Buddhist Engagement in Climate Change and Sustainable Energy

• In Event: Border Crossing Activism in the Asian Anthropocene

Abstract

Fukushima 3/11 has become a watershed moment. Many Japanese argue the sacrifices of industrial development have outpaced the benefits. In its desire for material affluence, Japan’s natural environment has been compromised, with the specter of nuclear contamination from Fukushima the most dramatic case. Fukushima is just one of many environmental flashpoints in the global battle against climate change. And yet, as with Hiroshima and Nagasaki before it, it has arguably changed Asia forever, and brought the question of sustainable ecological futures into everyday discourse. For decades, Buddhists in the East and West have been grappling with various environmental problems. It is only recently that concerted efforts to network across regional, sectarian, and even other religious barriers have emerged. The International Network of Engaged Buddhists’ Inter-religious Climate and Ecology network (ICE), founded in 2012, is bringing together diverse religious persons to work together at climate change negotiations, on educational and awareness programs and pilgrimages, for emergency response to disasters induced by climate change, and for the design of ecological communities based around religious facilities. This paper examines the work of ICE with reference to its Japanese members. I show how they actively take on the critical issue of nuclear energy and sustainable lifestyles after Fukushima, move in multiple social arenas, and deploy innovative organizational tactics. I suggest their works open up new understandings of the relationship between nuclear energy, climate change, and sustainable ecological futures in the Anthropocene.

Author

• Jonathan S. Watts, International Buddhist Exchange Center