sustainable china

By Mary Evelyn Tucker

Pan Yue

In a world where eco-systems are unraveling and where water, soil, and species are rapidly diminishing, there are few places on Earth where environmental problems are of greater concern than China. The sheer size of the population, over a billion people, and the rapid speed of modernization are creating a collision course for a sustainable future. As China modernizes with an unprecedented rapidity, the destruction of its environment is becoming increasingly visible and ever more alarming. This is affecting not only China but also the entire world. Our interconnected global markets, trade, cultural exchange, and travel are pushing us up against one another as never before. The way China resolves its environmental problems may have an immense affect around the globe.

There are many signs now that these problems are being felt strongly in China with some 60,000 protests a year occurring and with government officials recognizing that the prized Confucian value of political stability may be eluding them. Clearly some new approaches are needed that are not simply punitive, drawing on traditional Chinese Legalism – laws and regulations. Rather, many are looking to Confucianism and other Chinese traditions for a humanistic approach that would create new grounds for environmental protection and social harmony.

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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.