And it begins! In the first session of "Religion and the Anthropocene," we read an essay by Buddhist feminist geologist Jill Schneiderman while listening to some of John Bullitt's remastered "Earth Sound," then watched the trailer for a swashbuckling documentary which tries to make of the anthropocene an exciting puzzle: "Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy? Or is it something more surreal?"We had a pretty good discussion too, considering this was the first time we were meeting, and for many in the class their first class on religion and/or first engagement with the challenge of the anthropocene, a term unfamiliar to some. (Indeed many are students in their first year!). And of course this class is itself something of a first, and not just for me.
Jill Schneiderman is someone I heard at the conference last May in Bloomington. (I got to see the documentary there, too.) Although Schneiderman's essay "Awake in the Anthropocene" traversed and bridged areas students were unfamiliar with - par for the course in a first class session, and in fact, diagnostically useful for course prep - it proved a good place to start the course. Schneiderman raises some of our central questions in unexpected and interesting ways (and shows up the documentary as the frivolous click bait it is). The anthropocene confronts us with geological time, a time we cannot feel. She links this to Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence" and Johann Galtung's ideas about "structural violence" - names for conditions that predictably produce harm but in a manner difficult to perceive. How we can respond to processes we can't perceive is one of the big questions.
Here Schneiderman's experience as an earth scientist comes in handy.
In outcrops of rocks, forgotten fossils, and minute mineral fragments, we find evidence of earlier events on earth. And to us, present time mingles intimately with the past and the future. Ours is a cultivated skill that requires patience grown from sitting still or walking slowly in the field, and watching nothing happen. Most other scientists derive understanding by observing processes occur.
But this skill at "watching nothing happen" also has parallels with Buddhist ideas, Schneiderman argues, and these she recommends to those who hope to be "awake in the Anthropocene." Which ideas? She mentions several (too many for our class), including mind-bending ones like Dogen's concept of "time-being" (uji) and of the interpenetration of mountains and waters. But what I'll build out is her commendation of the Noble Eightfold Path, whose constituent "wisdom" (panna) "ethical conduct" (sila) and "mental discipline" (samadhi) she links to head, heart and "the whole body ... eengaged in various contemplative practices."
Most scientific approaches to the Anthropocene are wise but lack heart (there's a heartlessness in the distanced discussions in the documentary, for instance), but geologists can be "kind-minded guides" for us. At least those who have learned from Buddhist practice. (The interplay of the components of the Noble Eightfold Path is something learned only by doing.) Though some of the Buddhist teachers of old thought they were in the kaliyuga, the point in the cosmic cycle "in which humans and society reach the extreme point of disintegration," they weren't aware of the Anthropocene. Yet some of their practices, some of their stories might come to our aid now.
I hadn't quite worked out that this would be our first religion-and-anthropocene conjuncture, but it's a good one, and I'll work with it.
