Religion and Ecological Crisis

This book is available on back order and is due to be published in March 2026

How and why do religion and spirituality motivate individuals and collectivities in contemporary Asia to engage in environmental action? This question is at the heart of Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia. Across nine chapters, the book examines a wide range of environmental initiatives, ranging from agroecology, waste recycling and dietary change, to a broader cultivation of ecological values and ethics. With case studies from India, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, the book brings out the complex ways in which religious and spiritual institutions and movements become repositories of alternative ways of knowing and acting on the world, complementing and sometimes also providing more radical alternatives to scientific forms of reasoning and materialist modes of living. Religion and Ecological Crisis also crucially demonstrates how the power of religious and spiritual forms of environmentalism to accelerate the transformation towards more sustainable ways of producing, consuming, and living is conditioned by wider structural relationships. While there may be no immediate ecological revolutions on the horizon in the contexts and communities analyzed in this book, the case studies powerfully portray a rich landscape of collective environmental agency that points towards an ongoing search for more ecologically sustainable and ethically sound futures.

Mette Halskov Hansen is Professor of China Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he also heads the Centre for South Asian Democracy.