Loy’s central thesis is that there are common “spiritual roots” to our ecological crisis and that the Buddhist soteriological structure, when properly understood and applied from the individual to the collective case, holds the key to our way out. Loy’s wish is not simply that we all “stop befoul[ing] our own nest” in the ways already mentioned, but that we all “awaken” to the true causes of environmental spoilage—our false belief in an ultimate “separation from other people and from the natural world” and our dysfunctional striving after “ever-increasing power and control” as a way of resolving our collective anxiety about what it means to be human. If these points weren’t proof enough of Loy’s unwillingness to play by any Maritainian or Rawlsian-inspired rules of compartmentalization, there is also his direct appeal to religions to change their internal lives: to “stop denying evolution and instead refocus their messages on its meaning.”

An article about Buddhist environmentalism and a critique thereof.