July 2021 – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Sit down and wake up! On Buddhist theory and planetary crisis

Posted on July 26, 2021April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

Mention Buddhism and you’ll often get a response shaped by its recent commodification into a self-care trend. Mindfulness apps, cheerful Buddha incense holders and the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up have led many to assume that Buddhism, like deep breathing and scented candles is primarily a technique for managing stress. Do I even need to tell you that these assumptions are wide off the mark? Probably not, yet even those who are aware ‘Buddhism’ goes deeper than these stereotypes may be surprised to hear it paired in the same sentence with ‘post-humanism’ ‘decoloniality’ ‘deconstruction’ and even ‘anarchism’.

Yet I’m about to embark on research linking just these streams of thought. This October I’ll be studying for the MSc Society & Space with plans to continue to PhD study through the ESRC 3+1 route in 2021. My research will ask how Buddhism can help us reconceive the politics of the more-than-human world in an age of planetary crisis. Buddhist thought has a unique contribution to make here, yet it’s frequently overlooked as a source of theory for approaching these questions (and other social science questions more generally).

A statue of Jizo (Kṣitigarbha) or the Earth-Womb boddhisattva glimpsed through a doorway at the Koya-san temple complex in Kansai region, Japan.

Just like other non-Western philosophies, perceptions of Buddhism have been framed through the colonial encounter. Whilst nineteenth century explorers to Tibet, China, India and Japan, did much to inspire fascination with ‘Oriental religions’, early translations of Buddhist texts often understood Buddhism through a Christian lens, equating the Buddha with Jesus. This, and the general imperial refusal to take other ways of thought and life seriously have ensured that Buddhism is yet to receive much serious academic attention outside of religious studies and history departments.

For this reason alone, Buddhist perspectives can and should be mobilised as a source of decolonising critique. But it’s not just valuable as a perspective from which to criticise. Contemporary Buddhisms brought to the West by Tibetan refugees and modern Japanese scholars such as D.T. Suzuki from the 1950s onwards have demonstrated the breadth, diversity and originality of Buddhist scholarship and practice. And more recently, excellent work has been carried out demonstrating historical Buddhism’s clear pertinence to contemporary philosophical and political concerns more broadly.

In fact many of most disruptive (and productive) concepts shaping contemporary humanities study today were anticipated by Buddhist thought by literally thousands of years. Put it this way – if names like Derrida, Deleuze, Whitehead, Latour, and Stengers are more familiar to social scientists today than Nagarjuna, Dogen, and Candrakirti this is not because the latter have nothing relevant to say on topics such as deconstruction, non-representational theory, subjectivity and self, embodiment, the symbolic order or the production of knowledge (although of course the way they mobilise and describe these concepts is completely different.)

Post-human concepts of relational networks and assemblages, which have so radically re-shaped geographical approaches to understanding human/environment relations, find close resonance in pratitya samutpada, or the doctrine of mutual causality, an ontology of radical relation. Pratitya samutpada sees reality as process – patterns of self-organising physical and psychological events which have no fixed structure or semiotics. This interdependence logically implies an ethic of care and kind-heartedness (towards all sentient beings), a cornerstone of Buddhist practice common to all traditions.

A moment of contemplation at the D.T. Suzuki centre in Kanazawa, Japan.

In an age of climate crisis the ethical imperative to try to relieve suffering is being interpreted increasingly to include ecological care for the more-than-human world (including heterogenous and complex ‘sentient beings’ such as watersheds, bio-regions and radioactive waste) and the resulting politics of this ‘Eco-dharma’ have many similarities to activisms inspired by deep ecology, indigenous, ecofeminist and anarchist philosophies. This global wave of ecologically-informed Buddhist practice is the starting point for my research, but I’m hoping to use it as a springboard for bringing Buddhist critique into geography more generally – applying Buddhist ideas to questions of political ecology, inter-species relationships, care-giving, and environmental governance.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to disrupt some assumptions along the way – including the idea that Zen is primarily concerned with minimalist interior design and esoteric catchphrases. For me, it offers something much more radical and ultimately subversive – a philosophical commitment to experiment with risky ideas and relentlessly question the foundations of your knowledge (as well as a strong suggestion to not take yourself too seriously, and to always be prepared for absurdity and impossibility!) I hope that these will be useful qualities for a new postgraduate researcher to bring into their academic practice and I’m sure that both Deleuze and Nagarjuna would agree.

And of course, Buddhist psychology and meditative practice do offer highly effective methods for understanding the mind, cultivating equanimity and un-learning habitual patterns of thought. It’s exactly this refusal to sit neatly in disciplinary boxes that makes Buddhism such a fascinating area of study – a philosophy of the mind and world which is simultaneously theory and practice. Buddhism asks us to move beyond dualisms of self/world, human/non-human and thought/reality which is exactly why its perspectives are essential to understanding our entangled, inter-dependent and precarious life in the age of the Anthropocene. It offers us an injunction to both sit down (learn to change your mind through meditation) and wake up (liberate yourself through taking ethical action), demonstrating beautifully Marx’s dictum that the true purpose of philosophy is not just to interpret the world, but to change it.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Courtenay Crawford who is undertaking a new MSc and PhD project, funded by an ESRC 1+3 grant through the South West Doctoral Training Partnership. This blog was reposted with kind permission from the Bristol Centre for Environmental Humanities. Read the original blog.

Courtenay Crawford

Five satellite images that show how fast our planet is changing

Posted on July 19, 2021April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

You have probably seen satellite images of the planet through applications like Google Earth. These provide a fascinating view of the surface of the planet from a unique vantage point and can be both beautiful to look at and useful aids for planning. But satellite observations can provide far more insights than that. In fact, they are essential for understanding how our planet is changing and responding to global heating and can do so much more than just “taking pictures”.

It really is rocket science and the kind of information we can now obtain from what are called Earth observation satellites is revolutionising our ability to carry out a comprehensive and timely health check on the planetary systems we rely on for our survival. We can measure changes in sea level down to a single millimetre, changes in how much water is stored in underground rocks, the temperature of the land and ocean and the spread of atmospheric pollutants and greenhouse gases, all from space.

Here I have selected five striking images that illustrate how Earth observation data is informing climate scientists about the changing characteristics of the planet we call home.

1. The sea level is rising – but where?

The sea is rising quickly – but not evenly.
ESA/CLS/LEGOS, CC BY-SA

Sea level rise is predicted to be one of the most serious consequences of global heating: under the more extreme “business-as-usual” scenario, a two-metre rise would flood 600 million people by the end of this century. The pattern of sea surface height change, however, is not uniform across the oceans.

This image shows mean sea level trends over 13 years in which the global average rise was about 3.2mm a year. But the rate was three or four times faster in some places, like the south western Pacific to the east of Indonesia and New Zealand, where there are numerous small islands and atolls that are already very vulnerable to sea level rise. Meanwhile in other parts of the ocean the sea level has barely changed, such as in the Pacific to the west of North America.

2. Permafrost is thawing

Permafrost is permanently frozen ground and the vast majority of it lies in the Arctic. It stores huge quantities of carbon but when it thaws, that carbon is released as CO₂ and an even more potent greenhouse gas: methane. Permafrost stores about 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon – twice as much as in the whole of the atmosphere – and it is incredibly important that carbon stays in the ground.

This animation combines satellite, ground-based measurements of soil temperature and computer modelling to map the permafrost temperature at depth across the Arctic and how it is changing with time, giving an indication of where it is thawing.

3. Lockdown cleans Europe’s skies

Nitrogen dioxide is an atmospheric pollutant that can have serious health impacts, especially for those who are asthmatic or have weakened lung function, and it can increase the acidity of rainfall with damaging effects on sensitive ecosystems and plant health. A major source is from internal combustion engines found in cars and other vehicles.

This animation shows the difference in NO₂ concentrations over Europe before national pandemic-related lockdowns began in March 2020 and just after. The latter shows a dramatic reduction in concentration over major conurbations such as Madrid, Milan and Paris.

4. Deforestation in the Amazon

Credits: ESA/USGS/Deimos Imaging

Tropical forests have been described as the lungs of the planet, breathing in CO₂ and storing it in woody biomass while exhaling oxygen. Deforestation in Amazonia has been in the news recently because of deregulation and increased forest clearing in Brazil but it had been taking place, perhaps not so rapidly, for decades. This animation shows dramatic loss of rainforest in the western Brazilian state of Rondonia between 1986 and 2010, as observed by satellites.

5. A megacity-sized iceberg

The Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough frozen water to raise global sea level by 58 metres if it all ended up in the ocean. The floating ice shelves that fringe the continent act as a buffer and barrier between the warm ocean and inland ice but they are vulnerable to both oceanic and atmospheric warming.

This animation shows the break-off of a huge iceberg dubbed A-74, captured by satellite radar images that have the advantage they can “see” through clouds and operate day or night and are thus unaffected by the 24 hours of darkness that occurs during the Antarctic winter. The iceberg that forms is 1,270 km² in area which is about the same size as Greater London.

These examples illustrate just a few ways in which satellite data are providing unique, global observations of key components of the climate system and biosphere that are essential for our understanding of how the planet is changing. We can use this data to monitor those changes and improve models used to predict future change. In the run up to the vitally important UN climate conference, COP26 in Glasgow this November, colleagues and I have produced a briefing paper to highlight the role Earth observation satellites will play in safeguarding the climate and other systems that we rely on to make this beautiful, fragile planet habitable.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Jonathan Bamber, Professor of Physical Geography, University of Bristol.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jonathan Bamber

The case for case studies: a natural hazards perspective

Posted on July 13, 2021April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

As I wander the streets of Easton, as I have done over the last 18 months, the landscape becomes more and more familiar. Same streets, same skies. Things seem flat and still.

Living in this mundane landscape, I find it hard to believe that we live on a turbulent, roiling planet. But the Earth is not flat or still! Natural events happen daily, and extreme climatic events continue to escalate – although all we see in England is a rainy July. Some people are more vulnerable to the Earth’s vicissitudes than others. Since 2021 began, volcanoes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Guatemala, and Iceland have erupted, and hurricanes have already gathered pace in the Atlantic. Many of these events have caused disaster for people living in these areas, losing homes, livelihoods, and lives.

Disasters erode and destroy, they leave scars and memories. We are fascinated by them: we seek to understand and to explain. How can we best do that? The case study is one way. Because of its in-depth nature, a case study is well-suited to describe disasters caused by natural hazards (earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, floods, droughts), allowing us to tell a rich and nuanced story of events. However, we have to be prudent. There are many more natural hazards than we have scope to investigate. A good subject for a case study offers the possibility of new insights that other, limited methods have missed. Many, many times an earthquake or flood does not cause disaster. In choosing a good subject for a case study, we are looking for that event which is particularly interesting to us, and which we hope can tell us new things.

I am currently working on three case studies of disasters in Guatemala. Why and how did the disasters happen?

Coming from an Earth Sciences background, I’m not sure where to begin. There are no obvious blueprints. Why is there so little guidance on how to do a case study in our field? I think there are two reasons. Earth Sciences has always generously included other physical and social sciences (physics, chemistry, mathematics, geography), while a disaster caused by natural hazards involves both physical and social factors. So while this supports disaster’s suitability to the case study method, both science and subject use multiple philosophies and methods. It’s harder to make a cookbook with mixed methods. Secondly, Earth Sciences looks at the mutual interaction between people and nature, who operate on different timescales. Tracing a disaster through a case study requires uniting these timescales in a single narrative. That union is a difficult task and often context-specific, so not generalizable to a single blueprint. (Strangely, in an interdisciplinary case study of a disaster it’s the physical scientists who seem to study events over shorter timescales, for example on the physical triggers of a volcanic eruption. A few years ago in my undergraduate I remember tracing the story of Earth’s evolution across billions of years; now we’re operating over days and hours!)

There have been many criticisms levelled at case study research: that you can’t generalize from a single case, that theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge, that case studies tend to confirm the researcher’s biases [1]. I have also read that case studies are excellent for qualitative research (e.g., on groups or individuals), but less so for quantitative research (e.g. on events or phenomena) [2]. I think these points are rubbish.

“You can’t generalize from a single case”, goes the argument against case studies. But generalization is not the point of a case study. We want to go deeper, to know more intimately, to sense in full colour. “Particularization, not generalization” is the point [1], and intimate knowledge is worthwhile in itself. However, I also think the argument is false. Because it is such a rich medium, the case study affords us a wealth of observations and thus interpretations that allow us to modify our existing beliefs. As an example, a case study of the Caribbean island of Montserrat during an eruptive crisis showed Montserratians entering the no-go zone, risking their lives from the volcano to care for their crops and cattle [3]. This strongly changed the existing reasoning that people would prioritize their life over their livelihood during a volcanic eruption. How could you deny that this finding is not applicable beyond the specific case study? True, it isn’t certain to happen elsewhere, but the finding reminds us to research with caution and to challenge our assumptions. A case study might not give us a totally new understanding of an event, but it might refine our understanding – and that’s how most science progresses, both social and natural. This ‘refinement’ is also a balm for people like me who might be approaching a new case study with trepidation, concerned we might be going over old ground. Sure we might, but here we might forge a new path, there dig up fresh insights.

On the grounds of theoretical versus practical knowledge – we learn by doing! We are practical animals!

Context-dependent knowledge and experience are at the very heart of expert activity.

(Flyvbjerg, 2006)

Does a case study confirm what we already expect to find? I think the possibility of refining our existing understanding can encourage researchers to keep our eyes open to distortions and bias. I think this final criticism comes from a false separation between the physical and social sciences. Qualitative research is held up as a contrast to “objective” quantitative research in the physical sciences, focussed on hypothesis-testing and disinterested truth. But any PhD student will tell you that the scientific process doesn’t quite work that way. Hypotheses are revised, created, and abandoned with new data, similar to how grounded theory works. And you can find any number of anecdotes where two scientists with the same data and methods came to two different interpretations. There is always some subjective bias as a researcher because (a) you’re also a human, and (b) because the natural world is inherently uncertain. (I wonder if this is an appeal for those who study pure maths – it’s the only discipline I can think of that is really objective and value-free). Maybe qualitative/quantitative has some difference in the degree of researcher subjectivity. This would be a fascinating subject to explicitly include in those interdisciplinary case studies that involve both types of researcher – how does each consider their inherent bias towards the subject?

After flattening those objections above, I really want to make three points as to why case studies are so great.

First, they have a narrative element that we find irresistible. As Margaret Atwood said,

You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

A case study is not just a story, but it does have a story woven into its structure. Narratives are always partial and partisan; our case studies will be too. That’s not to say they can’t be comprehensive, just that they cannot hope to be omniscient. I love this quotation:

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Graham Greene, The End Of The Affair

It certainly applies to case studies, too. We may find the roots of a disaster in political machinations which began decades before, or that the journey of a mudslide was hastened by years of deforestation. Attempting to paint the whole picture is futile, but you have to start somewhere.

Second, a case study provides a beautiful chance to both understand and to explain – the aims of the qualitative and the quantitative researcher, respectively. Each may approach truth and theory differently: the first sees truth as value-laden and theory to be developed in the field; the second, as objective and to be known before work is begun. It’s precisely because it’s difficult to harmonize these worldviews that we should be doing it – and the disaster case study provides an excellent arena.

Finally, the process of building a case study creates a space for dialogue. Ideas grow through conversation and criticism, and the tangle of researchers trying to reconcile their different worldviews, and of researchers reconciling their priorities with other interested people, seems both the gristle and the fat of case study research. In the case of disasters, I think this is the most important point which case study research wins. Research can uncover the most wonderful things but if it is not important to the people who are at risk of disaster, we cannot hope to effect positive change. How can we understand, and then how can we make ourselves understood? For all the confusion and frustration that it holds, we need dialogue [4]. A really beautiful example of this is the dialogue between volcano-watchers and scientists at Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador: creating a shared language allowed for early response to volcanic hazards and a network of friendships [5].

I’ve grappled with what products we should make out of these case studies. What are we making, and who are we making it for? From the above point, a valuable product of a case study can be a new relationship between different groups of people. This is not really tangible, which is hard to deal with for the researchers (how do you publish a friendship?) But a case study can produce a relationship that benefits both parties and outlasts the study itself. I think I’ve experienced this personally, through my work at Fuego volcano. I have found the opportunity to share my research and also to be transformed in my workings with local people. This has lasted longer than my PhD, I am still in touch with some of these people.

I believe in the power of case study to its own end, to create dialogue, and to mutually transform researcher and subject. And, if a new relationship is a valuable product of the case study, it is made stronger still by continued work in that area. To do that, the relationships and the ties that bind need to be supported financially and socially across years and uncertainty, beyond the current grey skies and monotony. When we are out, we will be able to renew that dialogue in person and the fruits of our labour will blossom.

[1] Flyvbjerg, 2006

[2] Stake, 1995

[3] Haynes et al., 2005

[4] Barclay et al., 2015

[5] Armijos et al., 2017

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Ailsa Naismith from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. Ailsa studies volcanic hazards in Central America.

Ailsa Naismith