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	<title>sustainable china &#187; environment</title>
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	<description>researching religious values for ecological sustainability</description>
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		<title>daoist religion and ecotourism: a visit to maoshan</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2010/09/02/daoist-religion-and-ecotourism-a-visit-to-maoshan/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2010/09/02/daoist-religion-and-ecotourism-a-visit-to-maoshan/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:51:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>james</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Fieldwork]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[china]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[daoism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sustainability]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=373</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In May this year I had the opportunity to visit Maoshan (Mt. Mao) a Daoist mountain sacred to the Shangqing (Highest Clarity) tradition of Daoism that I studied in my most recent book. Located in Jiangsu province, it is about an hour&#8217;s bus ride south of Zhenjiang, a stop on the main high speed railway from Shanghai to Nanjing. I was interested to visit Maoshan not only because of my historical research, but because it was the site of the Maoshan declaration, which in 2008 committed China&#8217;s Daoist Association to a ten year program of ecological protection. The result of my visit is a mixed assessment of the possibilities and problems associated with the practical implementation of Daoism and ecology. I&#8217;ll be presenting the full details of my conclusions at the forthcoming SASASAAS conference at Furman University on September 24-25, but I&#8217;d like to present some key findings now. First of all, the encounter between Daoism  and Ecology has to be understood from the perspective of China&#8217;s engagement with modernity and especially science. &#8220;Ecology&#8221; in Chinese does not signify a Romantic attachment to nature undefiled by human habitation, but rather a modern, scientific and ultimately technological enterprise. To make Daoist [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
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		<title>new directions in religion and nature</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2010/06/08/new-directions-in-religion-and-nature/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2010/06/08/new-directions-in-religion-and-nature/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:27:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>james</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Conferences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[daoism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[research]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I was in LA last weekend to attend the Sixth Annual Conference on Daoist Studies which was organized by my former teacher, Livia Kohn, and LMU Professor Robin Wang. The conference drew the usual mix of academics and practitioners (which was itself the subject of an interesting meta-analysis by Elijah Siegler). My rationale for attending the conference, however, was that one of its focus themes was religion and ecology. I wanted to see how far the field had evolved since I co-edited the first book on this topic, Daoism and Ecology, Ways within a Cosmic Landscape, in 2001, and I&#8217;m delighted to report that there has been some excellent progress. The majority of essays in that volume, nearly a decade old now, focussed on correlations between environmental concepts and philosophical and religious concepts in the Daoist tradition. Some focussed more on cultural practices such as fengshui or meditation, but there was generally a lack of historical detail and also theoretical innovation. But it was the first stab at creating such a field, so one can&#8217;t be too critical. On the other hand, the papers presented at this year&#8217;s conference revealed a greater emphasis on historical detail and also a willingness [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>does environmental science lead to environmental action?</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2009/04/03/does-environmental-science-lead-to-environmental-action/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2009/04/03/does-environmental-science-lead-to-environmental-action/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:41:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>james</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Questions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[religion]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=228</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I have just finished teaching my undergraduate course on religion and the environment. Most of the students are in engineering or environmental science, and the course fulfills a humanities requirement for them. It&#8217;s been fascinating teaching scientists about religion, as you can imagine, but it&#8217;s also been hard. One of the most serious problems that I&#8217;ve had to deal with among my students is the basic assumption that seems to be taught in environmental science, namely that knowing more about the environment is the best way to generate action on the environment. This assumption is, from a historical perspective, hard to justify. The development of the modern scientific view of nature has not been accompanied by an enhanced respect for nature. Rather, scientific knowledge of the environment has swept away any traditional sense of nature as sacred or deserving of respect. At the same time it has enabled massive industrial exploitation of natural resources without regard for ecological sustainability. Now I&#8217;m not against science. Far from it. But I am against the simplistic fallacy that knowing about the environment necessarily leads to better adaptation to the environment. The cultural anthropologist Roy Rappaport long ago made the important distinction between the [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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		<title>is china&#8217;s one child policy environmentally ethical?</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2008/12/05/is-chinas-one-child-policy-environmentally-ethical/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2008/12/05/is-chinas-one-child-policy-environmentally-ethical/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:39:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Questions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[china]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecological footprint]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environmental ethics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[one child policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[population]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=84</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[By James Miller I&#8217;ve been following Andrew Revkin&#8217;s dot Earth blog at the New York Times. The tag-line of the blog is &#8220;Nine Billion People. One Planet&#8221; and is premised on the demographic likelihood that by 2050 the world&#8217;s population will have increased from six to nine billion, effectively adding another two Chinas to what we have already.  At the same time, the populations of China, Brazil and India are developing their economies at a relatively rapid rate which means that those populations will be commanding a larger ecological footprint than they are doing already. China&#8217;s 2001 ecological footprint was 1.5 global hectares per person. Canada&#8217;s was 6.4. Assuming that China&#8217;s economic development will bring about an expansion of its ecological footprint, the results could be catastrophic to say the least. China has 20% of the current world&#8217;s population but only 13% of China&#8217;s land mass is arable land. Economic development, moreover, has brought about a rapid deterioration in the quality of the natural environment, and a shrinking in the amount and quality of arable land. One tenth of China&#8217;s 120 million hectares of arable land is now contaminated, and China seems increasingly unable to provide itself with a necessary level of [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>environmental law or environmental ethics?</title>
		<link>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2008/12/04/environmental-law-or-environmental-ethics/</link>
		<comments>http://www.sustainablechina.info/2008/12/04/environmental-law-or-environmental-ethics/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:09:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>James Miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Questions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[china]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ecological consciousness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[environment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food scandal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regulation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.sustainablechina.info/?p=59</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[By James Miller The image of China in the Western media is often that of a monolithic totalitarian state, run by a cabal of shady figures in Beijing whose decisions affect the lives of downtrodden millions. When I bring visitors to experience the incredibly vibrant new China, the most common reaction I get is &#8220;I did not expect it to be like this!&#8221; This tells me that many people in the West have a strong idea of what China is like. It&#8217;s just the wrong idea. One of the most important thing that anyone who has spent time in China realizes, is that China is a very diverse, almost chaotic, country. Although the rhetoric of nationalism is very strong both from Beijing and from the people,  this points to the fact that China is still in the process of constructing a national identity for itself our of the fluid mix of languages, nationalities and cultures that occupy its borders. Chinese national unity is an ideal, rather than a reality, something aspired towards rather than concretely realized. (This also helps explain why China is so anxious about Tibet and Taiwan.) Even though we are always told that Han Chinese make up 93% [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
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