The Ordination Of A Tree

A firsthand look at the Thai Buddhist environmental movement and its activist monks.

This lively survey of the peoples, cultures, and societies of Southeast Asia introduces a region of tremendous geographic, linguistic, historical, and religious diversity. Encompassing both mainland and island countries, these engaging essays describe personhood and identity, family and household organization, nation-states, religion, popular culture and the arts, the legacies of war and recovery, globalization, and the environment. Throughout, the focus is on the daily lives and experiences of ordinary people. Most of the essays are original to this volume, while a few are widely taught classics. All were chosen for their timeliness and interest, and are ideally suited for the classroom.

Environmental and Climate Change in South and Southeast Asia offers a cultural studies' perspective on how local cultures cope with climate changes and environmental crises. The focus is on Hindu India, Islamic Indonesia, Buddhist Thailand, and Himalayan glaciers.

This book looks at two contradictory ethical motifs—the warrior and the pacifist—across four major faith traditions—Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and their role in shaping our understanding of violence and the morality of its use. The Warrior and the Pacifist explores how these faith traditions, which now mutually inhabit our life spaces, bring with them across the millennia the moral teachings that have traveled from prehistoric humanity, embedded in the beliefs, rituals, and institutions socially constructed by humans to deal with ultimate concerns, core aspects of daily personal and social life, and life transitions.

Socially Engaged Buddhism is an introduction to the contemporary movement of Buddhists, East and West, who actively engage with the problems of the world—social, political, economic, and environmental—on the basis of Buddhist ideas, values, and spirituality. Sallie B. King, one of North America’s foremost experts on the subject, identifies in accessible language the philosophical and ethical thinking behind the movement and examines how key principles such as karma, the Four Noble Truths, interdependence, nonharmfulness, and nonjudgmentalism relate to social engagement. Many people believe that Buddhists focus exclusively on spiritual attainment. Professor King examines why Engaged Buddhists involve themselves with the problems of the world and how they reconcile this involvement with the Buddhist teaching of nonattachment from worldly things. Engaged Buddhists, she answers, point out that because the root of human suffering is in the mind, not the world, the pursuit of enlightenment does not require a turning away from the world. Working to reduce suffering in humans, living things, and the planet is integral to spiritual practice and leads to selflessness and compassion. Socially Engaged Buddhism is a sustained reflection on social action as a form of spirituality expressed in acts of compassion, grassroots empowerment, nonjudgmentalism, and nonviolence. It offers an inspiring example of how one might work for solutions to the troubles that threaten the peace and well being of our planet and its people.

A nuanced look at how nature has been culturally constructed in South and Southeast Asia, Nature in the Global South is a major contribution to understandings of the politics and ideologies of environmentalism and development in a postcolonial epoch. Among the many significant paradigms for understanding both the preservation and use of nature in these regions are biological classification, state forest management, tropical ecology, imperial water control, public health, and community-based conservation. Focusing on these and other ways that nature has been shaped and defined, this pathbreaking collection of essays describes projects of exploitation, administration, science, and community protest. With contributors based in anthropology, ecology, sociology, history, and environmental and policy studies, Nature in the Global South features some of the most innovative and influential work being done in the social studies of nature. While some of the essays look at how social and natural landscapes are created, maintained, and transformed by scientists, officials, monks, and farmers, others analyze specific campaigns to eradicate smallpox and save forests, waterways, and animal habitats. In case studies centered in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, and South and Southeast Asia as a whole, contributors examine how the tropics, the jungle, tribes, and peasants are understood and transformed; how shifts in colonial ideas about the landscape led to extremely deleterious changes in rural well-being; and how uneasy environmental compromises are forged in the present among rural, urban, and global allies. Contributors: Warwick Anderson Amita Baviskar Peter Brosius Susan Darlington Michael R. Dove Ann Grodzins Gold Paul Greenough Roger Jeffery Nancy Peluso K. Sivaramakrishnan Nandini Sundar Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Charles Zerner

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Causes and Consequences of Species Diversity in Forest Ecosystems that was published in Forests

Correlation between plant distribution and climate is examined over different time and space scales to determine the mechanisms of control in physiological and biochemical terms.

A phytosociological investigation was conducted in a virgin northern hardwood-spruce- fir forest in the lower elevations of the Bowl in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to determine the structure and dynamics of relatively small units of the forest. There is no evidence that the composition of the present forest has been influenced by human activity or fire, though portions of the present community demonstrate the effects of catastrophic damage caused by a severe hurricane in 1815. Forty-five 20- by 30-m plots ranging in elevation from 586 to 920 m were studied. Tree densities ranged from 685 to 3,851 stems/ha, basal areas from 22.0 to 60.5 m21ha, and shrub-seedling densities from 0.15 x 105 to 2.27 x 105 stems/ha. Bray and Curtis ordination was used to position the plots on the X and Y axes of a vegetational mosaic. The primary differentiating species were Picea rubens and Acer saccharum on the X axis and Betula alleghaniensis and Fagus grandifolia on the Y axis. The ordination was divided into seven subjectively defined plot clusters based primarily on the size-class distributions of four major tree species found in each plot. Cluster A represents a high-elevation, stable Picea abies unit. Cluster B represents a lower elevation, edaphically controlled Picea-Abies-Fagus grandifolia- Betula alleghaniensis unit which is projected to develop into a Picea-Abies-Fagus grandifolia unit. Clusters C to G represent stages in a successional sequence initiated by a catastrophic blowdown. The sequence is postulated to start with a Betula alleghaniansis Reproduction-Sapling unit, none of which was observed in the present forests of the Bowl. This stage develops into an All-Sized Immature Betula alleghaniensis unit (Cluster C) followed by a Mature Betula alleghaniensis/Sapling Acer saccharum-Fagus grandifolia unit (Cluster D). Then, depending on tree density, will follow a Mature Fagus grandifolia/Residual Decadent Betula alleghaniensis unit (Cluster E) or a Mixed Acer saccharum-Fagus grandifolia/Residual Decadent Betula alleghaniensis unit (Cluster F). Cluster F develops into a Decadent Acer saccharum-Fagus grandifolia unit (Cluster G). This and the unit represented by Cluster E could develop into a Hypothetical Decadent Fagus grandifolia/Acer saccharurn unit.