sustainable china

By James Miller

I recently had the pleasure of participating in the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, now housed at Yale University. While I was there I managed to see for the first time the Chinese translation of the book Daoism and Ecology that I co-edited some ten years ago when I was a graduate student at Boston University. 

The book arose out of one of a series of conferences on world religions and ecology, organized by the founders of FORE, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions.

The translation of the book was accomplished several years ago by my friend Chen Xia at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, but the publication, by Jiangsu Education Press, had been held up for bureaucratic reasons. In China all books that are published have to go through an approval process, and books on the topic of religion also need a second level of approval from the State Administration for Religious Affairs. 

What speeded the approval process up was that Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, Chen Xia and I had the good fortune of arranging a meeting with Pan Yue, the vice-minister of the State Administration for Environmental Protection, in Beijing this summer. At that meeting, Minister Pan expressed a keen interest in the volumes published as a result of these conferences and wanted them all to be translated into Chinese. Fortunately we had already got the wheels in process to publish the volumes on Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, and all that was lacking was the necessary approvals. I don’t know if Minister Pan personally intervened in our favour, but soon after we left China this summer, we learned that the books would be published in the fall. You can read about the Daoism and Ecology book on the Amazon.cn website.

By James Miller

My new book came out recently. It’s called The Way of Highest Clarity: Nature, Vision and Revelation in Medieval China. It’s published by Three Pines Press, a specialist publisher in Daoist Studies, but you can also order it from the distributor, University of Hawai’i Press. The book studies a medieval Daoist religious movement, and has some interesting insights into traditional Chinese views about the environment. Probably the most important of these was that specific sites in the natural landscape were viewed as a source of religious relevation and power.  Mostly these were mountains and caves where Daoist adepts would meet gods and immortals and be trained in meditation and other forms of Daoist cultivation.

It’s such a contrast from the modern view of nature, which is essentially “flat.” A “flat landscape” has no contours, no features which stand out as being somehow different from the ordinary. Similarly, “flat” concepts of nature treat all features of the landscape indifferently: nothing is intrinsically more important or valuable than anything else. In this modern view, the value of nature is derived externally, when its value is added by being processed into consumable products. The problem with our modern view is that humans (usually wealthy manufacturers and consumers) become the chief arbiters of value, and they are unable to appreciate the intrinsic significance of natural elements within their own bioregions and ecosystems. An ecological theory of value should give worth to natural objects in terms of the role they play within the system as a whole, and not just when they are extracted from their origins and turned into consumable items.