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
The Reincarnation of Waste: A Case Study of Spiritual Ecology Activism for Household Solid Waste Management
In rural southern Bhutan, the revered Buddhist teacher, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, initiated a waste reduction project based on Bhutan’s guiding development philosophy of Gross National Happiness.
Deity Citadels: Sacred Sites of Bio-Cultural Resistance and Resilience in Bhutan
Consistent with the pan-Himalayan tendency to see the landscape as lively and animated, protector deities and local spirits are perceived to inhabit various features of the landscape in Bhutan, causing these places to be treated with reverence and respect.
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.
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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