Climate change has largely been understood as a biophysical, economic, and political phenomenon. This approach has obscured the ways in which climate change also poses a challenge to human subjective understandings of self and society in relation to place, and in relation to perceptions of the sacred. 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. Locally grounded values arising from particular experiences of the landscape, especially from those most at risk from effects of climate change, may offer new avenues of ethical reflection around climate change that can and should influence larger climate discourses.

As rural and subsistence households in the Global South take on the consumption habits of industrialized countries, shifting consumption patterns have contributed to cascades of nonbiodegradable solid waste overwhelming the ability of households, municipal authorities, and governments to manage. As global capitalism expands around the world, spiritual ecology approaches to waste and pollution can provide deeper insight into the attitudes and practices that create a “throw away” society. 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. Through engaging cultural and spiritual values, and drawing on the inspirational qualities of social and spiritual leaders, the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative’s Zero Waste project is an example of spiritual ecology activism for household waste management and waste reduction.

While religious belief and environmental practice can be at odds with each other in a reductionist paradigm, both are aligned in service of environmental conservation in the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. Government documents assert that the nation’s unique sacred cosmology, a blend of Animism, Bön, and Vajrayana Buddhism, has protected Bhutan’s natural environment, allowing about two-thirds of the nation to remain under forest cover. The widespread belief in spirits and deities who inhabit the land shapes the ways that resource-dependent communities conceptualize and interact with the land. Local beliefs reveal a deep aflnity for and care of the landscape. In this way, local beliefs support the modernist goals of environmental conservation, while arising from a decidedly different ontology. The Bhutanese case highlights the potentials for both convergence and conmict inherent in the precarious intersections of traditional ecological knowledge and scientilc epistemologies of the environment

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