advocates of alternatives to industrial agriculture and, having emerged from copyright protection, has attained the status of a classic work. A free edition is available from the Gutenberg e-text website.

One of King’s key observations regarding the ‘permanent’ nature of China’s agricultural practices at the turn of the 20th century regarded the use of human manure as fertilizer, thereby returning key nutrients to the soil. He describes in detail the practice of recycling human manure to the soil, which he observed throughout the Far East. Then he launches into a withering attack on the supposed civilization of the West (Chapter IX):

On the basis of the data of Wolff, Kellner and Carpenter, or of Hall, the people of the United States and of Europe are pouring into the sea, lakes or rivers and into the underground waters from 5,794,300 to 12,000,000 pounds of nitrogen; 1,881,900 to 4,151,000 pounds of potassium, and 777,200 to 3,057,600 pounds of phosphorus per million of adult population annually, and this waste we esteem one of the great achievements of our civilization. In the Far East, for more than thirty centuries, these enormous wastes have been religiously saved and today the four hundred million of adult population send back to their field annually 150,000 tons of phosphorus, 376,000 tons of potassium, and 1,158,000 tons of nitrogen comprised in a gross weight exceeding 182 million tons, gathered from every home, from the country villages and from the great cities like Hankow-Wuchang-Hanyang, with its 1,770,000 people swarming on a land area delimited by a radius of four miles.

Man is the most extravagant accelerator of waste the world has ever endured. His withering blight has fallen upon every living thing within his reach, himself not excepted; and his besom of destruction in the uncontrolled hands of a generation has swept into the sea soil fertility which only centuries of life could accumulate, and yet this fertility is the substratum of all that is living. … The rivers of North American are estimated to carry to the sea more than 500 tons of phosphorus with each cubic mile of water. To such loss modern civilization is adding that of hydraulic sewage disposal through which the date of five hundred millions of people might be more than 194,300 tons of phosphorus annually, which could not be replaced by 1,295,000 tons of rock phosphate, 75 per cent pure.

King’s language reveals the exasperation of a scientist who can readily see the folly of his own culture’s practices but finds himself powerless to change them.

For me the issue here is that “waste” and “pollution” are key categories in anthropology. What falls into these categories and how we behave in relation to them are governed by social habits that are deely ingrained and culturally specific. Terms for human waste are obscenities in the English language, and readily convey the particular distaste that we have developed for these substances. The pervasive Gnostic / Christian emphasis on the soul, rather than the body, as the location of the divine also contributes to the notion that little good is to be found in the material we excrete from our bodies. Cultural barriers such as these make it particularly hard to advocate the recycling of human waste.

Curiously, this reminded me of the famous discussion in Zhuangzi chapter 22.

Hmong woman carrying nightsoil (Image: Brad Houk)

Dongguozi asked Zhuangzi, “Where is this Dao you speak of?”
Zhuangzi said, “There is nowhere it is not.”
“You must be more specific.”
“It is in the ants and crickets.”
“So low?”
“It is in the grasses and weeds.”
“Even lower?”
“It is in the tiles and shard.”
“So extreme?”
“It is in the piss and shit.”

The notion that the Dao subsists in all things, even what we regard with the greatest disdain, was clearly meant to shock, but it is certainly the logical outcome of a resolutely monistic philosophy, the notion that the Dao underlies and pervades all things in the cosmos. Zhuangzi would probably not have been surprised to learn that, from a scientific perspective, the Dao really does lie in human excrement.

I would argue, however, that it is precisely Zhuangzi’s way of thinking, shocking though it may be, that makes it more possible to contemplate recycling human waste, rather than flushing it into the sea. When human waste is viewed as the location of the Dao, rather than as a polluting substance that makes us ‘feel dirty,’ then it becomes more possible to implement systems that incorporate our waste into the agricultural cycle.

Paull is right, then, to see the battle between ‘permanent’ agriculture and the USDA ‘orthodoxy’ as an ideological battle. But in my view, what we consider to be “waste” and “pollution” and how we behave towards it is also a matter for cultural/religious anthropology.

religion, ecology and nationalism

December 2nd, 2011

Should environmentalists support conservation projects that also serve to bolster right wing nationalist agendas? This was one of the questions that was discussed last month at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, in San Francisco. I spoke on a panel organized by the Religion and Ecology section which featured a vibrant discussion on this very issue.

One of the key points of discussion that came up was the way in which the alliance of religion and ecology is not necessarily compatible with left / liberal politics. In North America we tend to associate environmental issues with left / liberal politics, and religious organizations that advocate on behalf of environmental issues similarly tend to get associated with those similar politics. As an example of this, at the Forum on Religion and Ecology lunch just a few days earlier, it was quite evident from the conversation that scholars involved in environmental issues largely fell into the left / liberal camp. But just because this is the normative cultural expectation in North America does not necessarily make this the case everywhere else in the world.

Landsat Image of Rama's Bridge

George James from the University of North Texas, for instance, noted the way in which the right wing nationalist politics of India BJP opposed the Sethusamudram shipping canal between India and Sri Lanka not because of environmental reasons but because the proposed shipping channel would cut through the causeway known as Rama’s Bridge, which is identified in the Hindu sacred mythology of the Ramayana. Here was a case in which the alliance of religion and ecology did not conform to the typical expectation of the left-liberal North American academic.

My own paper, on the alliance of Daoist religion and ecology, similarly made the point that the state has particularly supported the conservation of Daoist sites where this has accorded with nationalist politics. This is the case at Maoshan, a designated AAAA tourism destination, which is also a red tourism site, associated with the 4th Army’s role during the 1937-45 war with Japan. It was also the case for Wudang shan during the Ming dynasty, which ordered a local garrison to prevent local deforestation, in part because of the national significance of the site to the Ming emperors.

Here were two examples, then, of the ways in which religious efforts at the conservation of sacred sites were aided by nationalist agenda rather than a green agenda. In these cases, environmental efforts were local, rather than global, and subsumed under the question of national identity.

This discussion was also continued with reference to Suzanne Armstrong’s paper on the Christian Farmer’s Federation of Ontario, which demonstrated a range of theological opinions regarding the alliance of religion and agriculture that could be classified politically anywhere from conservative to liberal. Similarly, Elizabeth Allison’s paper on “brown” environmental issues in Bhutan raised the question of whether a technocratic approach to environmentalism bolstered a statist agenda, that is, empowered the government to strengthen its control over a wide range of issues in people’s lives.

The conclusion we reached, I think, is that just because environmental issues are perceived as being left/liberal issues in North America does not mean that this is necessarily the case in other cultures. We should not expect environmentalists to hold the same colour of political opinions, and we should also expect that there are instances where local environmental issues will bolster conservative orthodoxies and right wing agendas. Does this mean that we shouldn’t support environmental efforts where they also serve to bolster political ideologies that we don’t agree with?