Hinduism and Climate Change

How are Hindu traditions engaging with and responding to climate change now, and what might the future hold? This panel seeks to explore how Hindu practices, stories, and discursive worlds articulate with climate change, both as an idea and as a set of material-physical processes impacting South Asia at present. We note that responses to climate change often entail what might be termed an intersection of different scales and registers of thought and practice: cosmological, narrative, medicinal, political-economical, psychological, moral, activist, and performative. The panel aims to invite conversations about how Hindu traditions can help us think about issues of scale (microcosm, macrocosm), relationality, and human/nonhuman agency in a moment of cascading ecological crises that often intensify pre-existing forms of structural violence.  

The panel specifically considers four different situations: 

“Wonder and Terror in Climate Perception: Bhūdevī, Yama, and Thillaiammal in the Hindu Cosmological Imaginary and the Environmental Commons in southern India” explores the multiple ways in which the aesthetic emotions of wonder and terror could help us understand critical aspects of the planetary climate that overlap with Hindu mythologies and cosmologies. 

“Staging Survival: Popular Performance and Hindu Climate Ethics in the Sundarbans” looks at how Bengali Hindu activists in the Sundarbans frame climate change as a moral and ethical issue in popular theater performances. In the drama, climate change is generated not only by carbon emissions, but by humanity’s immoral acts, vices like greed and anger, and social issues such as interreligious conflict. Ultimately, the drama emphasizes the importance of human agency and the possibilities of collective political action.  

“Bearing the Gods in Mind: Psychogenic Climate Change in Early Ayurveda” examines an Ayurvedic response to climate change attributed to Ātreya Punarvasu in the pre-Classical period Caraka Saṃhitā that frames the roots of climate change as “psychogenic,” that is to say ultimately attributable to faults of human awareness.  

“The Land of the Gods is Not Sustainable: Religion and Climate Change in the Uttarakhand Himalaya” tackles the current realities of Himalayan religious tourism in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, and makes the case, with particular reference to the Kedarnath valley region, that the abundant religious ecological resources of the Himalayan area often referred to as the “Land of the Gods” (Dev Bhumi) are an insufficient counterweight to the economic logic exerted by rapidly growing yatra tourism in the state. Many major forms of climate-related adaptation and mitigation based in Uttarakhand would be incompatible with the current rate of growth of yatra tourism.