Coordinators: Tristan G Brown (MIT), Serguei Saavedra (MIT) and Or Porath (Tel Aviv University)
Overview
The facts surrounding climate change have never been clearer. Over the past decades, scientists have gathered extensive data on sea level rise, glacial melt, atmospheric carbon levels, groundwater pollution, aridification, and the frequency of superstorms. Yet, a reliance on data alone has seemingly been unable to compel behavioral change on a global scale. Attention has been gradually shifting towards the environmental humanities—narrative-centric approaches to environmental issues that appeal to scholars and students across the academy and to the broader public beyond. This pillar is rooted in such an approach by fostering a diverse community of scholars actively uncovering the human stories, tensions, and synergies informing sustainability efforts worldwide.
For this pillar’s first project incarnation, we seek to assemble an international working group of scholars to examine the historical links between sacred places and biodiversity. “Sacred Natural Sites” (SNS) have been identified by scientists working across Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Many of these sites support old-growth forests, endangered flora and fauna, and broader regional ecosystems. In China for instance, botanists examining the forests of ancient mountain cults have revealed a remarkable fact: some of the most endangered plant species in the region survive solely on the slopes of Buddhist and Daoist mountains. Today, these mountains constitute a significant portion of the country’s expanding national park system. To give one example, one of the only extent collections of Heptacodium (“Seven-Son Flower”) is found on China’s Mount Tiantai, a major religious site associated with Buddhism from the medieval period onward and today a major national park spanning 187 square kilometers. While ecologists have been aware of these pockets of biodiversity for decades, their backstories have largely been absent in humanistic inquiry. Drawing on methodologies in the environmental humanities, we propose filling that gap.
A related effort aims to trace religious discourses across East Asia that centered plant and animal lives broadly. In the medieval period, Buddhist monks in China and Japan developed a worldview that promoted the deification of sentient beings beyond humans, extending to animals by attributing to them the potential for Buddhahood. Later, a discourse on the enlightened nature of inanimate entities began to emerge, reshaping attitudes toward a broader range of natural phenomena such as plants, trees, and rocks. By the early modern period, particularly in Edo-period shunga prints, this perspective culminated in captivating visual works that intertwined nature’s reproductive cycles with human procreation. As such, we take as our focus the topic of animal-human kinship, and how it was driven, supported, and framed by religious sensibilities.
Humanists have rightfully critiqued romanticized or enchanted views of religious approaches to nature that emerged in the West during twentieth century. Yet, there is considerable value in a nuanced examination of cultural arenas where collaboration and contestation between religion and nature took place. MIT Comparative Global Humanities Initiative is the ideal hub to bring together scholars working at the intersection of environment, religion, and science. The broader academic community of MIT stands to benefit from knowledge and awareness of the cultural patterns and practices that have shaped environments over time.
Current Scope
A wide array of case studies will draw from religious texts, historical diaries, legal documents, as well as prose, poetry, paintings, and prints spanning centuries. These sources will be analyzed to bridge humanistic and scientific disciplines, offering historical, religious, and cultural context for remarkable botanical discoveries made over the last thirty years.
We aspire to not only enrich the humanities with scientific findings, but also to employ methodologies from the disciplines of history and religious studies to foster new research on the cross-fertilization between religion and nature, and how religious ideas about the fauna and flora, gods and buddhas, social and natural landscape, have cultivated new ways to think about the environment.
Guiding Questions
- Why are sacred natural sites important case studies of biodiversity today? Are there underlining resonances across religions, cultures, and geographies that have fostered landscape protection over time, or did different practices and beliefs foster similar outcomes? What contingent and structural historical forces worked to produce such outcomes?
- How were the flora and fauna of these sites conceptualized in historical sources, scripture, poetry, and painting over the centuries? Do the historical and literary records of a region bear witness to biodiversity across time? What was recorded – and what was not?
- What religious and cultural attitudes enable animal-human reciprocity and kinship?
Goals
Our primary goals are to
- Foster an interdisciplinary, global network of humanists and scientists working on related issues to bring these topics to a wider audience.
- Provide a platform through which humanists can provide engineers and scientists with relevant context, feedback, and insights related to projects centering biodiversity.