sustainable china

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.