Harmonising with Heaven and Earth: Reciprocal Harmony and Xunzi’s Environmental Ethics

Xunzi’s philosophy provides a rich resource for understanding how ethical relationships between humans and nature can be articulated in terms of harmony. In this paper, I build on his ideas to develop the concept of reciprocal harmony, which requires us to reciprocate those who make our lives liveable. In the context of the environment, I argue that reciprocal harmony generates moral obligations towards nature, in return for the existential debt that humanity owes towards heaven and earth. This can be used as a normative basis for an environmental ethic that enables humanity and nature to flourish together.

As the Deep River Rises

The present essay seeks to offer a conceptual framework for grappling with climate change from within the sources of Jewish law (halakhah), a discourse rooted in the Hebrew Bible but developed in the rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity and then in medieval and modern codes and commentaries. Halakhah reflects deeply-held intellectual, theological, ontological, and sociological values. As a modus vivendi, rabbinic law—variously interpreted by Jews of different stripes—remains a vital force that shapes the life of contemporary practitioners. We are interested in how a variety of contemporary scholars, theologians, and activists might use the full range of rabbinic legal sources—and their philosophical, jurisprudential, and moral values—to construct an alternative environmental ethic founded in a worldview rooted in obligation and a matrix of kinship relationships. Our essay is thus an exercise in decolonizing knowledge by moving beyond the search for environmental keywords or ready analogies to contemporary western discourse. We join the voices of recent scholars who have sought to revise regnant assumptions about how religious traditions should be read and interpreted with an eye to formulating constructive ethics.

Elective Affinities in the Anthropocene: Christianity and the Natural Environment Reconsidered

To reach a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between religion and the natural environment, it is important to move beyond essentializing any religious tradition as having a pro-environmental or anti-environmental ethic. Rather, prior work has shown that the canonical, scholarly, and popular literatures and discourse of a number of religious traditions can and have been socially and rhetorically constructed as supporting an array of positions, from preservation to profligacy, and much in between those two ideal types. In this paper, we develop Max Weber’s theory of “elective affinities” and adapt it to the Anthropocene, to make the case that in a fragmented society, people and communities of convenience tend to choose the tropes and framing from the dominant culture to justify self-interested action. That often can take the form of religious discourse. In the sense of finding a wide array of practical interpretations relative to the environment, the theory is largely supported, although we do find important nuances. It is instructive to look at how the language and legitimacy of one institution (e.g. religion) has been used to justify and legitimate that of others (e.g. the polity). While these processes of institutional co-optation can be effective in the short run, they may have corrosive longer-term effects. Key rhetorical, and in fact political, battles in the Third Millennium, will likely be organized around how to adapt pre-industrial religion to late industrial and perhaps post-industrial times, and it remains to see how central the natural environment will be in what communities hold sacred.

Environmental Issues in Latinx Studies

To expand the lens of what is considered an environmental issue in Latinx studies, this overview includes a hemispheric approach even if the focus remains on US Latinx populations, primarily because Latinx and Indigenous peoples across the Americas draw on centuries of knowledge tied to caretaking of the land and that environmental ethic continues to be evidenced in many ways. We can measure high Latinx participation in mainstream environmentalism, look to the many grassroots movements that respond to local, national, and transnational environmental justice concerns, and recognize how Latinxs have redefined the very ideas of “nature” and what counts as an environmental issue. We also read across disciplines, including ecocritical scholarship that shows how writers contribute to the development of a sense of place and connect readers to an environmental ethic; research on politics and policymaking reveals both the negative impacts of environmental and economic policies on Latinx groups as well as the consistently pro-environmental attitudes Latinxs demonstrate in surveys. Revisionist and recuperative histories bring our attention to activists and actions that broaden our awareness of what counts as an environmental issue, such as the reckoning the Alianza Federal de Mercedes brought in the 1960s for the restoration of land grants in New Mexico. Gender studies approaches show that women are leading environmental movements in Latinx communities (as they do around the world). We see that, for many Latinxs, displacement and place-making play a large role in mediating relationships with nature—this is evident as much through literary analysis as it is through critical geography studies. Finally, we look at the topic of environmental justice, which is large enough that we pulled themes such as food justice and green space access out for development in their own sections while attending to different notions of environmental justice and the different kinds of environmental harms experienced by activists and environmental defenders in the United States and throughout Latin American and the Caribbean. In the United States, Latinx environmental activism was highly visible in the 1960s when the United Farm Workers campaigns gained national prominence; however, a land-based and environmental ethic among people of Mexican descent is evident much earlier than even the 19th century when Mexican territory was ceded to the United States. While much has been written about Mexican Americans’ relationships to the environment, emerging research seeks to uncover environmental attitudes and issues that impact other Latinx groups. Puerto Ricans, for example, are the second-largest Latinx group in the United States, and Puerto Ricans on the island developed a robust environmental movement though anti-colonial mobilizations in the 1960s. Further, recent migrants to the US mainland bring an awareness of the impacts of neoliberal globalization, extraction economies, and development driven environmental degradation that is especially acute, from hurricanes that displace people from their homes in the Caribbean to droughts, floods, and rising sea levels that impact Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and other countries across Latin America. For many, those very issues, including increased violence as a result of environmental and economic conflicts, drove their migration. This work serves as a starting point for researchers interested in environmental issues in Latinx studies, and more comparative research on environmental issues across the hemisphere remains to be done.

Human Hubris, Anthropogenic Climate Change, and an Environmental Ethic of Humility

This article is about how hubris, individually and collectively, has contributed to the climate emergency and how an environmental ethic of humility could play an ameliorating role in the crisis. It focuses on the relationship between virtue ethics and the natural environment, and it argues that a collective “human hubris” (“The Problem”) has contributed significantly to anthropogenic climate change and that a “humility-based approach” toward the environment that entails an appreciation of humanity’s proper place in the natural order (“A Solution”). In it, we combine theories from the social and environmental sciences to propose an environmental ethic of humility as an “antidote” to human hubris by which leaders and other stakeholders could steer institutions, organisations, and behaviour towards environmental virtuousness. We also suggest the environmental ethic of humility as a benchmark against which stakeholders could be held to account for the environmental impacts of their actions. The article discusses the implications of hubris and humility in the areas governance, consumer behaviour, reputation, learning and education, accountability, and critical reflexivity.

Applying Ibn ʿArabī's Concept of Tajallī: A Sufi Approach to Environmental Ethics

This article examines the Sufi concept of tajallī and its application to environmental ethics. This study usesdescriptive and productive interpretation to analyze the data which are extracted from the main works of Ibn ͑Arabī, namely Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam and al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah. It finds that Ibn ʿArabī’s concept of tajallī can be understood not only in its philosophical sense but also in its spiritual and moral sense to develop a new approach to environmental ethics. This research has valid implications for taking a new direction in the study of mystic Islam and environmental ethic by incorporating tajallī and other Sufi doctrines such as waḥdatu-l-wujūd, maḥabbah, and maʿrifah.

Buddhism and the Environment

Buddhism is a vast and heterogeneous set of traditions embedded in many different environments over more than two millennia. Still, there have been some similar practices across Buddhist cultures that contributed to the construction of local Buddhist environments. These practices included innumerable stories placing prominent Buddhist figures, including the historical Buddha, in particular places. Many of these stories concerned the conversion of local serpent spirits, dragons, and other beings associated with a local place who then themselves became Buddhist and were said to protect Buddhism in their locales. Events in the stories as well as relics and landscape features were marked by pillars, reliquary shrines (stupas), caves, temples, or monasteries that often became the focus of pilgrimage or considered particularly auspicious places for Buddhist practice, where one could encounter buddhas and bodhisattvas. Through ritual practices such as pilgrimage, circumambulation, and offerings, Buddhists engaged environments and their local spirits. Landscapes were transformed into Buddhist sites that were mapped and made meaningful according to Buddhist stories and cosmology. Farmers, herders, traders, and others in Buddhist cultures whose livelihood depended on their environments engaged the spirits of the land, whose blessings they needed for their own good. Just as they transformed the meaning of local environments, Buddhists also transformed the material environment. In addition to building monasteries, stupas, and other religious structures, Buddhist monastics developed administrative and engineering expertise that enabled large-scale irrigation systems. As Buddhism spread through Asia, it brought agricultural technologies that created the watery landscapes enabling rice production and increasing the agricultural surplus that made possible large monasteries and urbanization. In the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, eco-Buddhist scholars and practitioners have found resources in Buddhist traditions to construct a Buddhist environmental ethic. Some have argued that concepts such as dependent origination, the ethics of loving-kindness and compassion, and other ideas from classical Buddhist traditions suggest that Buddhism has always been particularly attuned to the environment. Critics have charged that eco-Buddhists are distorting Buddhist traditions by claiming that premodern traditions were responding to contemporary environmental concerns. Moreover, they argue, Buddhist ideas such as dependent origination, or its more environmentally resonant interpretation as “interdependence,” do not in fact provide a satisfying grounding for an environmental ethic. Partly in response to such critics, much scholarly work on Buddhism and the environment became more focused on concrete phenomena, informed by a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, place studies, art history, pilgrimage studies, and the study of activism. Instead of focusing primarily on universal concepts found in ancient texts, scholars are just as likely to look at how local communities have drawn on Buddhist ontology, ethics, cosmology, symbolism, and rituals to develop Buddhist responses to local environmental needs, developing contemporary Buddhist environmentalisms.

The problem of subjectivity of values in the search for a universal environmental ethics

Considering the relationship between the environment and morality, discussion of the matter of values is inevitable. Although there is no consensus on the intrinsic and instrumental characteristics of the value, the condition of talking about environmental ethics is that the environment carries not instrumental but intrinsic value. The problem of subjectivity of this value creates an ontological problem. Given that the value of what is valued depends on the preferences, interests, and attitudes of the valuers, it can lead to anthropocentric environmental ethics, which is an abusive approach style by environmental policymakers. On the other hand, the understanding that value is independent of the preferences, interests, and attitudes of the subject brings an objective approach but this makes it difficult to base environmental ethics on values ??and adds scientific aspects to environmental approaches. Scientific aspects are already discussed under some concepts such as sustainability, biodiversity, ecology, and environmental management. However, grounding these concepts on moral values ??and the formation of environmental ethics depends on emphasizing not only the scientific and objective but also its subjective side. This study explained the possibility of meeting the universality criterion in objective conditions despite the subjectivity of values because the way environmental ethics is adopted by everyone is only a universal environmental ethic.

The Book of Ezekiel: A Help or a Hindrance for Environmental Ethics?

In this essay, I examine how the book of Ezekiel has been employed or criticized as a resource for environmental ethics, and I explore the hermeneutical strategies behind these efforts. To do this, I make use of David Horrell’s critique and taxonomy of how the Bible has been used to inform attitudes about the environment. I conclude by arguing that while the book of Ezekiel is not as ecologically dangerous as some readers have claimed, neither can it function on its own as a useful tool for constructing an environmental ethic. However, reading Ezekiel as part of a metanarrative generated by a larger scriptural corpus may render its imagery useful as a resource.