My research explores the intersection of the world’s religious traditions with environmental policy and practice.
Contrary to the expectations of the “secularization hypothesis,” religion has not declined in the technological age, and thus remains a vital variable for understanding socio-ecological dilemmas.
I use qualitative social science methods, such as critical ethnography, case studies, environmental histories, and interviewing. I seek to understand how people derive and create meaning in relation to their surrounding environments. I explore how these meanings reflect, challenge, or resonate with received or novel religious teachings and institutions, and how such processes of meaning-making simultaneously create particular types of socio-natural places.
Specifically, I explore how small-scale, rural, and subsistence-based communities attribute noneconomic values to various aspects of the landscape, and how related perceptions and practices engage with, contribute to, or impede environmental degradation at the local, regional, state, and global levels. This approach challenges the fact/ value distinction that places ecological science in the realm of quantitative and confirmable science, and values and morality in the voluntarist, subjective realm.
FEATURED TOPICSResearch, Articles & Public Lectures
On Ecology and Spirituality
Dr. Allison gave a lecture “On Ecology & Spirituality” as part of the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Big Ideas lecture series in January 2020.
Ecology and Spirituality
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.
The Relational Spiral of Integral Ecology
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?
Religiously Protected Natural Sites of Khumbu
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.
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