When planetary cosmopolitanism meets the Buddhist ethic: Recycling, karma and popular ecology in Singapore

Abstract

By thinking with and through Buddhist cosmology, this paper explores the emergence of an ethical sensibility—what we call planetary cosmopolitanism—that is based on not just a spatially expanded ethic of care to ecological worlds, but also a temporally extended sense of justice to the future Earth. This transtemporal sense of ethical becoming reflects how the possibility of future ‘rebirth’ and accountability for past actions can motivate new ecological consciousness in the present. We forge these ideas through an empirical focus on popular Buddhist ecological practices in Singapore, where green recovery visions have primarily been driven by a secular and technocratic ethos. In negotiating the prevailing modernist ecological discourses, many Buddhists tap into an alternative imagining of cosmological time that regards Earth not simply as a place to be left behind at the end of one's life, but a permanent home for all future beings. This reading of human–ecology relations emphasises a causal responsibility to secure planetary well‐being, moving the making of cosmopolitan sensibilities from the realm of beneficence into justice. Yet, this renewed cosmopolitan sensibility to Earth is not simply a prescriptive ethical framework articulated on an abstract level, but materially performed and negotiated at the level of everyday life. Recycling becomes a site of rapprochement that allows Buddhists in Singapore to promote and negotiate their ecological consciousness within the strictures of the secular state. In doing so, it opens up new spaces of postcapitalist possibility that enable Buddhists, alongside people of other or no faith, to imagine alternative ways of inhabiting the planet. By developing an alternative account of cosmopolitanism grounded in Buddhist cosmology, we identify Buddhism as a decolonial lens through which we can critically reimagine human–ecology relations, and illuminate diverse modes and practices of ethical becoming in this age of ecological crisis.