Paper short abstract

Buddhist monastic communities demonstrate how spiritual narratives can function as cultural resources for climate adaptation, offering frameworks for both individual resilience and collective environmental response.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Buddhist monastic communities in France and England use storytelling to address climate change and the environmental crisis. Based on ethnographic research conducted at two Buddhist monasteries belonging to the Sōtō Zen and Theravāda forest traditions, the paper explores how traditional Buddhist narratives are adapted to address contemporary ecological challenges.

From this fieldwork, three narratives of storytelling emerged: the adaptation of classical Buddhist stories to guide present-day recycling practices; personal accounts of continuous interspecies relationships that blur the boundaries between humans and nature; and first-person spiritual experience narratives in which practitioners sense their interdependence with the natural world.

I argue that these narratives actively cultivate the 'arts of noticing', which Anna Tsing defines as a refined attention to overlooked beings and relationships. Through these practices, environmental ethics arise naturally, shaping daily practices and morally guided behaviour. Unlike climate narratives that focus on catastrophe or technological solutions, these Buddhist monastic stories emphasise interconnectedness and compassion as a response, practising 'active hope'. Practitioners use these stories to process climate anxiety, moving from despair to what one participant called "responding rather than reacting", and drawing resilience from the environmental ethics that these narratives sustain in order to engage with the topic of climate crisis. These findings suggest that traditional spiritual narratives can provide resources for addressing the climate crisis by fostering both individual resilience and collective environmental practices. This demonstrates how storytelling can function as a cultural resource for sustaining engagement with ecological challenges.