Buddhist environmental ethics and climate change

Abstract

Philosophically, Buddhist ethics would appear to be well‐prepared for the climate change age. Buddhists receive encouragement to extend compassion and nonharm throughout a universe that is utterly interconnected across time and space. Such positive extensions result in a strength of the tradition involving some welcome positive treatment of nonhuman animals. However, looking closely in terms of practical outcomes reveals some serious limitations regarding Buddhist environmental ethics. Not all animals receive ethical value and care, for instance, and the tradition provides a historically unstable platform for vegetarianism despite some popular beliefs to the contrary. Even worse, perceived sentience is required to receive substantial Buddhist moral value, in most cases leaving plants, stones, and bodies of water without ecological respect. Since managing climate change precisely includes the moral management of plants, stones, and bodies of water, our ethics regarding these entities must be clear. Buddhist environmental ethics, though, today provide us with few tools for developing such ethics for entities considered by Buddhism to be insentient, although perhaps views are changing.