Unity through diversity: a study of a pan-Asian interfaith climate change network

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), ancient nature-based wisdom, and Indigenous practices the world over have been systematically removed, dismissed, and marginalized throughout the industrial growth era. Now in an era of accelerated climate emergency and biodiversity loss, calls for creative nature-culture-based solutions to address the challenges of climate change intensify from United Nations and International Non-Governmental organisations. Leaders within these institutions generally assert there are no such examples from which to draw in markets, energy, transport, land management, industry, global governmental, and NGO spaces. I argue that creative, nature-culture-based solutions are emerging and converging globally, beyond the confines of the dominant climate regime. They can be found in local faith-based, eco-cultural / eco-spiritual, endogenously-derived and Indigenous engagement on climate change and biodiversity loss, most vividly through convergent regional networks. These nature-culture initiatives offer strategies for biodiversity recovery and climate change adaptation, mitigation, and resilience, and for transitioning and new systems: for markets, organisational patterns, and human-ecological dynamics. The Interreligious Climate and Ecology (ICE) Network in Asia presents a particularly exciting example for eco-culturally derived solutions and regenerative systems underway, which this project seeks to clarify, investigate, and understand. Eschewing centralised or linear program management and structure, membership requirements, and with limited fiscal resources, the ICE Network thrives and rapidly expands its sphere of influence, catalysing and inspiring endogenous, eco-culturally-reflexive climate change and biodiversity initiatives through an expanding web of interconnected faith networks across Asia.
This study shows how the ICE Network challenges current “standard toolkit” assumptions around scale and impact, as well as attitudes towards climate change, and humanity’s relationship to a living Earth. To facilitate this understanding, the overarching research question guiding this work asks “Why does the ICE Network appear to thrive and expand while explicitly eschewing structure and centralised program management as is usually considered essential for networks to succeed?” This study of the ICE Network serves as a potential map for humanity to re-learn or re-connect with a sustainable way of life in harmony with the Earth, informed by diverse eco-cultural practices, and the wisdom of all of humanity’s ancestors, accumulated over millennia. Lovelock’s and Margulis’ Gaia theory, one in which the Earth is a self-regulating organism, finds a mirror or manifestation in the self-regulating nature of a network rooted in convergent beliefs that they are nature, and part of a self-regulating Gaian Earth organism. The findings from this examination of a network formed and expanded through the liminal states of ritual furthers, through a practical case study understanding, van Gennep’s Turner’s and Wagner’s theoretical conceptions of linear and separated stages segregating a ‘mundane’ societal structure from the temporary liminal sacred states of ritual, challenging the notion of ‘profane’ with a worldview in which all is sacred. The findings build upon Rappaport’s theory that a new, singular and universal religion would form in the 21st Century in response to the ecological crises of the Anthropocene following an age of scientism and industry--yet with a distinction. The emerging movements of spiritual-ecological consciousness are not singular in uniformity, rather richly ecoculturally diverse while joining in a mutuality that strengthens the health of the whole: unity emerges through dynamic eco-cultural-diversity.
My ethnographic research employed participant observation for more than a two-year period. It includes semi-structured interviews and focus groups across ICE Network affiliate projects and ICE Network gatherings. From these interviews and my field observations, I found the characteristics within this nature-culture-inspired climate change network to include: a convergent spiritual ecology ethos across faiths and local eco-cultural traditions; self-organising, dynamic, and mutually co-responsive self-regulating systems of network formation and functions akin to the Gaia theory in practice, and a pervasive Indigenous worldview (liminality of energy in ritual as governance); endogeneity and eco-cultural confidence of values and practices; centrally-positioned ritual and “spiritual awakening” emphasis, applied learning, and leveraged capacities across the network through practical action. Thus my study concludes that a critique of the structural violence of dominant 20th century economic, social, and political power paradigms is a catalyst for giving attention to and creating new food systems, new markets, and new strategies for ecosystems recovery.
ICE Network’s predecessors contribute to foundational values, capabilities, and organisational decision-making processes, but they also inject some contradictions and friction evident across generation and gender. What could become fatal flaws for most organisations instead illustrates the adaptive, resilient, corrective, and self-organising characteristics of the network. A “small is beautiful” ethos presents numerous challenges when enveloped by dominant conventional farming and industrial market systems. The functional models emerging from this network potentially apply to climate finance mechanisms, transitional systems considerations, and particularly climate-smart markets that enable sustainable and sovereign local livelihoods. There are few studies conducted on interfaith-Indigenous climate change collaboration in network spaces, particularly not in Asia. This study could provide a roadmap for navigating the complexities and challenges of the Anthropocene in a manner that respects and restores the agency, wisdom and variety of eco-cultural values and practices around the world. It offers potential for a transition into more sustainable, harmonious ways of living, informed by traditional Indigenous wisdom, yet transformed through challenges and opportunities of the Industrial Age.

Keywords: indigenous
Hindu
sustainable development
Asia
animist
regenerative food systems
interfaith
new systems markets
new systems design
climate change networks
climate regime
Buddhist
endogenous development
ecocultural
wellbeing economy
cultural anthropology
faith-based climate action
Advisor: McDermott, C