Himalayan Ecospiritual Knowledges and Ethics of Sustainability in the Anthropocene
A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2025 | Viewed by 6072
Special Issue Editors
2. Director of Research and Development, Royal Thimphu College, Thimphu, Bhutan
Interests: environmental humanities; climate change; water; human–animal–plant entanglements in Bhutan and Highland Asia
2. Global Faculty Member, The Global South Studies Center, The University of Cologne, Köln, Germany
Interests: environmental humanities; religion and ecology; indigenous knowledge; modern Tibetan Buddhism; politics of ethnic diversity in China
Interests: religion and ecology (a co-founding scholar); Asian religions; world religions; earth ethics; ecological civilization; climate change; inter-religious environmental dialogues
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
An integral part of the earth’s climate system, a multiregional weather-maker, and a more-than-human pluriverse, the Himalayas and the adjacent highlands of Tibet, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia are interconnected, diverse nations of humans, animals, and plants. Since the advent of modern extractive development in both colonial and postcolonial eras, Himalayan lifeworlds have undergone multiple anthropogenic transformations of land, air, and water as the consequence of global industrialization-induced climate change. Parallel to the UN’s intergovernmental initiation of sustainable development in the 1980s, native ecological knowledges and local environmentalist advocacies, including those that are religiously and spiritually based, have been gaining public visibility and policy consideration. The intersection of spiritual beliefs, ecology, and sustainability found in Highland Asia is a fertile source of interdisciplinary research and public discourse around the world.
This Special Issue, not limited to religious studies, invites contributions from all fields of the sciences and humanities to feature historical and current case studies of the ecological role of religions and spiritual practices in shaping human–nature relations and in forging faith-based environmentalisms in the greater Himalayan region, including the Tibetan Plateau and places that are under-researched in Himalayan studies, such as Laos, Myanmar, Northeast India, Southwest China, and Pakistan. In this Special Issue, “religions” and “ecospirituality” broadly include indigenous beliefs and indigenized world religions. Without assuming that all religious or spiritual traditions are eco-friendly, this Special Issue recognizes a panhuman cultural fact that religions and spiritual traditions, situated in different ecological contexts, play various roles in forging human environmental values and worldviews. It therefore welcomes manuscripts that address different ecological facets of religious-spiritual traditions, how they respond to modern extractive development and the subsequent human-induced climate change, and how their ethical values find actual and potential roles in shaping local and regional environmental sustainability and in interconnecting with modern scientific environmental knowledge to co-create more inclusive and synergetic modes of environmental governance and sustainability.
Prof. Dr. Jelle J.P. Wouters
Dr. Dan Smyer Yü
Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- Himalayan–Tibetan highlands
- religious ecology
- spiritual environmentalisms
- commoning
- ethics
- the Anthro-pocene
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