Biography
Alice Millington is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, split between the Geography and Social Anthropology departments. Alice's research centres on the 'more-than-human' components of Tibetan-Himalayan beliefs systems: a pantheon of landscape deities and local spirits through which meteorological events are often understood. In doing so, she intends to develop scholarly understandings of indigenous approaches towards climate change in Tibet and the Himalayas. Accordingly, once travel restrictions ease, Alice will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Nepal and India, with a view to uncovering how indigenous and religious climate knowledge should be utilised within climate policy.
Paper Abstract
Bhutan has long been recognised as an international leader in terms of forest protection and climate change mitigation. Particularly, it is lauded for its status as a net carbon sink, which stems in part from forested deity citadels (Dz: pho brang) across its sacred landscape, and the tenets of Vajrayāna Buddhism that inform their protection. Whilst Bhutan's progressive environmental policy and Gross National Happiness (GNH) development philosophy contribute significantly to conserving its natural resource base, informal religious practices also play a central role. Drawing on the religious components of Bhutanese Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), this paper examines informal religious values as motivators of climate-positive behaviour at the individual scale. Two vignettes of indigenous religion - (1) a framework of meteorological attribution termed the 'moral climate', common across the Tibetan-Himalayan region and (2) beliefs in an 'animated' landscape - are assessed for climate-positive influence. These work alongside Buddhist-informed state policies to ensure Bhutan remains a 'carbon negative' nation. In the West, proposed solutions to climate change have drawn disproportionately on the physical scientific issues surrounding our current crisis. Yet, climate change is a key example of a 'social ecological system' that cannot be adequately resolved by relying on the 'hard' geosciences alone. Responding to the urgent need to critically examine the values that have given rise to current states of ecological degradation, this paper presents Bhutanese religious worldviews as a crucial foil to global trends. The paper concludes with a consideration of how these lessons might be applied outside Bhutan: in religious contexts, and beyond.