ABSTRACT
In recent decades Buddhists have started formulating responses to the climate crisis and other environmental problems. In the months leading up to the 2015 climate conference in Paris, for example, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other Buddhist leaders signed the “Buddhist Climate Change Statement to World Leaders.” In 2009 several eco-Buddhists published an edited volume, A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency, which lead to the formulation of an organization, Ecological Buddhism, and a declaration, “The Time to Act is Now: A Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change.” Another group of Buddhists, many of whom are connected to Spirit Rock Meditation Center, founded in 2013 the Dharma Teachers International Collaborative on Climate Change and issued a declaration of their own: “The Earth is My Witness.” A third recently formed organization, One Earth Sangha, takes as its mission “expressing a Buddhist response to climate change and other threats to our home.” A range of other Buddhist organizations and institutions have been offering additional responses to the ecocrisis, including the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (led by Thai Buddhist Sulak Sivaraksa), the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Ordinary Dharma, Green Sangha, the Green Gulch Zen Center north of San Francisco, and the Zen Environmental Studies Institute at Zen Mountain Monastery in New York State, as well as the Boston Research Center for the twentyfirst century, Wonderwell Mountain Refuge in New Hampshire, the Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka, the Tesi Environmental Awareness Movement in Tibet (also known as Eco-Tibet), and the headquarters of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Japan. Parallel to the praxis of these groups, ecoBuddhists have published monographs, anthologies, and articles in journals and popular Buddhist publications. What we are seeing in these writings is the emergence of a new theoretical dimension of the Buddhist tradition: environmental ethics.
