Buddhism and Ecology: Challenge and Promise

Introduction
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982) and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) addressed three different global environmental problems—toxic contamination of the food chain, the worldwide consequences of nuclear proliferation, and the impact of global warming. These warnings led to major changes in national and international policy: the banning of the widespread use of DDT as a pesticide, the START treaties that negotiated nuclear arms reduction agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Kyoto agreements to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Each utilizes science to advance a public policy agenda. In addition, each shares a similar holistic worldview, namely, that all life-forms are interdependent or, as the 1975 National Academy of Sciences Report stated, our world is a whole “in which any action influencing a single part of the system can be expected to have an effect on all other parts of the system.” The “Religions of the World and Ecology” project brings the rich historical and contemporary resources of the world’s religions into critical dialogue with the global environmental crisis. In particular, it seeks to broaden and deepen the symbolic, conceptual, and practical dimensions of their distinctive holistic worldviews for an understanding of human flourishing, community, the natural environment, and their interactions. The project also seeks to influence both social behavior and public policy by encouraging ongoing collaboration among various interdisciplinary arcs that must be forged if the environmental crisis has any hope of being resolved.¹ This paper explores ways in which the Buddhist traditions might contribute to this discussion and to the practice of a more ecologically aware lifestyle.

read more here