Paper short abstract:

This talk will explore how Australian Buddhists see their relationships with local ecologies as marked by continuous interactions and ongoing work. Part of this approach involves listening to and noticing native animals who can signal mundane and supra-mundane aspects of ecological health.

Paper long abstract:

This talk will explore animals as companions and co-communicators in contemporary Australian Buddhism. It will elucidate certain practices that attempt to develop respect and awareness of other creatures, including the occasional tiger snake that seeks a warm spot under the blanket of an advanced meditator. Labour at an eclectic Buddhist center in southwestern Australia aims to rehabilitate Jarrah forests and is carried out daily by volunteers. Buddhist practice is responsive to this engagement with ecologies. Land care, I am told, is one of the Green Tara’s (a Buddhist Bodhisattva) most active qualities. She is believed to instantiate, and invoked to heighten, the power of environmental movements. Part of this approach involves listening to and noticing the movements of native animals who can signal mundane and supra-mundane aspects of ecological health.

This talk will explore how, in contrast to some Euro-American conservation traditions which embrace the idea of leaving things alone, my Buddhist interlocutors see their relationships with the ecologies of the southwest as marked by continuous interactions and ongoing work. Disturbed ecologies are not left to auto-rewild, nor does such an approach make sense in a place where colonial mismanagement has led to voracious weeds choking rivers and invasive species outcompeting native marsupials. It challenges the assumption that conservation movements are necessarily about ‘letting nature takes its course’, an idea which is saturated in colonial notions of the ‘state-of-nature’, or the case of the enduring myth that Australia was a terra-nullius before European settlement.