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	<title>sustainable china</title>
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	<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info</link>
	<description>researching religious values for ecological sustainability</description>
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		<title>cultural transformation and ecological sustainability among the dai people in xishuangbanna</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/03/26/coping-with-change-rapid-transitions-faced-by-the-dai-in-xishuangbanna/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/03/26/coping-with-change-rapid-transitions-faced-by-the-dai-in-xishuangbanna/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Mar 2012 01:22:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lily Zeng</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fieldwork]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[buddhism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conservation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dai]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[holy hills]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[xishuangbanna]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=577</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A conservation biologist by training, I first arrived in Xishuangbanna because of my interest in the ecological value of sacred groves called “holy hills,” fragments of old-growth rainforest that remain protected by indigenous Dai people despite rapid deforestation due to the proliferation of rubber plantations. The Dai protect holy hills because they believe their gods reside in these groves of large trees. As a result, holy hills are often the only fragments of natural forests remaining outside nature reserves and have been documented containing endangered species from China’s Plant Red Data List. I realized quickly upon my arrival that the question of conservation with holy hills requires a strong cultural perspective: because holy hills are religious entities without formal government protection, their existence and persistence is entirely dependent on local people and how they maintain their traditions. The relationship between the Dai and their sacred landscapes is long and complex, and I will not delve into that discussion in this current post. Instead, I will share some preliminary observations of changes in cultural and religious practices among the Dai from my two months in Xishuangbanna in summer 2011. For those of you who are new to this area of the [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>religious diversity and ecological sustainability</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/03/01/religious-diversity-and-ecological-sustainability/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/03/01/religious-diversity-and-ecological-sustainability/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:52:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Conferences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[religious diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sustainability]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=566</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[For the past six months I&#8217;ve been working with Dan Smyer Yu from the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity on a conference which is finally taking place next week at Minzu University in Beijing. The title of the conference is Religious Diversity and Ecological Sustainability in China. Here&#8217;s the conference rationale that we wrote. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the health of Planet Earth is affected by human activities on both organizational and personal levels. The industrialist vision celebrating a modern cornucopia has proven itself successful in extracting and harnessing resources from the Earth as well as in producing wastes lethal to the biosphere. The worldwide project of modernization has concurrently brought blessings to human wellbeing as well as displacement of human communities and endangered myriad species. Many of us, who are either socially engaged or theoretically-oriented, have produced works critiquing the environmental consequences of modernity and its grand global material project—modernization. Meanwhile, many of us have also begun to revisit and reinterpret ancient ecological worldviews and practices that are an inherent part of native belief systems for the purpose of either exploring alternative, “green” models of modern life or radically reorienting the course of modernization [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/03/01/religious-diversity-and-ecological-sustainability/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>permanent agriculture and the anthropology of waste</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/02/12/permanent-agriculture-and-the-anthropology-of-waste/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/02/12/permanent-agriculture-and-the-anthropology-of-waste/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:28:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[agriculture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[china]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[daoism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[organic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sustainability]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[zhuangzi]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=544</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This term I have the privilege of co-teaching a new seminar course at Queen&#8217;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 &#8220;organic farming&#8221; or &#8220;sustainable agriculture,&#8221; 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 &#8220;permanent&#8221; was meant to differentiate it from the &#8220;orthodox agriculture&#8221; advocated by the USDA, and signals what the Oxford scholar John Paull terms a &#8220;clash of ideologies &#8230; which remains to this day.&#8221; In recent years, interest in King&#8217;s book has multiplied amongst advocates of alternatives to industrial agriculture and, having emerged from copyright protection, has attained the status of a classic [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>contested sacred space on maoshan</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/01/07/contested-sacred-space-maosha/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2012/01/07/contested-sacred-space-maosha/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:19:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fieldwork]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=523</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In May 2010 I had the opportunity to visit Maoshan, an important Daoist site in Jiangsu province (see here for my earlier post). One result of my fieldwork was that it gave a deeper insight as to the way Daoism and nature are represented together in contemporary Chinese culture. The evidence suggests that just as Daoist organizations are competing and also collaborating with local governments and other enterprises for control of the natural spaces in which monasteries are located, they are also engaged in ideological conflict over the meaning of these spaces. The battle over administrative control over natural spaces where Daoist sites are located is an ideological contest over the meaning of nature. This suggests that in contemporary China, as in the West, the meaning of nature is contested in part by means of its association with concepts such as “the sacred.” Evidence of ideological conflict can be seen in the use of signs that aim to offer visitors to Maoshan the “correct interpretation” of the natural spaces through which they are travelling. Two examples of this can be found in the Huayang Cave 华阳洞 and the Feichang Path 非常道. The Huayang cave was a site for Daoist meditation, [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>mazu: marine ecoregion goddess</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/12/15/mazu-marine-ecoregion-goddess/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/12/15/mazu-marine-ecoregion-goddess/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:16:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fieldwork]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bioregionalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mazu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taiwan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=493</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[According to tradition, Mazu (Matsu) was a girl who lived in the late tenth century who was renowned for her assistance to seafarers. She was posthumously deified and attracted a wide cult throughout the southern China coastal area in the Ming dynasty. Over the past few centuries she has become one of the most popular local deities in China. Following my visit to the popular Mazu temple in Guandu, Taipei, I&#8217;d like to propose that Mazu be thought of as a bioregional deity, specifically one corresponding to the Southern China Marine Ecoregion as identified by the WWF, that is, the sea area between Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. Traditional scholarship on Chinese religions divides gods into local and national categories. Local gods have their specific domains and are worshipped only by people living in those particular geographic areas. National gods, such as Guan Di, the Jade Emperor, or th God of Wealth, can be found throughout the country. Local gods, conversely, are worshipped only in specific regions. Devotion to Mazu is widespread throughout South East China&#8217;s coastal areas because of her association with seafarers and fishermen, and because of this she should be thought of in bioregional terms. [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/12/15/mazu-marine-ecoregion-goddess/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>religion, ecology and nationalism</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/12/02/religion-ecology-and-nationalism/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/12/02/religion-ecology-and-nationalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:39:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Conferences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Questions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bhutan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[china]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[India]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nationalism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=473</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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. George James from the University of North Texas, for instance, noted the way in which the [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/12/02/religion-ecology-and-nationalism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>the religion and ecology of the blang minority nationality</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/08/16/religion-and-ecology-in-blang-minority-nationality/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/08/16/religion-and-ecology-in-blang-minority-nationality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:29:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fieldwork]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[china]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[religion]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=462</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The question of how to promote a culture of ecological sustainability in China took me this summer to conduct exploratory fieldwork among the Blang minority nationality, in Yunnan province, close to the border between China and Myanmar. The Blang are one of China&#8217;s smaller nationality groups and occupy a remote mountainous terrain that is a gruelling and dangerous three-hour drive from the county town of Menghai. The economy of the Blang village where I stayed was based increasingly on the production of tea. Previously subsistence farmers, the villagers had now turned almost exclusively to the production of tea leaves which, when processed, become the famous and expensive pu&#8217;er tea. Since the economic and land reforms after the cultural revolution, the villagers had been steadily converting their lands to the production of tea, with tea bushes now dominating the steeply-terraced mountainsides. After harvesting the tea leaves, the villagers dry and lightly roast the tea leaves before selling them via middlemen to nearby tea factories that ferment, process and package the finished product. The village is distinguished by well-preserved social customs: villagers are divided into a number of exogamous clans; newly married men live in their wife&#8217;s family&#8217;s home for three years; [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/08/16/religion-and-ecology-in-blang-minority-nationality/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8220;best to be like water&#8221;: tsunamis, religion and non-human agency</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/04/04/best-to-be-like-water-tsunamis-religion-and-non-human-agency/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/04/04/best-to-be-like-water-tsunamis-religion-and-non-human-agency/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Apr 2011 23:07:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gaia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[non-human agency]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tsunami]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wuwei]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=444</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It&#8217;s been three weeks since the devastating tsunami in Japan, and I am still haunted by the familiar phrase from Daode jing ch. 8: Best to be like water, Which benefits the ten thousand things And does not contend. It pools where humans disdain to dwell, Close to the Tao. (Trans. Addis and Lombardo, Hackett: 1993). For those devastated by tsuanmis, floods and other water disasters, to make an analogy between goodness and water seems at the very least grotesque. In what sense can the wild and untameable powers of nature be used as an analogy for what&#8217;s best? In English, such natural disasters are often referred to as &#8220;acts of God&#8221;, meaning that they are far beyond the power of humans to grasp, and essentially mysterious and unknowable. Insurance companies may refuse to cover such &#8220;acts of God&#8221; because they represent risks that are so enormous and so incalculable that they resist any attempt to bring them within a familiar economic rationality. An &#8220;act of God&#8221; is simply beyond human comprehension. Although ancient Chinese philosophers did not, so far as I know, have any experience of the devastation brought by tsunamis, they were undoubtedly aware of the dangerous power [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/04/04/best-to-be-like-water-tsunamis-religion-and-non-human-agency/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>daoism and technological innovation</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/02/14/daoism-and-innovation/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/02/14/daoism-and-innovation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:23:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>james</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[daoism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[innovation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[technology]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=431</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As China overtakes Japan to be recognized as the world&#8217;s second largest economy, it is inevitable that Chinese religions will undergo change and transformation. But since Marx infamously compared the social function of religion to that of a narcotic, religion has consistently been framed in the modern imagination as backwards, anti-modern, and anti-science. China&#8217;s modernizers, likewise, have viewed religion as a problem to be overcome in the quest to build the new China, and their view has become part of the mainstream amongst Chinese youth. In Chinese Religions in Contemporary Societies, I told a story about a lecture that I gave in Shanghai several years ago: one of the students was shocked to learn that I studied Chinese religions, and asked me, incredulously, why on earth someone would spend time studying China&#8217;s religions! Of course it is entirely ironic that the divisive narrative that frames religion as part of the past has also been taken up by some religious institutions who would seek to return human civilization to some mythic ideal that most likely never existed as an empirical fact. Fundamentalists and secular modernists often share the same framework about the absolute disjunction between modernity and science on the one hand, [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/02/14/daoism-and-innovation/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>consumptionomics: asia&#8217;s role in reshaping capitalism and saving the planet</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/02/07/consumptionomics/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2011/02/07/consumptionomics/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:48:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>james</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=421</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Last year I wrote an article for atlantic-community.org on China&#8217;s quest for ecological sustainability. The basic point that I tried to make was that China has to create its own model for development because China simply will not be able to function as a country if its nearly 1.4 billion people expand their ecological footprint to the same level as that of North American societies. I am not arguing that China must not develop its economy. Rather I am arguing that it must develop its economy in a radically new way and not slavishly copy the pattern of development that the West has established. I&#8217;m pleased to note that a similar argument has now been made but fleshed out in much more detail, by Chandran Nair, founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, a &#8220;social venture think tank.&#8221; The book has already been reviewed by the Financial Times and I&#8217;m very interested to read it. It hasn&#8217;t yet been published in North America, but I&#8217;ve ordered a copy from Amazon. According to the FT&#8217;s Hugh Carnegy, Nair is adamant that nothing good will come to any of us if success in the new economies of the east is defined by [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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