Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape (review)

"If we are to have a viable Theology of Ecology, we need to find it in Daoism"— so claimed Huston Smith, eminent scholar of religion, when he visited the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the mid-1970s.¹ And I have been quoting Professor Smith, especially to participants in the many Tai Ji groups that my wife and I have led in the last quarter of a century.

"Not so fast and not so simple" is the general message that most of the more than two dozen essays in this volume would caution. These are papers from a conference on Daoism and Ecology, the bulk of which (with a few essays solicited to augment the book) are the views of scholars of Religion and Daoism (including practitioners) who represent a wide spectrum of Daoist understanding. The participants came from China (including recent emigrants), Hong Kong, France, New Zealand, Canada, and, with a large majority, from the United States. Organized by Daoist scholars Norman Girardot and Livia Kohn, the conference took place at the Center for the Study of World Religions, at Harvard University, on June 5-8, 1998.

This unprecedented event was one in a series of conferences on Religion and Ecology held at the Center during a three-year period. The overall project, headed by Mary Elizabeth Tucker and John Grim (both of Bucknell University), was designed to explore Religion's possible contribution to addressing the problem of the perceived ecocrisis in our modern world. Its purpose was to challenge "scholars of religion to respond as engaged intellectuals with deepening reflection" (p.xxviii) to explore ways to provide the symbolic resources of religion to change attitudes and habits so that the degradation of Earth could be reversed.²

Religion is seen as something primordial, in its broadest sense as the "religious worldviews" of different cultures that reveal their understanding of the world and the role of humans in it. Religious worldviews are of central importance, writes Lawrence Sullivan, the director of the Center, because

they probe behind secondary appearances and stray thoughts to rivet human attention on realities of the first order: life at its source, creativity in its fullest manifestation, death and destruction at their origin, renewal and salvation in their germ. The revelation of first things is compelling and moves communities to take creative action. Primordial ideas are prime movers.

(p. x)

To avoid any facile attempt to relate ancient religious worldviews to the modern-day problems of ecology and to tone down activists who will read into Daoism what they need for their ecological agendas, the concise summary by James Miller of the serious "groundbreaking" discussion on theoretical questions provides a consensus that outlines the complexity of the project on three levels: (1) the complexity of Daoist experience, (2) the complexity of the ecological situation,³ and (3) the complexity of ourselves as actors and shapers of culture, which defines nature and ecology. In addition the discussants offer "A Manifesto of Daoist Ecology" that also emphasizes three points: "(1) Daoist ecology is not an idea but a practical consciousness shaped by a living religious tradition, (2) Daoist ecology recognizes that nature is a construct of human culture, as well as something other than ourselves, and (3) Daoist ecology is not deep ecology, but 'shallow.' It insists upon the complexity of the particular and resists the simplicity of the universal" (pp. 72-75).

Michael LaFargue underscores the fact that humans are the shapers of culture and that despite a growing ecological awareness and a concern for Planet Earth, we humans are and will be "inevitably 'anthropocentric.'" We cannot be otherwise, because the concept of "Nature" itself is a social construct, a part of the web of meanings we call "human culture" (p. 56). To be either "anthropocentric" or "cosmocentric" is to truncate the interconnectedness between the divine, human, and...