Disentangling Multispecies Landscapes in Arunachal Pradesh: Religion, Ecology, Ethics

Abstract

This article considers the dilemma between advocating for a religion-based environmentalism in the Himalayas and recognising that the different cultural traditions in the region make a uniform religious environmentalism difficult to uphold. Conservationists often attempt to mobilise local communities for environmental protection by building on their religious and cultural beliefs. Yet, such forms of mobilisation tend to homogenise plural traditions by forcing them within a single fold. What is the way out of this dilemma? I offer some reflections, drawing on my empirical work in the Buddhist Himalayas, and focusing on the case studies of the yak and the black-necked crane respectively, two species which hold a special significance in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Examining these multispecies relations in Arunachal Pradesh reveal not only Buddhist values at work, but plural and evolving entanglements. The question, then, is not to see if the value is religious but if the value is more-than-human in its orientation, taking into account the entangled lives of human and non-human habitations. My broad argument is that an ethics of the environment need neither to be removed from religious ethics, nor enclosed by it. Rather than force environmental thought and behaviour into silos of particular religious traditions or conservation science paradigms, how can one see these as the function of plural habitations?

1. Introduction

In this article, I consider the dilemma between advocating a religion-based environmentalism in the Himalayas, on the one hand, and recognising that practical realities of life make such environmentalism difficult to uphold. Conservationists often co-opt local communities to make them allies in environmental protection, and harness religious and spiritual traditions for doing so.1 Yet, such forms of co-option tend to reduce human and non-human entanglements to static, one-dimensional ones. Drawing on my anthropological work in the Buddhist cultural regions of the Indian Himalayas, I offer a few reflections on why a singular lens, framed through religion, cannot subsume local ecological practices and perspectives. In practice, multispecies relations in these Himalayan regions show not only Buddhist conceptions at work, but plural and evolving entanglements.

The Himalayan ranges traverse many international borders which make this region particularly sensitive to shifting geopolitical contexts. Many of these borders, demarcated during British colonial rule, have fraught postcolonial lives, forming the subject of disputes between neighbouring nations. When India and the People’s Republic of China emerged as new nations in the 1940s, both embarked on their individual projects of nation-building and border strengthening, leading to the political-economic integration of the border communities on each side of the Himalayas. After the Chinese annexation of Tibet and subsequent border war between India and China in 1962, cross-border passages were closed to regular traffic and made subject to heightened military surveillance, while the Himalayan border communities on the Indian side were secured more firmly to their Indian political identity.

Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India is one such militarised borderland in the Indian Himalayas. Geo-strategically important in India’s border dispute with China, this foothills state has seen widespread military settlement and expansion of security infrastructures. This has led to serious environmental consequences for this region known for its rich biodiversity. Forest clearance for military movement and unabated and illegal tree felling by timber smugglers, often with the complicity of members of the border security forces, have led to a drastic reduction in the green cover and increased risk of landslides and avalanches. Along with climate change, therefore, miltarisation, state-driven infrastructure, development, and urbanisation, and tourism, specifically ecotourism, have shaped the transformation of Arunachal’s multi-species landscape. In this article, I use multi-species to talk about the co-existing and connected inter-species lives and worlds, and non-human to talk about non-anthropos beings, while acknowledging the limitations of these terms pointed out by scholars (e.g., Price and Chao 2023)

My focus in this article is the western part of Arunachal Pradesh comprising the primarily Buddhist districts of West Kameng and Tawang, bordered by Bhutan on the west and Tibet on the north. Collectively known as Monyul, a Tibetan-origin term meaning lowland, these districts are home to Monpa ethnic communities, who practice Buddhism and were tax-paying subjects of the Tibetan state for nearly three centuries. Even after the British rulers in India delineated the Indo-Tibetan boundary in 1914, Tibetan tax-collectors continued to collect taxes from these areas until the postcolonial Indian government established its first political outpost in Tawang in 1951. After the 1962 war, all passes leading from Tawang to Tibet were barricaded. While this led to a disruption of the previous economic, cultural, and kinship ties that existed between the Monpas and the Tibetans of Tibet, it also drew the Indian state to make inroads into this strategically important border region through various development schemes, as well as cultural measures, such as adopting a favourable stance towards the locally influential Buddhist monasteries, and promoting Buddhist and monastery festivals for tourism. Since the early 2000s, a Buddhist environmentalism spearheaded by monks has become increasingly visible in these parts. These Buddhist environmental activists draw on ideas about ecological Buddhism that have a longer history. However, while Buddhism can inspire and support environmental activism, local approaches to the environment do not often overlap with Buddhist ideas.

I illustrate this by examining the multispecies landscape of western Arunachal Pradesh, where I have long term anthropological ties, focusing on the “entangled lives” (Pachuau and van Schendel 2022) of the yak and the black-necked crane, both of which have a special status in the local culture. I show how neither a homogenous Buddhist religion nor conservation can subsume the relations of the local communities with these two species. Ecotourism, market logics, nationalism, national security, and food politics are part of these multispecies assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 2008), which are not unchanging unities, but are relations that can be reconfigured while maintaining their fragmentary unity (Nail 2017). It then becomes necessary to first disentangle these configurations before advancing religion as a way forward to reshaping local visions to an ethic of deep ecology (Naess 1973). I propose the notion of plural habitations to disentangle multispecies relations in Arunachal Pradesh. This article synthesises ethnographic observations from field visits conducted for over more than a decade from 2009 to 2023.

I begin by tracing the development of ecological Buddhism and locating it within the broader trend of eco-theology, which explores ecological consciousness in religious traditions. I then discuss the two cases of the black-necked crane and yak respectively, showing the inadequacy of ecological Buddhism in understanding multispecies entanglements. I point out the essentialist tendencies of ecological Buddhism, for it proceeds by abstracting and singling out ecological motivations in individuals and communities that connect to religious values, whereas in reality, individual habitations, which is a composite of habitat, habits, and habitus (Bourdieu 1977) and include calculations of pragmatic goals, shape ecological behavior in multiply-entangled multispecies worlds. I conclude by arguing that instead of making religious value-based education the desired route to environmental education, where ethics is wedded to religious morality,2 one can think of a number of ethical ways forward, which centre an environmental consciousness. Such a consciousness may draw on religious doctrine and practice or modern conservationist thought or can be lodged in pragmatic concerns. My broad argument is that an ethics of the environment need to be understood as neither removed from religious ethics, nor enclosed by it, but as situationally arising through contexts where values and pragmatic interests intersect.

2. Eco-Buddhism: Practical and Epistemic Limits

Ian Harris (1995) traces the origins of ecological Buddhism or eco-Buddhism to the poet Gary Snyder, who spent the period 1956–1964 at the Mahayana Buddhist Rinzai Zen temple in Kyoto, studying under the Japanese Buddhist Oda Seso Roshi, and later co-founded the Berkeley-based Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Gary Snyder endorsed the thesis propounded by historian Lynn White Jr. that Asian systems of thought, and Buddhism in particular, serves the natural world better than those with their roots in Judeo-Christianity (Harris 1995, p. 202). Lynn White Jr. was among the first scholars to make a connection between religion and modern environmentalism in his 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis”, where he contrasted the exploitative character of medieval Western Christianity with the ecological character of non-Judeo-Cristian religions in the non-Western world (White 1967).3 Lynn White’s call for religions to produce more ecologically sensitive theology influenced world religious leaders, such as Pope Francis, to make pronouncements on modern environmental concerns, which, in turn, gave impetus to scholarly attempts to discover ecological ideas in Western Christianity (Whitney 1993; Tucker and Grim 2016), and to the development of the field of eco-theology, which traces ecological values in the textual and oral traditions of different religions, which are then contrasted to the extractive anthropo-centrism of modern capitalism (Tucker 1997; Tucker and Grim 2016). Eco-theologians share with the historian Lynn White Jr. the idea that the modern environmental crisis is fundamentally a moral and religious issue and that the solution lies in religion (Whitney 1993, pp. 152, 160), even while disagreeing with the latter’s criticism of Judeo-Christian traditions.

Christian eco-theologians such as James Barr, Carl Braaten, John Cobb, and Joseph Sittler have held up the concept of stewardship in Christian tradition, exemplified by Saint Francis of Assisi, Bonaventura, Maximus the Confessor, which holds that all beings are created by God, and nothing is created without a purpose, and the responsibility of the created world lies with humans (Whitney 1993, p. 160). However, philosopher Damien Keown maintains that in the stewardship tradition, man is the steward of the natural order whereby the worth of creatures is measured simply in terms of their worth for human beings. He finds better worth in highlighting the Western virtue ethics tradition—the oldest systematic body of ethical theory in the west originating in Aristotle’s ethical treatises, and later revived by Alasdair Macintyre in 1981-which he finds comparable with Buddhist ethics. Like the Buddhist-prescribed path to enlightenment as character development, virtue ethics is about developing human potential and states of character to achieve a sense of fulfilment and long-term happiness. Virtue ethics considers not just the action, but the agent, and focuses on what sort of person we are, rather than what sorts of action we should perform (Keown 2007, p. 98). Keown thus distinguishes the virtue ethics approach from the Christian stewardship tradition, for it is the former that has a concept of the common good whereby individuals can flourish only if there is flourishing of the greater (ecological) community. According to him, this is where it resonates with ecological Buddhism.

Ecological Buddhism sees Buddhist concepts as aligned with eco-centrism and the idea that human and non-human worlds are inter-connected.4 The Buddhist emphasis on change in individual consciousness is seen as being synonymous with the concept of deep ecology, first propounded by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1973), to distinguish it from shallow ecology, where the former goes beyond surface questions to ask for radical social change at the level of individual consciousness.

An influential volume that promoted the ecological basis of Buddhism was Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays on Buddhism and Ecology (Badiner 1992), published in 1990, with contributions from Gary Snyder, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, mathematicians and philosophers, and Western practitioners of Buddhism. One of the contributors, Lafleur (1992) turns to the Mahayana Sutra texts of East Asian Buddhism to show that monks in these regions developed a way to cross the divide between sentient and non-sentient beings that restricted Buddhist thought from extending consciousness to plants (the six realms of existence in Buddhist cosmology does not include the plant world). Citing several verses composed by monks in 4th–12th CE China and Japan, he shows that they expressed a realization that even plants, trees, grass have a Buddha nature capable of enlightenment, and this realization spread from monasteries to more public usage through poetry and song. He concludes that “the past does offer materials and insights that may be of use in coping with a set of [ecological] crises facing us today, in both the East and the West” (Lafleur 1992, p. 142).

Other Asian religions too have been examined from eco-theological approaches. For example, Singhvi (2002) holds up a number of Jain teachings, such as ahimsa (non-violence towards fellow-humans and natural world) jiva-daya (caring for and sharing with all living beings), parasparopagraho jivinam (all life is bound together by mutual support and interdependence) and anekantavada (relativity and non-absolutism of views, which means no single perspective, such as anthropocentrism, is the only truth), which is shown to support eco-centrism and bioethics. Likewise, scholars have highlighted strains of ecological thought in Hinduism (Prime 1994). Muslim ecological thought is traced to the Islamic concept of the unity of god and man, especially in the concept of khalīfa, which designates the status of the human as a responsible carer for God’s creation (e.g., Ouis 1998; Feise-Nasr 2023). While this is similar to the stewardship tradition within Christianity, some other scholars identify alternative textual strands within Islam that appear to question speciesism and anthropocentrism. For example, Naveeda Khan (2014) does a narrative analysis of a tenth century fable The case of the animals versus man before the King of the Jinn by the Ikhwan al-Safa (The Brethren of Purity), a secret society of Muslim thinkers in Iraq, to show that the superiority of humans are subject to dispute within Muslim theology.

More than other Asian religions, however, Buddhism has inspired environmental activism among monks and nuns who draw on Buddhist ethics and practices (Darlington 1998, 2007), as well as lay members of Buddhist societies. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama has been a staunch advocate of the view that Buddhism espouses a harmony between humans and their natural environment. His landmark statement “An ethical approach to environmental protection,” published in 1987 was reproduced as the foreword in several subsequent publications. Tibet Policy Institute, a policy organisation with its office in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India, brought out a compilation of the Dalai Lama’s statements on the environment from 1987 to 2017.5 Buddhist and Sanskrit fables about the animal world such as Hitopadesha and Jataka are often extolled as ecological narratives.

Monks have been active in environmental campaigns in Theravada Buddhist countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Thai monks gained international fame in the 1970s–1980s by organising Tree Ordination and Long Life Ceremony rituals for rivers—ceremonies normally performed on human individuals—drawing on traditional Buddhist teachings as well as indigenous beliefs in spirits (Darlington 1998, 2007). These monks were inspired by the Engaged Buddhism approach started by Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, which advocates active intervention of monks in societal matters for a better future. Thich Nhat Hanh has several speeches and written texts where he offers advice on a Buddhist approach to environmental problems. Buddhist monks often frame their stance against state development policies that are detrimental to the environment as a Buddhist response to modern ecological challenges. In Indian Himalayan areas such as Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, anti-dam protests and rituals with environmental aims are led by Buddhist monks. Tibetan Buddhist reincarnate monks in the Indian Himalayan region of Ladakh have championed Buddhist environmentalism in the form of garbage collection, waste disposal and tree plantation (Williams-Oerberg 2022). However, ecological Buddhism has its detractors.

Scholars (Harris 1995; Keown 2007) have pointed to epistemic gaps in the representation of Buddhism as ecological. They reason that secular concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, receding water levels etc arise from a scientific understanding of the world which was not possible in ancient times, and could not have been predicted by Buddha and his early interlocutors in just the same way. In practice too, Buddhist communities do not commonly conform to ecological representations of Buddhism (Huber 1997). Anthropologists particularly have offered critical and nuanced reflections on the connection between Buddhism and modern environmentalism (e.g., Woodhouse 2012; Yü 2023). Reading Susan Darlington, who studied the Thai monks, against the grain, one sees that despite lauding Buddhist monks for mobilising people for environmental causes, Darlington maintains that spirit beliefs and local or regional rituals still hold sufficient power and meaning for villagers to serve as focal points for environmental projects (James and Cooper 2007, p. 95). Woodhouse (2012) similarly shows how Buddhist people in Samdo invoked karma to explain their actions such as not killing animals and plants, as these actions accumulated merit. There was thus an instrumental value in being non-violent towards animals (Woodhouse 2012, p. 63).

These interpretations are similar to the findings of researchers on eco-spirituality elsewhere. Thus, regarding sacred groves in Tamil Nadu, Eliza Kent writes that there was little in the beliefs and practices of people which could be seen as evidence of an “ecological” ethos, and in fact, the people “came across as hard-headed pragmatists, who seek to draw liberally on all the resources available to them—social, material, and supernatural—in order to thrive in a difficult environment” (Kent 2016, p. 23).

My intention here is not to dismiss the role of Buddhism or other traditional religious practices in modern conservation. I simply wish to underscore that there are limits to framing local behaviors through a religious lens only. My point is not that there is no place for religious environmentalism; only that it should not be presented as rigid or seen as sufficient. For religious beliefs are not all-encompassing, and when they are represented as such they acquire the power to capture and “enclose” imaginations and practices. One of the meanings of enclosure is “articulation: conferring propositional content on an experience, and hence the possibility of truth value, by means of making an assertion” (Kockelman 2016, p. 5). Enclosing people as “homo-religiosus” (Eliade 1959, p. 15) forces them to occupy a particular slot. Further, the attempt to enclose diverse views and practices through the singular lens of religion excludes those that do not fit or sit in tension.

Second, human interactions with non-human nature are not fixed in time but are dynamic, making static enclosures difficult. Multispecies relations move through different configurations over time, and are part of multiple assemblages, that make claims on shared commons (De Maaker 2022). How do we begin to disentangle these changing configurations? I explain this point through the examples of the black-necked crane and the yak respectively in Arunachal Pradesh, a Himalayan state that offers a crucial site to study multispecies relations (Wouters and Yü 2025; Yü and de Maaker 2021).

3. Black-Necked Crane

The black-necked crane gained national attention when it emerged as a central symbol of anti-dam protests led by Tibetan Buddhist monks in Tawang (Gohain 2017). Between 2011 and 2012, the Society for Development of Culture and Education (SDCE), an association of monks based in Sera monastery in the Tibetan settlement of Byllakuppe, Karnataka, ran a campaign in Tawang against state-sponsored mega-dam projects on Tawangchu and Nyamjangchu rivers. With the help of a local organization, Save Mon Region Federation (SMRF), also composed of monks, the protestors organised rallies and a door-to-door campaign to mobilise the people of Tawang against these dams, which threatened to submerge sacred Buddhist sites, and especially the habitat of the black-necked crane or thung thung karmo, considered to be an embodiment of the Sixth Dalai Lama. Their protests met with stiff resistance from the district and state administration, and culminated in the deaths of two monks and the political isolation of Lama Lobsang Gyatso, the leader of the Save Mon Region Federation. The campaign made the black-necked crane famous as a symbol of Buddhism environmentalism.

The black-necked crane is a migratory avian species found in the Himalayan and trans-Himalayan region. First classified as a “Vulnerable” species in the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), and later listed as “Near Threatened”, the black-necked crane population was numbered at around 10,000–10,200 in 2019. Their breeding grounds include Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau in western China and Changthang in the Indian Himalayan region of Ladakh. Their wintering habitat includes the lower elevations of Qinghai-Tibet and Yunnan-Guizhou Plateaus of China, Phobjikha in Bhutan, and Sangti, Chug, and Zemithang in western Arunachal Pradesh.6 The bird’s breeding habitat typically located in shallow waters has consistently faced threats from factors such as reclamation of wetlands for agriculture, construction, sandmining in river beds, and development of tree plantations in high-altitude wetlands such as in Hanle in Ladakh, while its wintering habitat has been disturbed by developmental activities, feral dogs and tourists. Many birds die after getting trapped on open electric wires. Conservation efforts to save the crane have taken the form of a Black-necked Crane Conservation Network, formed in China in 2006; while World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-India and the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature lead the conservation work for black-necked cranes in India and Bhutan respectively.

The black-necked crane has long been embedded in relations of intimacy with local people in the Himalayas not by the frequency of interactions, as it is a migratory bird but by virtue of seasonal habitat and positive association—these cranes were considered to be the harbinger of good harvests, and finding a feather of the crane was considered auspicious. The intimacy stemmed from the familiarity and constancy of the relations of this bird with the communities and landscapes of Sangti, Chug, and Zemithang, which form part of its wintering habitat. Black-necked cranes come right after rice harvesting—they scrabble in the swampy rice fields for grains, roots, and insects, when their Tibetan homeland becomes snow-clad and food scarce. Chug and Zemithang are the other two valleys in west Arunachal where black-necked cranes come during the hard winters.

Locals say that thung thung karmo are intelligent creatures—they sleep in the marshlands at night, resting their weight on one leg and tucking their head under one folded wing, but remain alert. The slightest vibration or tremble in the marshy land would send them soaring to the skies. They are also thought to be caring of their companions. If one falls sick, the others carry it back in the weight of their wings. One more fascinating story I heard was that black necked cranes apparently practice flying for about a week before their long trip back home. Villagers see them circling around at the crack of dawn each day for a week before they fly away.7

The crane has an important place in local myth because of its association with the Sixth Dalai Lama, who was born in Tawang in the seventeenth century and later taken to Tibet to assume office. The Dalai Lama was of a creative bent and composed several fine verses in his lifetime, but one is particularly remembered for its reference to the thung thung karmo, translated as white crane in the following passage:

• O bird there—white crane—come,
• Lend the strength of your wings.
• I’ll not go far. Circling Lithang,
• I shall return
(Gyatso [Sixth Dalai Lama] 2004, p. 117)

After the Sixth Dalai Lama’s early death at the age of 24, his successor, the Seventh Dalai Lama was reincarnated in Lithang.

Since the beginning of this century, the black-necked crane has been co-opted as an object of conservation. In 2020, Neeraj Vagholikar, a long-time member of Kalpavriksh—a non-profit organisation based in Pune, which has been volunteering and documenting local conservation efforts since 2000 in Arunachal Pradesh—wrote a children’s story book, titled, Saving the Dalai Lama’s Cranes. The book was meant to raise environmental awareness among the local children by connecting them to their traditional values. The story of the Sixth Dalai Lama’s cranes is now one popularised by conservationists.

Both Bhutan and Ladakh, to which the crane’s habitat extends, have started conservation drives centering the crane. With WWF India actively promoting ecotourism in the black-necked crane sighting sites in Arunachal Pradesh (Sharma and Gohain 2024), there is a new awareness about conserving the bird. This, tied up with the economic opportunities of ecotourism, has provoked a shift in earlier sentiments and relations to the bird. Local homestay owners and others who benefit from the income opportunities of ecotourism now see the black-necked crane with a new-found perspective, through the “conservation gaze”—a particular way of seeing, conditioned by a global biodiversity discourse (Sharma and Gohain 2024, p. 6). This has displaced the bird from its earlier intimate relations with the local communities and lodged it in a different relationship with the villagers, as an object of conservation and a potential source of income, through eco-tourism.

In 2023, I visited Sangti, which is a village located at a half hour’s drive on a mud track from Dirang town in the West Kameng district. Sangti shot to the limelight in the last decade as the sighting place for black-necked cranes. This village is now one of the most sought-after destinations for eco-tourism in Arunachal Pradesh. Several homestays have sprung up in Sangti, their signboards advertising the lovely tall and grey white birds. Some of these homestays have their own websites advertising their ware and fare, and listing curated activities such as nature walks, bird watching, trekking, and culture experiences.8 There are eco-camps—tents pitched for tourists who wish to spend some nights in the expansive greens of this valley beside the Sangti river, that range from the basic to the luxurious, with matching tariffs.

Sangti villagers talk about the black-necked crane fondly and with wonderment. But when I talk about the bird being a manifestation of the Sixth Dalai Lama, they simply nod and say that they don’t know much about it. Yet, everyone seems committed to preserving it. “Tourists came to know about Sangti because of the black-necked crane”—one homestay owner tells me. People’s conservation ethic seems motivated more by a responsibility to a bird that put them on the world map than by its religious significance. It is not a mercenary attitude stemming from the commercial gains that crane tourism brings them. It seemed to me to be more like gratitude.

Nam Tsering (name changed), the caretaker monk in Sangti gonpa (village monastery) claims that his family were one of the oldest to settle in Sangti, a thousand years ago. He tells me that as a child in the 1970s, he would see fifteen to twenty cranes every winter. The numbers have dwindled to two or three now, and there was a year when none turned up. For some time, the NIMAS (National Institute of Mountaineering and Adventure Sports)—an institute founded in 2012 and jointly run by the government of Arunachal Pradesh and the Indian Ministry of Defence, conducted paragliding training in Sangti. According to my local interlocutors, the birds were probably disturbed by the paragliders and did not visit Sangti in the winter of 2019–20. The local public put a stop to the paragliding by routing a request through the village council. A number of people complained that the cranes are endangered by the open electric wires, and that their habitat is disturbed by military expansion and the stray dogs, whose numbers have risen proportionately with military settlements. Ecotourism, although considered a sustainable form of livelihood, further troubles the crane habitat. By forcing local people to create an environment that caters to the choice of the tourists-consumers, who trespass into bird territory to take photographs (Gohain 2025), ecotourism has contributed to the numbers of this migratory bird declining each year. Sand extraction from river beds has also encroached on the bird’s feeding habitat. To my question whether the people can be persuaded to stop sand mining, one person answered that it’s a source of income for the unemployed.

The appropriation of the black necked crane as a Buddhist symbol has not saved it from being the victim of unplanned urbanisation, widespread militarisation, and extractive capitalism.

4. Yak

Unlike the black-necked crane, the yak is not a migratory species but is transhumant stock, common to the pastoral communities in Tibetan Buddhist highland economies. It migrates seasonally to lower altitude grazing pastures during winter, and to higher altitudes during summer, since it cannot survive in lower temperatures. Since the early 2000s, the yak has been co-opted into regional cultural politics, and promoted as a symbol of the Buddhist identity of the local Monpa communities.

In 2003, charismatic and high-ranking monk, Tsona Gontse Rinpoche started a movement for a separate administration for the Buddhist Monpa areas within the Christian-majority state of Arunachal Pradesh (Gohain 2020), and launched an organisation called the Mon Autonomous Region Demand Committee to lead the movement. The agenda of the autonomy movement was to preserve the Buddhist cultural traditions and historical connections of Monyul by securing an independent administrative council for the region. The badge of the Mon Autonomous Region Demand Committee had a mountain motif, the Buddhist wheel of life, and an image of the yak—a prominent animal in Monpa life and culture, and this was read by the non-Buddhist communities living in the region as a symbolic move to exclude them from political say in the movement.

Traditionally, the Monpas used the yak as a pack animal for long distance trade with Tibet. Yak milk, cheese, butter were items of exchange in trade. For the yak-herding Brokpa communities among the Monpas, entangled in an ontological relatedness with the yak in their shared highland habitat, the yak are “treated as persons, as social, embodied and sentient beings with whom it is possible to establish relations of attachment, intimacy, care, love and worry” (Wouters 2021, p. 35). Before the border closure, the Brokpas alternated between their stable winter residences, concentrated in villages such as Nyukmadung, Senge, Lubrang, Mukto, Rho and Jangda, and their summer homes in the higher altitude alpine reaches, a necessary migration for the yak, which can only survive at temperatures below 13–15 degrees celsius. During the Losar festival, which is the Tibetan New Year celebrated by the Monpas, performances of the yak dance are accompanied by the ritual slaughter of the yak. In the oral lore of Monpa communities, yak is invested with a high rank in the food hierarchy, where the ruling clans are said to have preferred yak and lamb, over the meat of bree, the female yak and dzo, the hybrid of yak and domestic cattle.

The closure of cross-border passages between India and Tibet disrupted the Brokpas’ previous access to grazing pastures in Tibet, which affected both their lifestyle and livelihood. Permanent army settlements and continuous troop movement on roads additionally led to the compression of spaces that traditionally formed the habitat of the yak. Progressive military enclosure of the commons for the setting up of army residential campuses and firing or practice ranges and military observation posts appropriated control of land from the local people, and former land used as yak grazing pastures were bounded off and made off-limits for the Brokpas and their yak. Reduction in snow-fall in the highlands, rise in the average temperature, and blocking of access to summer yak pastures located in the higher altitudes of Tibet, as a fall-out of the border dispute, combined to add to large-scale habitat loss for the yak, which, in turn, contributed to the decline of their population. In local opinion, the yak’s lack of employment as transporters has been one of the main reason for the decline in their population (Goswami 2009, p. 6). The income from yaks was reduced to that obtained from milk and wool production. Although, yak-herders resorted to adaptive steps such as changing the duration and timing of migration, they have had little success in stemming the population decline.

In 1989, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research set up the National Research Centre on Yak (NRCY) for yak research and conservation, with an experimental yak farm at Nyukmadung, around 31 km from Dirang town. The institute is staffed by scientists, research scholars, and local employees, and it organizes regular national as well as international conferences and training workshops. It includes a milk processing unit to manufacture yak milk products; a wool processing unit to weave yak wool caps, mats, carpets, ropes, and belts; a veterinary polytechnic; and scientific cells to study transgenic animal production, genome mapping, and so on. I stayed several times for long periods in the guesthouse of NRCY between 2009 and 2013, and continued to visit its campus in following years.

While NCRY has not been able to salvage the local economy of the yak-herders, it created new links and routes between pastoral communities and conservation networks by co-opting them in conservation work and facilitating a cottage industry around yak products. The yak was gradually transformed from being primarily pastoral stock and a pack animal used in cross-border transportation to becoming a part-conservation animal kept under the watch of the NCRY.

In the last two decades, the yak has featured centrally in environmentalist campaigns waged by local Buddhist organisations, comprising largely of monks. An organisation called the Tangnyom Tsokpa (Tangnyom means equanimity and Tsokpa means society or association) revived a ban on yak meat that was initially started during the heyday of the autonomy movement in 2008–2009, and aggressively enforced it through vigilant watch in the market areas to prevent any slaughter and sale of the animal. Whereas the yak’s traditional role and relevance in the Monpas’ cultural and economic life accounted for its seasonal movement, its newfound role as a conservation animal and cultural symbol in political narratives locates it in different configurations. Like the crane, the yak has also moved in its multispecies entanglements.

The ban on yak meat notwithstanding, its consumption, although not done openly today, is a public secret. Yak meat continues to be in stealthy circulation locally, and easily procured through personal contacts. A non-meat diet is an exception rather than the norm not only for the lay Buddhist person but also monks in Tibetan Buddhist highland societies (Gohain 2021; Yü 2023). Even as Buddhist environmentalists bring a religious angle to yak conservation, their campaign lacks substantive support from the local Buddhist inhabitants (Gohain 2021) because of the latter’s multiple entanglements. A major threat to yak is not their meat but, as already described, the loss of livelihood and the blocking of previous grazing routes and pastures that followed the border closure.

By presenting the two case studies of the black-necked crane and the yak, I wish to highlight two points. First, multispecies entanglements and landscapes are not fixed in time. Both the yak and the crane have moved from their earlier configurations. While the black-necked crane travels between its two worlds of farm fields/wintering habitat and ecotourism sites, the yak has travelled from a seasonal migratory route propelled by pastoralism and trade towards new multispecies entanglements, defined by political borders, conservation schemes, and food politics. As species adapt their habits and habitats with new environments and infrastructure, they too shape the shared landscape. The yak and crane are not passive partners but co-fabricate the changing ecological formations of which they are part (Barua and Sinha 2022). When black-necked cranes shift their feeding habitat to sites contiguous to Sangti, such as Chug, they chart new ecotourism pathways, drawing tourists to the fresh sighting areas. Traditionally yak provided a “temperature meter,” as a monk once told me, for their ambulatory movements downhill marked the onset of winters. With yak mobility regulated and contained, they no longer serve this meteorological role.

Yet, unlike what Sophie Chao wrote about an “ontological dissonance” between indigenous Marind ecology and agrocapitalism in Papua New Guinea, incarnated in the oil palm and sago respectively (Chao 2024, p. 11), where we see a violence rendered on the former by the latter, in the case of Arunachal’s yak and crane, we see, instead, an interweaving of different multispecies worlds that appear complementary to the local communities. The yak is as much part of its traditional habitat in the highlands as it is of the research centre and yak farm started by the Indian state, and symbolically, it also belongs to the posters in the Buddhist identity campaigns. Likewise, the black-necked crane features in its traditional marshland habitat as well as in ecotourism or eco-capitalism ventures, in which local communities are promised equal stakes.

The resignification of these two species as icons of a modern Buddhist identity captures only one dimension of their different physical and symbolic habitats. Buddhist environmentalism therefore cannot enclose these two species in static entanglements, for they travel. Casting people into essentialised religious identities may not serve an environmental ethic. A person who professes Buddhist values may very well eat yak meat or welcome noisy tourists into their homestays located in crane habitat. This is not to discount the role of religious values in mobilising people towards environmental protection. What is at issue is the analytic of religion and spirituality as being key to understanding the environmentalist orientation of individuals and communities. It leads to a romanticising of an indigenous environmentalism that may have no practical bearing. Madhav Gadgil (2023) cites Raymond Dasmann to distinguish ecosystem people from biosphere people—the former being those who live in close proximity with forests and draw on the latter for the livelihood and daily existence, while the latter includes forest department people for whom the forest is merely a site for extracting timber, or as tourist destination, and unlike the ecosystem people they are able to value the forest for its own worth. This kind of division reinforces the indigenous environmentalism thesis where natives are seen as being innately, and unchangingly, ecological. Further, essentialised identities can descend into exclusionary and aggressive politics, when religious boundaries sharpen.

5. Plural Habitations

It’s hard to make a man, by pressure of law or money, do a thing that does not spring naturally to him from his own personal sense of right and wrong—Aldo Leopold

In Arunachal Pradesh, a person may be a practicing Buddhist, a stakeholder in the ecotourism industry by virtue of household responsibilities, and yet be co-opted into a conservation gaze through a scientific education and career. A person who is born a Buddhist but is not a practicing one and is compelled to subscribe to a point of view of a religion-based environmentalism may experience internal conflicts. Alternately, a person ensconced in a way of living that is consumerist, may yet borrow selectively from mindfulness lessons, and be sensitive to the eco-centric ideas of planetary living. How may one explain the environmental position of such individuals? How do these religious and modern environmental ethics interweave with each other? Therefore it is perhaps not helpful to understand environmental thought and practice as a fixed habitation. Indeed, scholars have pointed to concepts like situatedness (Haraway 1988) which draws attention to the specificity of ways in which different people become-with and understand other-than-human beings in particular places, at particular times, in the context of particular material and ideological assemblages (Price and Chao 2023). The different habitations within the Buddhist Himalaya make a uniform religion-based environmentalism untenable. I use plural habitations as a means to disentangle the different relations in which human and non-human beings find themselves.

People inhabit different identities, positions, and places in their multispecies worlds, and these plural habitations influence their ecological motivations. French philosophical anthropologists (De Castro 2005; Descola 2014) have used sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus to develop their notion of perspective or point of view. The agenda of these scholars like Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castros is to give agency to the non-human by recognising them as perceiving subjects, drawing on Amerindian cosmology, where personhood is extended to non-humans as an ontological possibility. They argue that animals perceive the same way as us but perceive different things than us because their bodies are different in the sense of what the body or the body-ensemble eats, how it moves, and whether it is gregarious or solitary etc. Descola paraphrasing Castros calls this “the heterogeneity of the habitus [emphasis mine] that a body incorporates as the seat of a particular perspective” (Descola 2014, p. 139), adding that perspective is not representation, for representations are properties of the mind while perspective or point of view is in the body.

Like the notion of perspective, plural habitation attempts to understand ecological motivations as influenced by habitus. I use habitations to talk of such inhabited, grounded motivations conditioned by the body, mind, the bodily and the built environment. But habitations differ from perspective in that the same individual may have plural habitations, for epistemologies and ontologies are entangled, and are subject to shifts.

Pragmatic concerns moreover make an entry into ethical considerations regarding the environment. I will briefly bring in two examples from elsewhere. The Pangti Story (2016) directed by Sesino Yhoshu is a documentary about the villagers of Pangti, a small village in Nagaland, who once hunted the migratory amur falcon and sold them for cash, but later became ardent conservationists of the bird, once they learned about its endangered status. The uplifting tagline of the film is “When hunters turned protectors”. Yet, a statement by the main protagonist in the film stands out where he says that if the government stops giving them their monthly stipend, they might go back to their old ways. It reveals that the incentive to stop the bird killings is not entirely driven by a conservation ethic, but by the supplemental income provided by the Nagaland state to an impoverished community that had long been dependent on the seasonal sale of the migratory bird to earn a few extra bucks.

The other example is from the Mahakumbh Mela, a Hindu festival that happens every twelve years in Prayagraj (Allahabad), which in 2025, hosted a record high number of pilgrims and tourists who came seeking spiritual fulfilment. At the same time, many concerned people remarked on the toxic effect of these crowds on the river Ganga on whose banks the month long festivities were conducted. How to think of restoring balance here? Geographer and policy analyst Srinivas Chokkakula writes, that to “unravel the underlying ecological ethic… requires recognising that the rituals and practices are informed and constructed by a web of agents, actors, and networks. These range from priests and pandas and pandits to popular preachers, spiritual thought-leaders, as well as institutions such as ashrams and akharas. These interests transcend the spiritual realm. They can often be driven by the interests of the political economy. The reimagining of rituals must involve working with these networks and institutions to produce means and meanings that can complement river rejuvenation efforts.” While in the first example, hunters turned conservationists require an income to remain conservationists, in the second example, people who provide religious services have to be directed towards environmental thinking not only by appealing to their religious values but also by material incentives. The broader point is that ecological motivations are shaped not only by the transformation of values into either religious or conservationist ones, but also by pragmatic concerns of livelihood.

6. Environmental Ethics

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise—Aldo Leopold

Revisiting the eco-theological approaches to different religions, we find that regardless of the differences between them, common to all is the hope voiced that a return to religious values might fundamentally redeem and transform us from being self-absorbed humans given to capitalism-driven consumerism, to owning responsibility for this more-than human world (e.g., Tucker and Grim 2016; Rupp 2002, p. 24). As anthropologist Bruno Latour puts it, “Whereas ecological consciousness has been unable to move us, the religious drive to renew the face of the earth just might” (Latour 2009, p. 463). That is, what we should be looking for or at, is a religious reformulation of the world.

The second common factor in such forms of eco-theology, is that these thinkers tend to treat modern humans as typically anthropo-centric, but the doctrines and values of the religion as containing more-than-human sensibilities. Modern human individuals and institutions are seen to differ from members of more traditional societies, who are less corrupted by modernity and represent homo religiosus. Once again, let us take Latour’s condonement of the modernist history of the church for its tendencies to save only humans and their souls, with no mention of the non-human (Latour 2009, p. 463). Although Latour says that his intention is not to resurrect a pre-modern theology, he does call for re-establishing (emphasis mine) the connection between religion and creation because pre-modern Christian theology, in his words, “was well aware that it was the whole of Creation that was in the throes of salvation, not only the poor floating souls of spiritually disembodied humans” (Ibid, p. 464). This stance implies an uncorrupted before-version of religion that either modernity corrupted or capitalism did through a naturalist ontology that separated nature from culture (Descola 2014).

Philosophers like George Rupp have argued that a religious reformulation of the world—and in the model of the past—is an attractive but unpractical idea. According to Rupp, neither Asian nor the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions and nor the orientations of indigenous communities in Africa, Oceania, and the Americas are by themselves adequate for addressing our modern environmental challenges, for we cannot selectively emphasize only environmentally friendly motifs from multiple traditions (Rupp 2002, p. 26). Religions can also be boundary-making projects, where religious identities become exclusionary, and aggressive towards the non or differently-religious other. Eventually, a care for the earth should be merged with an ethics and care for equitable distribution of resources (Rupp 2002, p. 30; Gagné 2018).

Rather than force environmental thought and behaviour into silos of particular religious traditions or conservation science paradigms, one should see how these are conditioned by and are the function of plural habitations. This allows for an environmental ethic that does not have to be tied to any monolithic ideology and manifestation of religion or science. It is not opportunistic because it in centred in an environmental ethic or “land ethic’ as Leopold (1949) introduced it, and is guided not by any overarching religious or scientific paradigm, but is interwoven with one’s habitation.

J. Baird Callicott’s idea of a “multicultural environmental ethics” (Callicott 2001, p. 77) articulates a way to gather together environmental ethics grounded in diverse world views. He identifies three pathways through which this can be done; the first is the ecological way, which respects the multiplicity of perspectives and allows their synthesis to happen—or not, in a spontaneous, organic way; second, the hegemonic path, which is a top-down, absolutist approach, which subsumes all other approaches under its purview; and the third is the orchestral approach, which actively tries to bring the different worldviews into harmony through dialogue, mutual understanding and cooperation; and favours the last approach, that is orchestration. However, Callicott sees the orchestration and dialogue happening between units that are singular and integral, whether individual, institution, or community, whereas I am pointing to the dynamic and fractional character of subjects with plural habitations. An ethics of the environment is located in the environmental thought of particular subjects, who occupy different subject positions, and are part of different multispecies configurations.

Here ethnographic inputs help. Ethnography pays attention to how ethical concepts are given life and then again, how life might be drained out of these concepts. In other words, environmental ethics is an embodied and interactive process that manifests not in abstraction; it presupposes a relationship based not on indifference but engagement. Drawing on Webb Keane’s conceptualisation, we can say that ethics comprises of often tacit, background assumptions that comes into manifest being when confronted with an ethical situation, while morality is explicit, something that an individual can contemplate and articulate, and it often refers back to a system of rules, written or unwritten, which could be drawn from religious authority (Keane 2015, p. 132). That is, ethics is the reflective and reflexive action that emerges in relation to a given ethical situation, and it may draw on a religious moral code or any other ideology. Although in their habits and dispositions, people may draw on religious vocabularies such as bad karmas, these words do not provide a stable and consistent moral compass free from any expression of doubt about them (Das 2015, p. 65). In order to understand what produces ethical reflexivity, we must look at what happens when all of these are put into play in social interactions. What is required then is the ethnographic exploration of how environmental ethics emerges from and in such plural habitations, without a priori assuming religion to be the fount and determinant of an environmental ethics. The quest is for the understanding and development of such a practical ethics that is not pre-determined but is practical, context-oriented, and attentive to the political ecology and to the lived realities of ecological entanglements.