Mary Evelyn Tucker joins Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies in conversation. A longtime leading figure in the study of the relationship between religion and ecology with special expertise in East Asian traditions, Tucker shares some of her experiences in “citizen diplomacy” in her many visits to China and her insights into that nation’s aspirations to become an “ecological civilization.” Given how crucial China’s evolution will be in shaping the world’s collective future, this conversation couldn’t be more timely.

Note: This is an edited and excerpted version of the interview transcript.

J.P. HARPIGNIES: Mary Evelyn Tucker, you’ve done an extraordinary amount of important work on the relationship of religion and ecology over the decades, but we’re not going to attempt to capture your entire body of work in this conversation. What we’re mostly focused on today is your work that relates to China, because the U.S.’s relationship to China is, of course, so currently paramount to the entire planet’s collective future. Your work on and in China has been fascinating, and you just had a recent trip there, which we followed avidly and wanted to ask you about. 

So, let me begin first by asking you to give us a little background on how you became interested in East Asian wisdom traditions and at what point you came to a realization that they might be relevant to one of your core interests, the emergence of an ecological civilization, and also unpack for us what your concept of an ecological civilization is. 

MARY EVELYN TUCKER: I’m keenly interested in East Asia for a number of reasons, but it really began, I have to say, with a great disillusionment in the ‘60s. I was very politically active in the movements of Civil Rights and the Anti-Vietnam War, went to college in Washington, D.C., and when Nixon was elected, I said I’m going to leave the country until he gets out of office, because I had worked on many political campaigns and so on. 

So, I was able, fortunately, to go to teach at a college in Japan, and that was in ‘73, ‘74, and it was a great adventure. It was the beginning of my dipping into the cultures of East Asia, and Asia more broadly speaking, and when I was in Japan, I became very interested in Buddhism, of course, and did Zen, took many courses in summer school up in Tokyo at Sophia University, and just immersed myself in the literature, culture, and history, and so on. 

I also wrote to Thomas Berry when I was there, and part of the great gift of my life is that he wrote back. I met him when I came back, which was almost two years later, coming out of a Zen retreat. I was on the Tokyo subway and the headlines were: “Nixon resigns,” and I thought, well, I can go home again. But I first spent many more months in Asia—it was a great adventure, way before modernization, and absolutely fascinating, and I became very interested, of course, in all the religions of Asia. I’ll never forget standing at a temple in Thailand and thinking: How can we dismiss these religions when almost two-thirds of the world’s people live in Asia, and these traditions have for millennia had enormous influence. But making sense of this experience took many years; it took more than ten years of graduate study with Thomas Berry at Fordham University and also with his good friend Ted de Bary, a great Confucian scholar at Columbia. 

The two of them had gone to China in ‘48 and ‘49 to study Confucianism but also Chinese language and culture. They had to leave as Mao came into Beijing in ‘49, but China remained a lifelong interest for Thomas Berry, and of course for Ted de Bary, who really helped create Asian studies in this country, and that’s a whole story, because we didn’t have translations of most key texts, and he created a whole series of translations – 150 in that series, including a book I did on the philosophy of chi. 

Most people don’t realize how important Confucianism was to Thomas Berry, as well as Native American traditions, which is my husband’s special area of study and interest. Berry was starting to teach classes on Native American traditions in 1975 at both Fordham and Barnard. It was standing room only in those classes. These traditions from Native American cultures and those from East Asia, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, share an incredible affinity to the livingness of the world, to the kinship and the sentience of all beings. We know this very well in Buddhism in the concept of interdependence, and in Taoist sensibilities about the flow of nature. And Confucianism emphasizes the continuity of being with humans, Earth and the universe. There’s no radical transcendence. It’s a liberating gift from mind-body and matter-spirit dualisms. We have yet to bring this fully into our understanding in the West. Buddhism is pretty well established by now in the West, and Taoism somewhat, but Confucianism still is not at all well understood here. 

The key figure in my interest in these traditions was Thomas Berry, who was a great cultural historian and created the History of Religions program at Fordham. Many people came there to study, even giving up fellowships at Columbia and Yale to study with him, because he saw the spiritual dimensions of these traditions, as almost no other scholars did. He also saw, even in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the growing ecological crisis. He was extremely prescient. I don’t think any of us could have imagined the incredible breakdown we’re in right now, the “polycrisis”—climate, biodiversity loss, pollution, etc., but he had an unreal prescience, and people were drawn to this notion that something was impending in the future, and that these traditions of the world’s traditions may have something to say in relation to our moment.

The sensibility that came from Thomas was that we needed a new dream. We need a dream of the Earth, a counterpoint to the American dream of materialism gone mad, the sickening accumulation of stuff, of affluence with no meaning, no purpose, creating incredible anxiety, disturbances and dis-ease of all kinds. This may be the last gasp of that American dream that we’re experiencing right now, but Berry was trying to return us to a dream of the Earth, of a living Earth community. He said that we need a new story, a story of the universe that would put us into the continuity of being, that would help us realize that we participate in a magnificent, diverse, dynamic, unfolding evolutionary universe, that we come from stars, as the birth of the atoms and the carbon in our very bodies come from supernova. 

People such as Carl Sagan were also on this same wavelength, and Brian Swimme did a book with Thomas on the universe story, and we created the Journey of the Universe to share Thomas’ worldview. But those of us studying East Asian traditions with Thomas and others had a sense of a coming impending crisis, as we realized that as China and India modernized, the planet would be radically shifted, and this growth, urbanization, modernization, the most extraordinary in human history, would have very, very significant and complex consequences. Those of us in Asian studies understood that China deserved the same comforts of modernity we enjoy—cars, fast trains, etc., but what would the future of the planet be with two populations of more than a billion people each modernizing so rapidly?

This brought us to consider the possibility of an “Ecological Civilization,” which China, the oldest continuing large-scale civilization on the planet, seemed to be an especially apt place to develop, and they themselves use that term. And I should add that the Chinese term for civilization has connotations of the luminosity of culture, the shining possibilities of a culture for transformation. It’s a really rich idea, and it implies a strong valuing of culture, of the whole range of self-cultivation practices, including the arts, poetry, painting, education and so on. 

The Chinese have recognized that their rapid, relentless modernization at such an incredible pace poses great challenges. It’s been roughly 75 years since the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949 (the year I was born, actually, so I had this identity with China in a very deep way). The sense that a government, admittedly with great messiness and great imperfections, could bring hundreds of millions of people in a very poor rural, agricultural society into a standard of living with enough food, clothing and shelter, etc., in such a short period of time, is extraordinary, but the price to the environment was extremely high, so they developed the concept of an ecological civilization about 30 years ago. 

The unintended consequences of industrialization: the massive pollution of the air, water and soil, rivers drying up, and the resulting numerous environmental protests were sending a clear message, so 30 years ago, Pan Yue, a government official—he was Deputy Minister of the Environment at the time—wrote a very important paper on the idea of an ecological civilization, which in 2018 has become part of the Chinese Constitution. It’s aspirational. There are, of course, many things one could critique or say haven’t been realized. I asked a wonderful scholar in Southern China during my recent trip, “What do you think about ecological civilization?” And he just looked at me over dinner with the most charming smile and patience and said, “Well, it will take at least a hundred years.” 

The Chinese do have this wonderful long-range view. They suffered enormously in the 19^th and 20^th centuries with all kinds of upheavals, including the Taiping Rebellion, the Opium Wars, the Sino-Japanese War, the Cultural Revolution, etc., that killed tens of millions of people, so, as a result of that perhaps, they are very interested in building something sustainable and to make a fundamental systemic change that can bring about the flourishing of life in a very integrated way. Some of the language in that constitution reflects that: “to promote the coordinated development of material civilization, political civilization, spiritual civilization, social civilization, and ecological civilization.” This is a hugely integrated vision. For an official government policy to include such terms as “a spiritual civilization” and an “ecological civilization” is just about unimaginable in the West at this point. 

JP: Let’s move backwards a little bit in time before we move forward. I’d like to delve a little bit more into what you began to discuss about Confucianism, because I think that many Western intellectuals might find your views on that tradition to be a bit surprising. Our sort of clichéd view of Confucianism is that it’s paternalistic, conservative, rigid, and plays down the rights of the individual, so can you unpack a little bit what it is in Confucianism that you find so important and central? 

MARY EVELYN: Well, Confucianism is probably the most misunderstood of the world’s thought traditions. There is this sense, of course, that it’s patriarchal, that it’s authoritarian, that it’s not friendly to women, but that is true of all the world’s religions, and patriarchy is still present on steroids around the world. That’s not a defense of those problems in Confucianism, just stating the facts. 

First of all, the knowledge of Confucianism had been very limited in the West because of translation issues—not enough texts were translated, but the second World War brought on, with growing programs at Columbia and elsewhere, a much better understanding of Asia because scholars who had come out of Army and Navy language schools helped found these programs. They had seen value, depth and creativity in these traditions, but the conventional view of Confucianism as just a social and ethical system persisted. There was no understanding that it’s richly spiritual too, though that, of course, is hotly debated in China because religion is not a word that is used much these days, but I collaborated with Tu Weiming, one of the great Confucian scholars, on two volumes that came out of a conference we did at Harvard on the spirituality in Confucianism. And it’s exceedingly rich: there’s a depth of spirituality, about where the human fits into the cosmos, Earth, and community. It’s not just a social, ethical system. 

But, yes, there are strains of authoritarianism, which again is present in many of the world’s traditions. There are problems and promise with all these traditions. Mencius, one of the very early thinkers in Confucianism, put into his writings that there’s a right to revolution. If the emperor did not follow a moral path for the common good, he could be overthrown. This was mentioned to Nixon in an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum many years ago, and he just blanched when he heard it. 

JP: That’s reminiscent of Jefferson. Didn’t he at one point say something like: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing…and what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

MARY EVELYN: Yes, you could say that’s a core democratic right if a government is not moving in a moral direction, and that leads me to another point: Confucian scholar-officials were trained to become more moral public servants. They were called literati and civil servants and were meant to combine learning and knowledge in their public service. And they could, in fact, be people who would speak to the emperor with a critical sensibility on policies or principles. Granted, sometimes it didn’t work in their favor and they were sent back to the countryside or ostracized, but the notion was that the rituals that the emperor was expected to perform at the Temple of Heaven or the Temple of Earth were to set the harmonic tone of the society. They couldn’t just follow their whims. The Japanese Emperor still does that, planting rice seeds in paddies as part of the ritual of the seasons, right down to this day. The ideal of the government was to serve.

And that appeals to me about Confucianism. In contrast, Buddhism, which I love and has very rich spiritual traditions and fantastic teachings about interdependence and compassion, doesn’t necessarily, outside of some strains of socially engaged Buddhism, have the impetus to have a political or social philosophy. When I first came back from China and started to study, I realized that the traditions of Confucianism (and I say traditions because there are more than one but it’s all part of cultural DNA that helps shape the society and human relations) emphasize a sense of community, of a common good. For Chinese Confucians, but for Chinese at large, you’re not an isolated individual; you’re seen as situated in expanding concentric circles—the individual, family, friends, society, politics, education, nature, and the cosmos. 

And there’s a strong notion that you are expected to cultivate yourself, which means engaging in spiritual practice, education, and thinking about virtue and virtues. And it’s often an engaging and enlivening process, not just about following dos and don’ts. I like to call this botanical cultivation because it has a very rich sensibility reminiscent of planting seeds, nurturing plant growth, taking out the weeds, etc. You cultivate the flourishing of yourself and the flourishing of nature. There’s a sense of chi, the energy permeating all of life, not only in humans but in plants, and animals, and fungi. We know all of this now in a modern context from the work of scientists such as Suzanne Simard and many others, the kinship relations that are the basis of our world. In the Chinese traditions, chi is in the air, in clouds, in rocks, etc., and it’s that matter/energy, or that matter/spirit which one cultivates in such practices as taijiquan, in qigong, in traditional Chinese medicine and so on. The mutuality of relationship is vital. 

This concept of chi, then, links us to a very broad sense of the common good. You are part of this vast, evolving universe. This is what Thomas Berry understood so well and why Berry’s writings are being appreciated now in China too. We just had this extraordinary conference on Berry’s work in China, and it ended with this most remarkable, spontaneous speech of a very high-level philosopher at Beijing Normal University about our cosmic being, that we’re part of a mysterious cosmic being. We don’t have to name it, but it’s energizing, vital, infusing us with the energy to do the work that we need to do. So, all of these sensibilities are why I think Confucianism is very rich and has a lot to say about our ecological challenges.

JP: Some of these ideas seem to me very Taoist. I get the feeling that the Taoist stream really influenced Confucianism, and that many people partook of both traditions, that there was a sort of interweaving of the different traditions. 

MARY EVELYN: This is a hugely important point, and I should’ve mentioned that, actually, at the beginning. You’re so right. I like to think of Confucianism and Taoism as yin and yang. They emphasize different things. Taoism has a tremendous focus on health, on the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm. Traditional Chinese medicine is very closely associated with Taoism. Taoism doesn’t really have a political/social philosophy, but absolutely the cosmologies of these two traditions interpenetrated and can be complementary.

I like to think of my husband, John, as a Taoist. He’s in touch with the flow, very grounded, and an incredible gardener, and I’m more the Confucian, feeling our political responsibilities regarding social change, and education, and so on. Fortunately, it’s been a very good match, and our great mentor Thomas Berry married us.

JP: So now let’s delve into the present. You’ve been going to China since 1985 or ‘86, as you mentioned earlier, you’ve seen that nation’s extraordinary transformation from this essentially poor agricultural society into this incredible industrial powerhouse, accompanied by massive urbanization unparalleled in human history. What has it been like to witness that, and what in that trajectory gives you some sense of hope, and what gives you pause? What’s your overall impression of the massive transformation you’ve witnessed there?

MARY EVELYN: 1985 is when I first went to the mainland, but I’d already been going since 1974 to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam, all of them deeply influenced by Chinese sensibility, and by Confucianism, by the way. That rapid industrialization, which you’re absolutely right, has had positive and negative consequences, has been absolutely staggering to witness. I remember being in Taiwan in the ‘80s, and the traffic was so intense you’d be two and three hours late for a meeting. And this began to be true on the mainland as China began to modernize, with construction cranes and buildings going up everywhere, and the pollution was intense, but hundreds of millions of people were brought out of poverty in a few decades. 

That urbanization happened at a very, very rapid rate, and it became clear to the leaders that the unintended consequences of very polluted air, water and soil pollution, as well as the many demonstrations by local people against that pollution, needed to be addressed, and that’s why they began to shift and to start talking about an ecological civilization. Awareness about climate change in China is very, very high. 95 percent of the people in China are very, very aware of that, according to the work of an excellent, reliable pollster at Beijing University, who’s actually a very good friend who was here at Yale and is a World Fellow. That level of awareness is far higher than anywhere in the West, so the whole population knows the threat of climate change is real, and that’s another reason they’re willing to seriously engage with the concept of an ecological civilization. 

In our last newsletter, we featured a film called Building China’s Future that shows how China is creating some of the tallest buildings, longest tunnels, fastest trains, and biggest cities, at a pace I think most Americans cannot even imagine. 

Since 1978, 500 new cities have risen up in China, even as the older cities are growing at breakneck speed. Shanghai in 1978 had 12 million people; now it’s nearly twice that, 23 million. We were just there; it’s unbelievable, but it’s functioning. By 2030, one billion people will be living in cities there, and right now 100 new cities are being built. It’s hard to grasp. 

One very curious and not widely known here in the West positive unintended consequence is that it has led to remarkable archaeological discoveries. With all that digging going on for construction, they have uncovered some of the early sites of their own civilization, and in the last few trips, we have been fortunate to be able to see some of them. For example, they’ve found a neolithic city near Hangzhou, outside of Shanghai on the eastern coast, that existed from 3300 BCE to 2300 BCE, a thousand years. It’s probably the oldest in China, and they are studying its water infrastructure for possible lessons for the present. They have created a museum there, and other museums in many of these new archaeological sites. They are often very beautiful and hugely informative institutions.

They are finding more and more evidence of the great interest this ancient culture had in astronomy and the relationship of human life to the cosmos, not surprising given the emphasis that Confucian/Taoist tradition places on the microcosm/macrocosm connection. We attended a three-day program while we were there in this last trip in which scholars discussed how this ancient cultural legacy could inform us as seek to live more sustainably in a flourishing manner. 

Just about all of these museums at these very ancient cities have been opened very recently, in the last five years or so, so that’s been one of the surprising positive dimensions of this rapid modernization. China has invested enormous sums in excavating the sites and training whole new generations of archeologists, so the push to modernize is accompanied by a reverence for the past. That Chinese sense of cultural pride can sometimes can be nationalistic, for sure, but it’s also about recovering an identity of deep time, and they’re exploring the great, exciting tension of having an ancient culture and to be racing into new forms of modernity. Their capacity for planning, both in terms of their economic development and their cultural creativity is staggering, and very inspiring. 

JP: Let’s unpack that a little bit more. There’s this incredible modernization, which we hear a lot about, and they’ve become the dominant leaders in many “green” technologies—the incredible rail network, electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels, etc. It’s all very impressive and, in a way, one of the only great sources of hope these days, in that at least one great power is leading a transition to a clean energy future. They still generate enormous amounts of pollution, obviously, still burning a lot of coal, and gas and oil. But my question is this: To what extent is this planning re: post-carbon technology among the Chinese elites, as farseeing as it is, merely strategic cleverness, or are they genuinely committed to ideologies of ecological civilization? How deeply does it go? You mentioned Pan Yue’s 2006 paper on “socialist ecological civilization.” Do the elites just view that as a winning economic strategy for the future, or is it genuinely deeply embedded in their worldview?

MARY EVELYN: Such a great question, very, very perceptive. I would say both. There’s a great book on Japanese Confucianism called Principle and Practicality, and that title sums up the Chinese approach. They love to explore principles and ideas that will guide their long-term plans, but they’re exceedingly practical; they know how to get things done. They also love to celebrate, to have dinners with endless toasts, so it’s a very lively, gregarious practicality.

But there’s no doubt that they’re shrewd economic strategists who do very long-term planning over the decades. You have to be with a population that size. Their current unemployment is at around five percent, but unemployment for young people is at 16 percent. That is very worrisome. They have very real problems they need to manage continuously. 

But I want to come back to Pan Yue. The Chinese love ideas, to think through things, but they want principles that are efficacious in the real world, not just ideas in a book. We met Pan Yue in 2008 when the Sichuan earthquake took place—69,000 people were killed. He had just come back from this. I can’t even imagine what he saw, and he said, “Well, I’ll give you half an hour.” Two hours later, we were still talking, because we recognized someone who was within the Chinese framework doing what we had been trying to do in our Harvard conferences, against great odds, exploring the problems and promises of ancient traditions in the modern context, trying to find approaches to ecological ethics attentive to the world’s diverse cultures. We’re not going to have ecological ethics in China based on Abrahamic traditions. It’s as simple as that and as complex as that. How do you retrieve, reevaluate, and reconstruct these traditions? 

Pan Yue was doing exactly that. Here he was, Deputy Minister for the Environment, and he went back school to get a Ph.D. in Chinese intellectual history, because, as he said to us, “I can’t enforce environmental laws without an ecological mindset, without an ecological culture.” His approach was pragmatic but very, very intelligent. We continue to be in touch and went to a wonderful conference with him last summer. 

The point is that drawing on their traditions gives them a sense of cultural pride, of self-determination, of authenticity, something peoples all around the world are looking for. Tapping into a deep cultural identity generates traction and efficaciousness, but their approach has implications that go beyond China, because some of these ideas can be broadly appealing to the entire human community. 

JP: Yes, but how deeply does that ecological consciousness go with the real, elite decision-makers in the Party? There are surely different tendencies within those circles, but I can’t help but wonder…Perhaps it’s unknowable…

MARY EVELYN: Well, I think it is indeed a bit of an unknown. One day people will write more about that as more becomes known, but I can say that the official written material on “Xi Jinping Thought” is enormously committed to the concept of ecological civilization, so, officially, it’s coming from the very top. And we’re working with a Chinese scientist who’s a forest expert, and she’s talking about the forest that she has worked on for 20 years in Beijing as part of creating that ecological civilization, so there also seems to be traction on the ground. Beijing is now 49 percent forested or parked, which is phenomenal. She, as a scientist, is very interested in the conjunction of culture, i.e., values-based forces for change, along with the practical techniques of forest management or recovering from desertification in Mongolia, another of her domains. So, it seems to me that there are many examples of principles and practicality working together.

And that effort of cultural retrieval seems to have support high up in the Chinese leadership. When Mao took over, Chinese intellectual scholars of Confucian training fled the mainland to Hong Kong and Taiwan to help establish universities and to help keep alive Confucianism in dialogue with Western philosophy, keeping that thin thread of an ancient tradition alive, and but in recent decades, that revival of Confucianism has been welcomed back to mainland China as well.

JP: You’ve been going to China quite frequently over the decades, serving, in a sense, as a “citizen diplomat,” an informal citizen diplomat. Obviously, there are a lot of tensions right now surrounding the U.S./China relationship, and this is not predominantly a political discussion, so we don’t need to delve into that too deeply, but what do you see as the potential for the sort of citizen diplomacy that you’re doing to try to avoid the worst outcomes in what’s sometimes characterized by that loaded term, a “clash of civilizations?”

MARY EVELYN: We’re extremely grateful that we have this chance to go back and forth to China, and that we have many friends there. John would get up, as we began our talks, and say, “We’re here to increase, and deepen, and extend the friendship that U.S. and China have had for many, many years.” And we would indeed, sometimes say that we’re citizen diplomats to put everyone at ease and create a context of dialogue and friendship.

In this we draw on the example of some of our friends. The great pianist Byron Janis traveled to Russia, as did our dear friend the musician Paul Winter, during times of high tension, and those cultural exchanges proved very valuable, as did many academic and scientific exchanges over the years. And the Earth Charter, that attempt to find an ethical path for a sustainable future between economic development and environmental protection launched by Gorbachev and Maurice Strong, is just now celebrating its 25^th year. Those of us on the drafting committee of that charter had this notion that we have to come together, not just nations in a political sense but nations in a human sense, for a viable future, because there’s no future without a shared future. 

So, I believe citizen diplomacy has possibilities, but one has to be modest about what one can achieve, especially because, as you hinted in your questions, there is much talk these days of a “Thucydides’ Trap,” the historical pattern of a conflict between a more established and a rising power. I don’t necessarily think that’s the best metaphor for U.S./China relations, and Joseph Nye, a great scholar at the Kennedy School at Harvard would always emphasize that we need soft power rather than a military approach to most problems. Perhaps I inherited that perspective, as my grandfather was the ambassador to Spain in the second World War, and was told by FDR to do everything keep Spain neutral, and he used cultural diplomacy over and over again, and succeeded. I think in the deepest levels of the anxieties rising around the world, peace is what we yearn for, for the next generations and the future of the planet, so I have to have some hope that modest citizen diplomacy initiatives, people-to-people contacts, can have positive effects. 

JP: If “ping pong diplomacy” could work in the 1970s, there’s no reason your efforts can’t, so let’s hope for the best. 

In closing, let’s back up talk a little bit about your whole body of work, and how this engagement with China fits into it. You’re just starting a new project, the Living Earth Community website, and I was wondering how that initiative fits into your whole long career starting at Harvard with the massive Religions of the World and Ecology project, which initiated a veritable archaeology of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions to highlight their green cores. And the last few decades with the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology you’ve generated so much rich material with your newsletters and publications and conferences, but how does this new website fit into that, and how does your China work fit into that entire trajectory? 

MARY EVELYN: We need aspects of our various cultural traditions as foundations to help us develop ecological values and ethics, but we also need what Berry offered, a unifying story that brings us into the context of an evolving universe. That’s where Journey of the Universe fits in. We show it in Chinese in China, and they love it, and the books from the Harvard conferences are in Chinese now as well. 

We feel that both these projects of ours, our study of world religions and ecology and Journey of the Universe share a sensibility that’s very close to what many environmentalists and changemakers around the world are feeling right now, especially in conjunction with some strong alliances with Indigenous Peoples and an awakening of interest in Indigenous worldviews. This Living Earth Community project is an attempt to bring a lot of that information together. When we went to China last summer, we asked two graduate students to start creating bibliographies of: research on animal behavior; the latest findings in ecology; the best current nature writers; Earth spiritualities; etc. The idea was to try and map out many of these efforts globally to retrieve or reclaim wisdom that can resonate with contemporary humans living in dynamic, interrelated systems, but, at first, we thought it would just be a few pages on our existing website. In a few months, though, they had 140 pages, so we’re creating a new website to honor what has been emerging over 20 years or so.

There is so much exciting work going on. Just recently we attended conferences on new findings and approaches regarding sentience among animals and plants, including the MOTH (More than Human) event at NYU Law School and the Thinking with Plants and Fungi gathering at Harvard Divinity School. A new ethics coming out of a deep appreciation of the differentiated sentience in the world around us seems to be emerging, and this movement includes arts and poetry and music. I see great healing possibilities in these developments, these efforts at reconnection with the natural world and the best of our traditions and our creativity.

We can do this—If 49 percent of Beijing is now forested, we can do this. This reconnection, I think, has enormous potential for resituating us with the energy we need to make the transition to a flourishing future ahead of us, not denying all of the problems and all of the suffering that is also ahead of us. An ecological civilization is not guaranteed, but it’s a real possibility. 

JP: Thank you, Mary Evelyn Tucker. This has been really enlightening, and I really can only hope that the vision that you’ve laid out is one that does await us. It might be hard to see that in the immediate moment when we’re dealing with an extremely depressing sociopolitical context, but let’s hope that’s just a bump in the road and that ecological civilization awaits us down the line.