Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

West Meets East

Seeing True Nature

John Worthington-Hill explores Buddhist environmental thought.

Today you’d be hard pushed to find a corner of the biosphere unaltered by human hands. In some places, nature has been rendered almost incapable of sustaining healthy life. Industrial society has caused a loss of species estimated to be 1,000 times more rapid than the rate of extinction that would have occurred in the absence of human activity. Manmade emissions have increased the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to its highest level in several million years, and the onset of human-induced climate change is set to produce ever more devastating effects. So extensive is the human impact on the planet that a growing number of scientists think we’ve entered a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, which signifies irreversible changes in the Earth’s ecosystems.

…