Somehow I set up "Religion and the Anthropocene" to introduce the Anthropocene and Buddhism at the same time. Partly this is because earth scientist and Buddhist environmental justice activist Jill Schneiderman's essay "Awake in the Anthropocene" links the two, and I had students prepare that for our first meeting last week. Partly it's because introducing broader debates on the "Anthropocene" - this week's topic - is hard without essayist Roy Scranton, and he grounds his recommendations for learning to accept the death of our civilization in Buddhist ideas in an essay in Tricyle, the Buddhist magazine.
Neither Schneiderman nor Scranton claims to be an authority on Buddhism (to balance them out I gave students the link to a guided meditation by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche), but the differences in their uses of Buddhist traditions are helpful for fleshing out what "religion" will mean in our class. For Scranton, Buddhism is accepting that everything, including the "I," is bound to die, if not already dead. For Schneiderman, who cites stories, the Noble Eightfold Path, Dogen's Mountains and Rivers sutra and the age of Kali yuga (among others), it's connected to cycles of decay and rebirth. For both, meditation practices connect one to the rest of suffering life in compassion, but this geologist's horizon is life, while the humanist's is death.
These intersected interestingly with two essays I assigned to give students entree to the scientific discussion, a review of the geologists' debates about whether to recognize the Anthropocene as an official epoch, and a synthesis of earth systems work by Will Steffen. Students were indignant at geologists' reluctance to go beyond stratigraphic evidence, several likening the "bureaucratic" scruples of these "old white men" to - you guessed it - "religion." Why do we need their imprimatur anyway, I asked? Whether it leaves a discernible geological trace or not, the destruction of so many other life forms by recent human interventions is a tragedy, and demands our response. We get a better, and more actionable, understanding from earth systems science.
Perhaps earth systems science gives us a better take on Buddhism (and religion!), too. The point isn't that everything is transient but that everything is interdependent. No particular thing persists, but this discovery conduces right to compassionate engagement with every other transient thing as it suffers and, sometimes, achieves satori. The humanist, heartbroken at the dead end of "civilization," decides everything was marked by death from the getgo. The earth scientist, attuned to cycles and systems, reminds us that even rocks aren't dead.
