The global environmental crisis is fundamentally a moral and spiritual crisis, and so science and technology alone cannot solve it and its ultimate solution has to be moral and spiritual. Therefore, the world’s religions, including Buddhism, are called to contribute to its solution via their environmental ethics. Green Buddhism is a Buddhist approach to environmental activism. It emerged out of the modern environmental movement and is led mainly by contemporary socially engaged Buddhists in the West, such as Joanna Macy. Green Buddhism advocates a holistic approach to Buddhist environmental ethics. Its theoretical basis lies in the early Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination, with the latter being interpreted as “interdependence of all things.” Supported by some recent studies, this “interdependence-of-all-things” interpretation of the early Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination is probably incorrect – from the perspective of early Buddhism, and is not sufficient for an environmental ethic. More recently, there has been another approach to Buddhist environmental ethics, one based on virtues. This virtues approach adopts the virtue-ethical interpretation of Buddhist ethics, under which Buddhist virtues are revealed as environmentally beneficial. Being true to the (virtue-ethical) nature of Buddhist ethics and emphasizing the necessity of the ethical development of the agent, this virtues approach is both theoretically more convincing and practically more insightful than the holistic approach. Furthermore, it is argued that the Buddhist environmental ethic rendered by this virtues approach can be a viable global environmental ethic and has important implications for our environmental education in schools.
