LUCKY SEVERSON (Correspondent): Few cities around the world can match the stunning skyline of Hong Kong. Architecture here is a big deal, and so is the 3,000 year old Chinese practice of Feng Shui.  Few skyscrapers are constructed without the advice of a Feng Shui master, and Raymond Lo is one of a handful of “grand” masters.

RAYMOND LO (Feng Shui Grand Master): Definitely, Hong Kong is a Feng Shui city. You can see Hong Kong is such a tiny spot in such a big country. Why Hong Kong is so unique? Because it enjoys the best Feng Shui.

SEVERSON: Nury Vittachi is an internationally syndicated columnist and author of over 30 books, including several about Feng Shui.

NURY VITTACHI (Author): One of the great things about Hong Kong is that it’s very rational and businesslike but at the same time, we believe in magic and we take it very seriously.

SEVERSON: Feng Shui is about more than tall buildings. People here practice it in their apartments and gardens and in their lives.

LO: Feng Shui means that it is an ancient Chinese knowledge which is talking about how the environment will affect people’s well-being. So the Chinese has discovered in their environment that different kind of energy. Some are good energy, which make you improve your health, improve your relationship with people and also improve your money. And there are negative energy which will do the opposite.

SEVERSON: Mr. Lo views himself as a scientist who, with the right tools, can actually measure good and bad energy.

LO: Of course this is an instrument we need. This is a compass, and those characters and numbers are actually the formula which the Feng Shui master, they have invented. So basically this is an instrument we use to measure the direction of the building and then based on the direction and based on the time the building was built, we can establish where is the good energy and where is the bad energy.

SEVERSON: Nury Vittachi’s columns are known for their humor and irony, and he finds plenty of both among the power structures of downtown Hong Kong.

VITTACHI: So you’d think this would be the most rational, number-focused place on earth, but in fact, Feng Shui rules even here.  As the building was being put up and finishing touches were being arranged, a Feng Shui master said, “Oh, it’s too regular. Everything is on a grid shape here and you’ve got to put something askew.”

SEVERSON: So plans for the escalators were changed. They are no longer perpendicular, they run askew.

VITTACHI: It does seem to have worked because over the last 20 years since this building was created, HSBC has grown to become literally one of the biggest banks in the world.

SEVERSON: This being Hong Kong, our next building is another bank and more Feng Shui.

VITTACHI: This is the Standard Charter bank building which has taken the idea of mixing money and spirituality very seriously in that, although it’s the headquarters of a major bank, it has a church-like feel or a temple-like feel, right up to the extent of having stained glass windows. But instead of religious icons, you have the trappings of modernity, you have computers, a gold mobile phone, aircraft, that sort of thing.  It’s done in a good spirit and the community loves it.

SEVERSON: Our next building is the Bank of China which was built by an architect from the States who apparently didn’t realize that the diamond designed exterior is a negative shape in Feng Shui, and the diamonds were pointed directly at the governor’s house.

VITTACHI: And the governor lost his job, so they built a swimming pool between this and the governor’s house so that the water would take away the negative energy. It didn’t work. The replacement governor had a heart attack.

SEVERSON: Today the bank has a moat around it.

VITTACHI: You notice the fish are mostly different shades of gold, and they represent, of course, gold flowing around your life. So, definitely a prosperity theme at this bank.

SEVERON: As an example of how seriously Hong Kong takes Feng Shui, in recent years, the city has spent more than 8 million dollars compensating people living next to construction sites because all that activity disturbed their Feng Shui.

Nury says some people go a little overboard when it comes to Feng Shui.

VITTACHI: If you move your desk over here a bit, you know, suddenly grandma will feel better. You know, if you move your desk a bit there, she’ll feel great. You move your desk too far and she dies. You know, there’s that sort of feng shui which I think is very… It’s clearly superstitious. But I think underpinning all that, there’s just good psychological sense. If you make your environment feel good, if you focus away from material things to spiritual things, it’s good for everybody.

LO: Actually Feng Shui encompass every walk of your life. Everything in life. There’s always a logic, a reason, behind things happening. So therefore you have an answer. If you don’t know Feng Shui, don’t care about Feng Shui, that means everything seems to be mystery.

SEVERSON: Raymond Lo has taught Feng Shui classes all over the world, including the U.S. where an increasing number of architects are using the practice in their house designs.

WILLIAM PAGE (Architect): The good energy that you are bringing in, it funnels into the front entrance.

SEVERSON: William Page is a Seattle-based architect who builds and sells houses.  He uses Feng Shui principles in his designs.

PAGE: A curved wall lets the good energy that comes in, the good Chi that comes in, dissipate throughout the building.

SEVERSON: He says the Feng Shui must be working, at least for him.  It’s helped him sell houses.

PAGE: It is said that you should not have a stove directly across from a sink because one is fire and one is water and they do not mix. It is important not to have the head of the bed backing up against a bathroom because it tends to flush the energy down the drain.

SEVERSON: Back in Hong Kong, Nury Vittachi takes us to a Buddhist shrine in the middle of a lively business district.  In his view, the shrine is part of the Feng Shui of this neighborhood, the calming and centering part.

VITTACHI: There’s a big tree actually growing right here, you know, in between the floor and the ceiling of this temple.  What a lovely unity between man and nature.  I mean, I actually think it is a very religious community. Behind every temple, every village, every modern skyscrapers, including the stock exchange, you will find something like this. You’ll find a little shrine. Spirituality, Feng Shui, is very much woven deeply into the fabric of a very rational, scientific, business-obsessed community.

SEVERSON: A business community so rational that executives decided to shift the angle of the entrance to the Hong Kong Disneyland theme park by 12 degrees after a Feng Shui master said the change would result in the park’s prosperity.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Hong Kong.

JUDY VALENTE: Mary Jo McMillin is a cookbook author from the Chicago suburbs. When she shops, she looks for fruits and vegetables that are in season, preferably locally grown. She doesn’t buy processed foods or fast food and makes sure she knows where the meat she’s buying comes from. It’s not just about green eating, or even healthful eating, but eating ethically.

MARY JO MCMILLIN: I’ve been using this brand of chicken for a long time and I’ve researched them and I know that they come from not very far away, and they’re produced on small farms. It’s done with high standards. They’re fed a vegetarian diet. They’re raised on these Amish farms. They’re sort of religious chickens, you know.

VALENTE: But there’s nothing funny about the way some large factory farms operate. Advocates of ethical eating protest the way animals are often kept in crowded, unsanitary conditions and injected with growth hormones and antibiotics. Norman Wirzba is professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke University.

NORMAN WIRZBA: Cattle are meant to eat grass, to live in pasture. Chickens are, are meant to roam and be outside, and when you think about how industrial eating practices, right, stifle that inner drive, this natural drive that these animals have, it’s a violation of their ability to be what they are.

VALENTE: Another frequent criticism of the food industry is the widespread use of preservatives and artificial flavoring to prolong shelf life.

WIRZBA: That’s not to say we don’t do any processing, right, or any refrigeration or any preserving, no, we have to do some of that, but we don’t need to do it to the degree that we do, because as we do more of it, what we’re discovering is that we are paying for it with our own illness.

TARA SMITH: We have the safest, least expensive, most abundant food supply in the world, and that’s no accident.

VALENTE: Tara Smith of the American Farm Bureau Federation:

SMITH: You can find nutritious food year round in the grocery store. And if you look, and you’re willing to buy certain products, you can find relatively inexpensive healthy food products year round.

VALENTE: Ethical eating means looking at food as more than a commodity and eating as more than a biological function. Eating, it is said, connects us to the mysterious and miraculous character of life.

STUDENT: Oh, my gosh. This one is a little larger than this one, as you can see…

VALENTE: Many Americans are getting back to the garden. These students in Cedar Grove, North Carolina brave intense summer heat as they learn to grow fruits and vegetables in a community garden.

STUDENT: You can just pull it right out, and just rinse them off and you can eat them.

KATE FORER: Right here we have sweet potatoes, that are doing fabulously, as you can tell.

VALENTE: Kate Forer, who manages the garden, is also an ordained minister.

FORER: Having the experience of planting a seed and having the faith that it’ll grow into a plant that will eventually sustain me is a spiritual experience. And ultimately I really, really feel like food is a sacred gift from God, and that’s something that we tend to forget about in our culture.

VALENTE: Small faith communities like this one are sprouting up all across the country to advance the cause of ethical eating, teaching more than just good gardening practices.

FORER: I also feel like we’re teaching people how to cultivate peace in their communities just by working together. Just by dong a task together that’s not always easy or fun. I mean, sometimes gardening is hot and frustrating and stressful. But being able to work through those things together can be really powerful.

VALENTE: For others, personal gardening is also an opportunity for spiritual growth. Everyday, Mary Jo McMillin walks about a half mile to a public park where for a yearly fee of $32, she can cultivate her own plot of land and her prayer life.

MCMILLIN: Going to the garden is part of a spiritual practice for me. I use that time to think about what I’m thankful for, and to try to remember people in my past that I’m thankful for, and my family that surrounds me now. It’s just my daily meditation. I feel I’m in a place where things are really alive and growing. We’re all so busy, adding extra hours to our fitness routine, adding an extra hour to our e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook, whatever. But maybe we need really to sometimes add that extra hour to what we’re ingesting, what we’re feeding ourselves.

SMITH: I don’t know about you but I don’t have time to make every loaf of bread I eat.

VALENTE: What about the person who says, “I’m busy. I don’t have time to worry about where my food comes from”?

WIRZBA: I think we need to make food a priority because food touches so much. It touches personal health, it touches education, the social development of people, right, as well as touching economic issues and ecological issues. So food needs to be a priority.

VALENTE: One downside to eating ethically, at least these days, is that it’s probably going to cost more, as shoppers often discover when they buy organic food, or from local farmers’ markets.

SMITH: Right now, during these economic times, we have one out of every eight Americans is currently on food stamps. Budgets, when it comes to purchasing food items, are very important to most American households.

WIRZBA: I know that there is a lot of concern about the fact that if you want to buy organic food it’s more expensive, or you want to buy locally produced food it’s more expensive. But we have to ask the question, well, what do we really value? Do we value healthy land, clean water, vibrant farm communities?

SMITH: I certainly feel my nutrition is my personal responsibility and I think that folks should take some personal responsibility for being sure that their diet is the way that it should be. There is no lack of option for food products here in the United States. If you don’t choose to eat those healthy food products, though, no one can force-feed them to people.

VALENTE: The importance of food, or sharing a meal, is deeply rooted in religious tradition. McMillin, for instance, bakes the fresh bread her congregation uses at its communion services.

MCMILLIN: It takes us back to the point that this really isn’t just a big symbolical ritual, it’s also a meal that feeds both the body and the spirit. So many families have come up to me at church and said “our children just love to have real bread at communion.”

FORER: (speaking to students) It’s good to see everybody here.

VALENTE: In most of the world’s religions, eating traditionally involved a blessing, and an expression of thanks, a practice Forer and others say has become all but lost in our mass-production, fast- food culture.

FORER: All right, let’s pray. Gracious God we give you thanks…

Grace is a way of pausing and remembering the creator who has given us this. But for me grace is also a way to acknowledge the other people who have brought the food to us.

WIRZBA: Saying grace, besides being a sort of ritual act, I think is also a political act, because if you’re truly saying grace and you’re remembering this food that you’re about to eat, you should also be committing yourself to the well-being of the sources of that food.

MCMILLIN: I remember my mother sitting in front of a perfectly ripened peach, We had peach trees, the first ones that we had — and saying, “I’m going to eat this very slowly. Just think how long it took to grow.”

VALENTE: Advocates of ethical eating say if we pay more attention to where our food comes from, we will begin to see it not as something that just happens, but as a gift.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente in Cedar Grove, North Carolina.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: With spilled oil now reaching all the Gulf States, the White House this week demanded more answers from BP about its cleanup efforts. Meanwhile, a prominent ethicist is calling for a much deeper national discussion about the moral implications of the spill. Kim Lawton reports.

PROFESSOR PAUL ROOT WOLPE (Director, Emory University Center for Ethics): It’s an ecological tragedy, it’s an economic tragedy, it’s a political tragedy, and it’s an ethical tragedy. Given that that is the case, what is the ethical response?

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Paul Root Wolpe directs Emory University’s Center for Ethics. He says because American dependence on oil is partly responsible for the crisis, it needs to be addressed in the responses as well.

WOLPE: One basic ethical issue is, as we criticize BP or as we criticize other responses to this, we have to look to ourselves and ask ourselves what are our contributions to this crisis? The second issue is how are we going to balance our dedication to the environment to our need for comfort?

LAWTON: Wolpe says scenes from the Gulf should force Americans to seriously reconsider their use of oil and the need to make greater lifestyle sacrifices—also, he says, to seek other sources of energy. But Wolpe says that conversation is not taking place on a broad enough scale.

WOLPE: The responses have been primarily economic and political, and they’re very important. But that economic and political response has to be tempered by a question of what are the values we are pursuing in those responses? That’s where ethics comes in. Ethics precedes your economic and political judgments, because it clarifies the values by which you should make those decisions.

LAWTON: And without that discussion, he says tragedies like the Gulf disaster will continue to happen.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

KIM LAWTON, host: Repercussions from the Gulf Coast oil spill dominated the news again this week. President Obama pushed BP to do a better job of resolving the crisis and taking responsibility for the damages. Meanwhile, religious groups have been holding a series of prayer vigils across the country. Participants are praying for an end to the environmental disaster. They are also offering prayers for those who have been most severely affected. The crisis has taken a devastating toll on people involved directly and indirectly in the fishing industry. Several faith-based groups have been mobilizing to provide assistance. Joining me now is Margaret Dubuisson of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Margaret, thanks for being here. Tell us a little about the needs you’re serving right now.

MARGARET DUBUISSON (Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans): Well, Kim, we have five centers set up in the fishing villages in the archdiocese of New Orleans. We’ve seen about 8,000 people so far, fishermen and their families who’ve come in just looking for help, looking for support, looking for financial assistance in some way. The BP claims process is a little cumbersome, and it is going to take some time. So Catholic Charities has been able to provide direct assistance and food much more quickly and put that in the hands of the fishermen through these five emergency relief centers.

LAWTON: What about the emotional needs, the spiritual needs? I imagine that those are very difficult as well.

DUBUISSON: Kim, it is. We have seen about 8,000 people in our five centers, as I said. Many of those people are receiving mental health assessments, where we ask very careful questions to see how they’re feeling and how they’re processing all of this. You may have heard this before, but this is much more than a loss of income for this particular group. This is loss of a way of life and a culture, and people are very fearful, very anxious, because no one knows how long this is going to go on, and the news just seems to get increasingly worse about it. So these fishermen and their families who for generations have made their living as fishermen, as a very independent group, they’re having a lot of difficulty dealing with the anxiety and uncertainty of the oil spill situation.

LAWTON: And what about for the broader community? Obviously, these people are directly—their livelihoods have been directly affected, but the greater area down there along the Gulf Coast, you all are still getting over Hurricane Katrina.

DUBUISSON: It’s been almost five years since Katrina and, yes, we are still definitely in the recovery period of that. So this was, this was an especially difficult blow at this time coming up on this five-year anniversary, when a lot of people felt like we were just beginning to get our heads above water, so to speak and, you know, making real progress toward the recovery, and then this oil spill comes. It’s almost like Katrina all over again and especially for the families of these fishermen, many of whom lost boats and homes in Hurricane Katrina and then in Gustav and Ike a year later. This has been, you know, a particularly difficult blow, a very, very anxiety-producing situation.

LAWTON: The churches down there are often the center for so much of the community. Do they have the resources they need to really deal with this crisis?

DUBUISSON: Well, we’re making the resources available, we’re gonna find the resources. We are reaching out to people who would like to help us in that, and anyone who would like to help can visit our website, which is ccano.org, and we have a secure website, and we’re set up to take donations there. But Catholic Charities and the archdiocese of New Orleans have been on the ground in these affected communities virtually since the beginning, like the archbishop went out the weekend that the spill occurred and met with parish leaders to find out, what do you all need us to do? He then gave Catholic Charities the green light to provide whatever services were necessary, and we’ve been doing that now for I think it’s fifty some odd days now since the spill first began, and we’ve been providing services to the fishermen ever since, and we will continue to provide services until it’s all over, and we’ll find the resources that we need to do that.

LAWTON: All right. Margaret, thank you very much.

DUBUISSON: Thank you, Kim.

Writing in the New York Times about “Avatar” (“Luminous 3-D Jungle is a Biologist’s Dream”) , Carol Kaesuk Yoon rhapsodizes over the beauty and variety of life depicted in the film. “With each glance, we are reminded of organisms we already know, while marveling over the new…It has recreated what is at the heart of biology: the naked, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing (my emphasis) the natural world.” To Yoon, and to this observer as well, the firing up of that “sense of wonder,” a phrase most notably introduced into modern discussions of biology and education by environmentalist Rachel Carson in her book of the same title, is central to the film’s impact.

But almost simultaneously with this comes a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation that boggles the mind: on average, the amount of time spent plugged into an electronic device for the population from eight to 18 years of age is seven-and-a-half hours per day. This is equivalent to a 53-hour work week. All of these kids’ waking time outside of school is spent connected to something (often more than one device).

As author and journalist Richard Louv has warned in Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2008 updated and expanded), children are especially in need of contact—first-hand, in-their-skin-contact—with nature. A rich, ornery, lungingly actual relationship with living Creation is necessary, utterly necessary, to inform the deepest sympathy with life on the planet, human life included. Such a relationship, fully and carefully developed over time, teaches responsibility and connectedness. It teaches birth, death, glory,transformation. It teaches decay, failure, and triumph. It teaches ocean truth and luna moth truth, parasite truth and pomegranate truth, volcano truth and tsunami truth—the marvelous continuum of the human and natural, and it teaches finally the unplumbable mystery of “beauty tangled in a rapture with violence,” as Annie Dillard puts it.

This rich and tragic sense of nature’s presence, power, and complexity does not require wilderness. With focused attention and effective preparation, something of it can be experienced in a suburban back yard, or along the banks of any edge-of-the-subdivision creek or golf course pond.

But in our schools there is very little training in how to see nature, in forming the habit of spending time outdoors without being driven by some sporting agenda. Outside of the one week in the year when a small handful of us learn about urban gardening, my students’ shoes never show the signs of woodsy mud. The knees of their jeans are never yellow with clay they have knelt in, rapt in observation of an insect or fossil. Their sweaters never bear the seeds of burdocks or thistles, those obvious signs of having brushed up against something other than a plastic mall kiosk. Instead of sharpening their students’ eyes for the natural world and opening their hearts to an environmental ethic, so many schools have leaped on the media bandwagon that brags to the public of their technological prowess, of how “wired” they are, of how technologically savvy their students are becoming.

What if such claims are dead wrong? What if such uncritical adoption of more and more technology is a form of contributing to the delinquency of our students in as clear a way as selling cigarettes to kiddies behind the gym or providing cases of beer to underage drivers who eventually wrap themselves and their friends around telephone poles? Where is the research that shows us all is well?

When I entertain such thoughts, the news from the Kaiser Family Foundation is as unsettling to me as any I have heard. It is the more unsettling because it is not the result of sinister overseas forces intent on ruining us, but is rather the result of the successful marketing of, and the constant invention and reinvention of, artificial “needs” that capitalism thrives on. The ubiquitousness of electronic devices in youth culture is so great that it has apparently obscured rational adult thinking. Quoted in another recent New York Times article by Tamar Lewin (“If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online”) Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston, says there’s no use arguing whether so much electronics consumption is good or bad, because these devices have become “like the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat.”

Exactly. Yes. And since we clearly know that water, air, and food are sometimes tainted and dangerous, shouldn’t we then form some sort of Environmental Protection Agency to monitor the ill effects of all these devices in the hands and ears and bedrooms and classrooms of our children? And how do we explain to ourselves why so many parents seem to have conceded to their children’s willy-nilly desire for all the gizmos and gadgets? Are they aware of the effects of addiction—any addiction, whether to tobacco, or heroin, or pornography, or texting? I had a student two years ago who, as part of a class project, stopped using her cell phone. After the first day, she reported, she was “half-crazy”; after the second, she was driven to distraction; after the third, she was utterly “sick with myself for being so needy for a phone!”

Incidentally, the seven-and-a-half hours per day of electronic media consumption does not include the 90 minutes of texting and 30 minutes of talking on the phone kids reported on the Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

Picture the typical day of such kids: outside of school and sleeping, there is for some of them not a minute during which they are not umbilicaled to an electronic device or two. Unaware of the weather outside, increasingly obese and diabetic, they must come to live in a Silent Spring of electronic origin, bereft of any awareness of anything but what has lurking beneath it not the voice of the wind or the great moanings of the sea, but some manufactured hum of circuitry. They are slipping further and further away from the incarnation, through their senses, of the material world, and they are oblivious.

I think of this as potentially one of the most significant withdrawals of human beings from the natural world in the history of our species. Unchecked for a generation or two, what sorts of people will these wired citizens be? Will they ever experience significant personal confrontations with, and difficult ruminations about, physical nature—the kinds of encounters both sublime and terrifying that have for millennia challenged humans with opportunities to grow toward wisdom and a sense of right behavior on this planet? If the electronic center of their increasingly virtual reality cannot hold (and recent cyber attacks hint at the vulnerability of such an overly centralized system), what fundamental, eons-old traditions of spiritual, physical, and intellectual survival will they have lost? Will their only nature be a succession of “Avatar” films, creating for them an avatar world, a virtual and substitute Creation in which, crippled by nature deficiency, 3-D goggled, and in a dark more ominous than that of the theater, they can vicariously leap and bound and be seized by a counterfeit wonder in a counterfeit environment lost to them in reality?

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s withering Christian attack on a way of life that paralyzed even those who knew it was wrong, Marie St. Clare, the hypochondriac and self-centered mistress of Tom, whines, “Well, at any rate, I’m thankful I’m born where slavery exists; and I believe it’s right—indeed, I feel it must be; and, at any rate, I’m sure I couldn’t get along without it.” Aside from her unconscious fumbling with logic and rationalization, her last thought is the one that chills me. If—just if—we wanted to protect our children from falling out of the world of Creation, can we imagine recalling all the devices already in their hands? Can we imagine them, and ourselves, getting along without iPods, PlayStations, MP3 players, TVs, more and more computers in the schools, portable DVD players, X-Boxes? Can we imagine the paroxysms to our economy if the sales of these were as limited or heavily taxed as the sales of alcohol and tobacco?

“Unimaginable,” many, if not most, would say. Equally unimaginable, and nearly unforgivable, is what may already be happening to our wired and exiled children.

Richard Hague is in his 40th year of teaching at Purcell Marian High School, an urban Catholic school in Cincinnati, Ohio. His latest book is “Public Hearings” (Word Press, 2009), a collection of poems social, political, and satirical.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This ragtag parade in northwest Thailand, in the area known as the Golden Triangle, is a celebration of sorts, but it also has a very serious purpose, and one that has had dangerous consequences.

(speaking to Thai man): How was he killed?

PIPOB UDOMITTIPONG: He was stabbed to death.

SEVERSON: You think that he was killed because of his environmental work?

UDOMITTIPONG: Of course, definitely.

SEVERSON: Why?

UDOMITTIPONG: Because there was no other reason. He’s such a nice man. If you meet in person, he’s a very amicable man. He has no enemies whatsoever.

SEVERSON: What was so unusual about the killing was that the victim held a position of great respect in Thai society. The victim was a Buddhist monk, an environmental activist.

Susan Darlington is writing a book about Thailand’s environmental Buddhism.

PROFESSOR SUSAN DARLINGTON (Hampshire College): There were 18 human rights and environmental activists who were assassinated in Thailand in a three-year period, none of whose murders were solved. So somebody was feeling threatened and had the power to push back and try to send perhaps warnings or to stop these people altogether.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa is a noted Buddhist scholar who has written over a hundred books. He claims he knows who was pushing back against the monks who were trying to protect the forests: international corporations with financial ties to some corrupt generals in the Thai military.

SULAK SIVARAKSA (International Network of Engaged Buddhists): Unfortunately the big loggers, in cooperation with generals, they don’t care. They cut the trees, and the monks protested, and they even arrested monks. Not before in history that monks had been arrested.

SEVERSON: Darlington is a professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. She says it wasn’t until the late 1980s, after whole forests had vanished, that monks became activists.

(speaking to Professor Darlington): We’re talking about whole forests, clear cutting?

DARLINGTON: Clear cutting to either get the logs—the teak forests were going at a rapid rate, other hardwoods—or cutting down forest to make room for intensive agriculture.

SEVERSON: The forests went away, and the animals, too, and then in 1988 catastrophic floods caused people to reevaluate what they had been told was progress.

DARLINGTON: Up to three hundred people were killed from the floods, and most experts pointed to this and said the flooding would not have occurred if there hadn’t been such severe deforestation.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa founded the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. He says Buddhism’s views of the environment are both moral and spiritual.

SIVARAKSA: Buddhism believes that we are all interrelated, not only among human beings but to all sentient beings, including animals, nature, the river, the trees, the clouds, the sun, the moon, we all related. We are brothers and sisters. So if you harm any of these you harm yourself.

DARLINGTON: Buddhists’ primary motivation, primary goal is to end suffering, and destruction of the environment causes suffering on many levels. Therefore as monks it is part of our role to make people aware of this and to undertake actions to prevent this and to protect the forests that still exists.

SEVERSON: To protect to the forests, one monk did something radical, just as they are doing here now. He started tying orange robes around trees, in effect ordaining the trees.

DARLINGTON: He was called crazy, and a national newspapers called for him to disrobe from the sangha [community or order], that this was not appropriate behavior for a monk, he’s misusing the religion. But meanwhile other monks began to do tree ordinations as well. “You can’t ordain a tree. What does that mean?” So people started debating, what does it mean to ordain a tree?

SEVERSON: To the monks, it meant making the forests sacred, off limits to exploitation. The idea has caught on with some villagers, like these. The forests rangers with the guns are not official rangers. They’re volunteers who patrol the mountainside looking for timber poachers. Senior monk Anek took us to an area near his village that was clear-cut in the dark of the night. August 21st there was a forest here. August 22nd it was gone. Three acres of prized hardwood disappeared overnight. Anek says he doesn’t think monks’ robes wrapped around trees would have prevented this.

INTERPRETER (translating senior Buddhist monk Anek): He says it might not deter them because they are investors from outside, they have no respect for the culture, they have no respect for the tradition. He’s saying that he feels sad because it took them many years to preserve this.

SEVERSON: Anek says he still gets threats for ordaining trees but not as many as before and not as severe. He doesn’t think this area was clear cut for the trees, but instead for the land, which foreign companies are using for huge farming operations, like the tangerine plantations that stretch for miles along rolling hills that were once covered with pristine forests. Unfortunately for the locals, the companies are hiring cheap labor from nearby Burma. So they’re losing the land and their ability to live off it. In the middle of the plantations there is a Buddhist monastery that acts as a buffer against development. The senior monk here is also an environmental activist. His name is Abbot Kittisap.

(speaking to Buddhist abbot): But you’re not fearful?

Because of his activism, and because he is testifying in the trial of the murdered monk who was his friend, Abbot Kittsop has 24-hour-a-day police protection, the gentlemen you see here. The abbot says he is still fearful for his safety, but his conscience keeps him going. Even though it’s been four years since the controversial killing, no one has been convicted of the crime, and recently the chief investigator confirmed many people’s suspicions when he accused the police of tampering with the evidence. Many here don’t think justice will ever be served, but Susan Darlington says that doesn’t mean the monks have not made progress. The Thai government, for instance, has cracked down on illegal logging.

DARLINGTON: I think the role of Buddhism in protecting the environment has come a long way. These monks really do, they put a moral standard into the environmental movement that makes people really stop and think. It brings a spiritual element to it.

SEVERSON: Others like Sulak say spirituality also requires action.

SIVARAKSA: Spirituality is not merely personal contemplation, not only meditation, that you feel peaceful and then you feel “I’m alright, Jack.” I think that’s is dangerous. It’s escapism.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa, who received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize, says many Westerners and many Buddhists alike do not understand the meaning of engaged Buddhism.

SIVARAKSA: In fact, meditation only helps you to be peaceful. But you must also confront social suffering as well as your own personal suffering, and people suffer now because of the environment.

SEVERSON: The generals and the developers still have the upper hand, but the battle for the land, and the hearts and mind of the people is not over. Ordinary people are now beating a drum for the monks.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson north of Chang Mai, Thailand.