CHINA, INDIA, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Many of us are very concerned about the threat to the earth arising from the deepening environmental crisis. Changing weather patterns the past few years have highlighted how quickly things are moving in a negative direction. As a result, there is a search for ways of dealing with the perilous situation. Western environmental movements are more high-profile and organized on a broader scale than elsewhere so that is where many people look for leadership and awareness. It is easy for us in the West to overlook the numerous groups worldwide at the grassroots level that are working to heal the wounds of the earth and to achieve justice for all.
There is some awareness of the contributions of indigenous people in the US, Australia, and New Zealand to our understanding of the kind of ecological thinking that is required for humanity to survive. But there is not much understanding about the situation in China and India, the two nations with the largest populations that seek power and status through economic growth. Their policies will have a huge effect on the environment so for that reason alone, it is important to know the situation in those two countries regarding environmental movements. It is also imperative that concerned people all over the world work together; Western people should not think it is only their actions that will determine the fate of the earth.
Asian Rural Traditions and Transcendence
Prasenjit Duara in The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (2015) has rendered the promise and perils of the Asian situation with a specific focus on China and India. He asks whether the Asian traditions can provide transcendent values to slow down the juggernaut of industrial development and nationalism. For Duara, transcendence is a source of universal moral authority beyond the world that provides a standard for judging our daily actions; it is ethics, ideals, and principles that possess such authority. Although often expressed in religious forms, ideologies can also have a transcendent dimension and Duara believes that the revival of transcendent sources of meaning can ease the current crisis. But he adds a word of caution, since such beliefs when maintained with absolute conviction can lead to horrendous violence.
Duara distinguishes between two types of religious transcendence: the radical version found in the monotheistic faiths that tends to prevail in the West in which only the believers are saved and the dialogical kinds that are prevalent in Asia. The latter are present in polytheistic religions that are mutually accommodating and in which the divine and the natural world interpenetrate. Dialogical transcendence has much to offer our present and future world inasmuch as its vision is cooperative rather than competitive, inclusive rather than exclusive. Compare Japanese and Chinese traditional attitudes toward religion with those of the West and the Islamic world. There is also Hinduism’s historical tendency toward tolerance and acceptance of other faiths. Gandhi assimilated into his Hindu faith what was of value in Islam and Christianity.
There are also two general types of environmental movement: those set up by postmaterialists in the industrial nations and those in the so-called “developing” world. Although both types appeal to a form of transcendence in which nature is viewed as sacred, their goals are quite different. For example, in the US, deep ecologists focus on protecting the wilderness and lifestyle changes, whereas in nations like India, industrialization and urbanization are having a highly negative impact on marginalized groups such as peasants, fishing communities, forest dwellers, and people displaced by large construction projects such as dams. For these people, since their livelihoods are at stake, preserving the environment is a matter of great urgency.
Both types of environmental movement need to act in concert so they gain sufficient momentum to create a vision of sustainability that provides a new form of transcendence. The local and indigenous traditions that are slowly being rediscovered are given new life through contact with the ideas and practices of modern movements responding to the ecological crisis. In India, movements led by indigenous people have been campaigning for the rights of people to their land and its fruits for several decades, attracting significant support and inserting the dimension of human rights into the conversation.
Duara emphasizes that nationalism, partly based on the religious idea of a chosen people, gets in the way of governments and people coming together to deal with the sustainability crisis. Nation states are competitors for power in the world system. They also claim total loyalty and allegiance from their citizens, yet it is hard for them to deny that the highest truths exist in a transcendent or universal realm. This opens the possibility of cooperation between the peoples of the world as they seek to realize such truths in their quest for meaning. It also encourages a movement away from the exclusivity of nations to a more open relationship that recognizes the openness of civilizations toward the rest of the world and their histories of interaction with each other.
In Asia, spiritual input from the West has found a receptive audience with religious groups in Asia that are accommodating and open to outside influence. Groups like the Theosophists and Universal Unitarians have had an impact upon religion in Asia, moving them in a more transgressive direction. Gandhi’s stay in England and his contact with critics of modernity and promoters of unorthodox lifestyles had a large impact on his move away from purely spiritual concerns. Indian environmental movements took up Gandhi’s oppositional attitude to modern materialism and challenged the Indian government’s development objectives that have disrupted their livelihoods and displaced them from their ancestral lands and homes.
Another example Duara gives is the lay Buddhist movement Ciji (Tzu Chi) in Taiwan led by Zhengyan, a charismatic woman monk. Ciji is active in environmental work and more broadly in relieving many types of worldly suffering, a significant departure from older Chinese Buddhist orientations. This movement has been very successful in Taiwan and extends to the Chinese diaspora. As a young monk, Zhengyan had persuaded Catholic missionary nuns who came to Taiwan that the Buddha’s compassion was equal to that of Christ’s love. But these nuns then asked her why she only focused on improving herself, whereas Christians built schools and hospitals.
What about conditions in China? The environmental movements in China exist under special circumstances, since the government tolerates no direct opposition to its policies. Nevertheless, as Duara points out, many environmental NGOs quickly sprang up from the 1990s onward in response to reckless economic growth and the rural development strategies of the government. They have tried to influence rather than oppose the central government and a notable achievement is the shelving of the huge Nu River dam construction in 2004. However, many local groups do not share the concerns of the elites such as biodiversity and endangered species. Instead of saving the threatened environment, an abstract and general issue, they focus on achieving social justice in order to protect the ecological basis of their lives. Their activities center on people.
The point I am making, which Duara’s work nicely illustrates, is that those of us in the West who are concerned about reversing environmental damage need to link up with our counterparts in India and China. Geopolitical rivalry among nation states and maneuvering for political advantage should not stand in the way of cooperation to address a global problem. We are all in the same boat and the only winners and losers are humanity as a whole.
