My research explores the intersection of the world’s religious traditions with environmental policy and practice.
Contrary to the expectations of the “secularization hypothesis,” religion has not declined in the technological age, and thus remains a vital variable for understanding socio-ecological dilemmas.
I use qualitative social science methods, such as critical ethnography, case studies, environmental histories, and interviewing. I seek to understand how people derive and create meaning in relation to their surrounding environments. I explore how these meanings reflect, challenge, or resonate with received or novel religious teachings and institutions, and how such processes of meaning-making simultaneously create particular types of socio-natural places.
Specifically, I explore how small-scale, rural, and subsistence-based communities attribute noneconomic values to various aspects of the landscape, and how related perceptions and practices engage with, contribute to, or impede environmental degradation at the local, regional, state, and global levels. This approach challenges the fact/ value distinction that places ecological science in the realm of quantitative and confirmable science, and values and morality in the voluntarist, subjective realm.
FEATURED TOPICSResearch, Articles & Public Lectures
Ecology and Spirituality
The spirituality of ecology describes the intuitions and sensations that bind people to the interconnected matrix of life on Earth, across time and space. Through experiences in nature, contemporary advocates of eco-spirituality argue, people reconnect with that which is most essential, most alive, and most sustaining in their intimate connections with other beings, Earth, and the cosmos.
Mountains of Memory: Confronting Climate Change in Sacred Mountain Landscapes
Mountains and glaciers are sites of powerful sacred and symbolic meanings for local communities around the world. In sacred mountain landscapes, religious practices address the observed changes in the landscape that have arisen as a consequence of climate change. Both religious rituals and glacial landscapes are holders of collective memory – and the degradation of mountain landscapes represents a ‘dis-membering’ of the human community from the larger Earth community.
The Relational Spiral of Integral Ecology
How will the Integral Ecologist, this new “spiritual guide,” unite the conventionally disparate realms of science and spirit in practical action? What tools can the integral ecologist use to bring wisdom and insight to bear on increasingly complex environmental issues, interwoven with social justice, power relations, and legacies of domination so as to appear intractable?
At the Boundary of Modernity: Religion, Technocracy, and Waste Management in Bhutan
Religion has long been a powerful cultural, social, and political force in the Himalaya. Increased economic and cultural flows, growth in tourism, and new forms of governance and media, however, have brought significant changes to the religious traditions of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book presents detailed case studies of lived religion in the Himalaya in this context of rapid change to offer intra-regional perspectives on the ways in which lived religions are being re-configured or re-imagined.
Religiously Protected Natural Sites of Khumbu
The Sherpa people of the Khumbu region of Nepal recognize numerous local religiously protected places and natural features with religious significance including water spring, lakes, large trees and rocks, religious forests, meditation caves, and sacred mountains.
Spiritually Motivated Natural Resource Protection in Eastern Bhutan
With its devout adherence to Buddhist traditions that influence every aspect of daily life and its concomitant preservation of vast forests, Bhutan is an exemplar of the mutually reinforcing connections between environmental and cultural preservation, religion, and ethics, with the potential to provide guidance for environmental and cultural preservation in other locales.
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