“I remember my grandfather used to tell me ‘Boy, these snowcapped peaks you see won’t exist years from now.’ I thought he was exaggerating and I didn’t believe him‬… How did he know that the snowfall would stop existing, that someday it would end? Thinking about that still surprises me.‬” Recalling a prophecy from his childhood, a young man from the indigenous Aymara population in Bolivia shared his memories in 2022 with Wilson Poma, an Aymara researcher, for the study entitled Vanishing Ice, Vanishing Cultures? carried out in the Milluni valley, near the Chacaltaya glacier. 

On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, this essay looks back to document the context and intellectual lineage out of which the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) emerged in 2013, and suggests some possibilities for the future of transdisciplinary education and the fields of religion and ecology (e.g. Tucker and Grim 2001), religion and nature (e.g. B. Taylor 2010), and spiritual ecology (e.g. Sponsel 2012) more broadly.

Earth is in the midst of a great transition: humanity, having become a planetary force, is now shaping both its own future and the longterm future of millions of living species. The magnitude of this process demands broad societal transformation—a challenge that occupies many of the world’s most vibrant thinkers and visionaries. Spiritual traditions, too, are engaged in the transformation of consciousness and society. As the moral force of the world’s religions joins with the insights of the ecological sciences, humanity finds itself at the very center of the deeply mysterious process by which the Earth community is revitalizing itself.

—California Institute of Integral Studies

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to more fully reveal injustices, inequities, and imbalances that contribute to climate change, ecological degradation, and economic instability that threaten our individual and collective well-being. This potent time invites us to consider questions like: How can we cultivate individual, collective, and ecological resilience in this unstable new reality? What lessons does the pandemic offer for addressing climate change and human health?

Rarely does one get a reprieve before encountering a big test, but this is exactly what the coronavirus pandemic offers humanity as we struggle to address climate change.

Dr. Allison gave a lecture “On Ecology & Spirituality” as part of the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Big Ideas lecture series in January 2020.

In rural southern Bhutan, the revered Buddhist teacher, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, initiated a waste reduction project based on Bhutan’s guiding development philosophy of Gross National Happiness.

The spirituality of ecology describes the intuitions and sensations that bind people to the interconnected matrix of life on Earth, across time and space. Through experiences in nature, contemporary advocates of eco-spirituality argue, people reconnect with that which is most essential, most alive, and most sustaining in their intimate connections with other beings, Earth, and the cosmos.

Consistent with the pan-Himalayan tendency to see the landscape as lively and animated, protector deities and local spirits are perceived to inhabit various features of the landscape in Bhutan, causing these places to be treated with reverence and respect.

Since at least the 1950s, scientists, policymakers, and oil companies have understood the threats of climate change to human society and the future of life on Earth. During this time, oil producers have engaged in obfuscation and disinformation campaigns to downplay the demonstrable hazards of continued fossil fuel production.

Mountains and glaciers are sites of powerful sacred and symbolic meanings for local communities around the world. In sacred mountain landscapes, religious practices address the observed changes in the landscape that have arisen as a consequence of climate change. Both religious rituals and glacial landscapes are holders of collective memory – and the degradation of mountain landscapes represents a ‘dis-membering’ of the human community from the larger Earth community.

Climate change is indisputably a feminist issue, and the tools of feminist analysis can provide valuable leverage in developing just and equitable responses to this existential challenge.

How will the Integral Ecologist, this new “spiritual guide,” unite the conventionally disparate realms of science and spirit in practical action? What tools can the integral ecologist use to bring wisdom and insight to bear on increasingly complex environmental issues, interwoven with social justice, power relations, and legacies of domination so as to appear intractable?

Religion has long been a powerful cultural, social, and political force in the Himalaya. Increased economic and cultural flows, growth in tourism, and new forms of governance and media, however, have brought significant changes to the religious traditions of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book presents detailed case studies of lived religion in the Himalaya in this context of rapid change to offer intra-regional perspectives on the ways in which lived religions are being re-configured or re-imagined.

Glaciers, as dominant features of high mountain landscapes, are sites of easily observable consequences of climate change, grounding the consequences of distant carbon emissions in material surroundings. They are also sites of powerful sacred and symbolic meanings for local communities. This review examines three instances of glacial decline in sacred mountain landscapes, in the Peruvian Andes, the Nepalese Himalaya, and the Meili Snow Mountains of Yunnan, China. These examples show that glacial decline is not simply a material process, but also has important implications for the ways that local people understand themselves and make meaning in relation to their surroundings.

The Sherpa people of the Khumbu region of Nepal recognize numerous local religiously protected places and natural features with religious significance including water spring, lakes, large trees and rocks, religious forests, meditation caves, and sacred mountains.

With its devout adherence to Buddhist traditions that influence every aspect of daily life and its concomitant preservation of vast forests, Bhutan is an exemplar of the mutually reinforcing connections between environmental and cultural preservation, religion, and ethics, with the potential to provide guidance for environmental and cultural preservation in other locales.