A TREE GROWS IN EXILE:

Reinventing the Tibetan Environmental Tradition

Jennifer Rowe Emory Tibetan Studies Program 1 August 2010 Jennifer Rowe

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks go to the many people who helped me in my research and writing of this paper: my advisor, Dr. Tara Doyle and my guide to the Tibetan environmental movement, Tsering Yankey. I am also indebted to the wonderful people who gave me their time and words, including Tsering Choekyi, Ven. Geshe Lakhdor La, Tenzin Choedon, Tenzin Tsundue, Pasang Tsering, Gen. Yangdon La, Tenzin Palmo, Jigme Norbu, Tenzin Daedon Sharling, Ngodup Dorjee, Tsering Lhamo, Tashi Yangzom, Tenzin Jamyang, Inpa Loden, Lobsang Yiken, Sonam Shine, Tenzin Shagya, Tenzin Daedon, Dhondhup Gyalpo, Tenzin Jamyang, Karma Tenjong Wanpo, Lobsang Dechen, and His Holiness the Karmapa. Finally, I must thank Sonam Dolma for letting me stay and work in her room for three weeks, Lauren Galvin for sharing Zanskar with me, my cousin, Sarah Michaels-Cassidy for putting up with me disturbing her morning sleep in countless cities across Europe, and my sister Meghan for her patient support.

PREFACE

I conducted the ethnographic research on the environmental movement in the Tibetan exile community while in Dharamsala and surrounding settlements and then in Tungri village, Zanskar. I made use of semi-structured interviews with people involved in various environmental and ecological projects including members of NGOs, the monastic community, the Central Tibetan Administration, and the schools. I also conducted an extended participant-observation of TesiEnvironment Awareness Movement while volunteering for the organization and a shorter participant-observation of Gen. Yangdon La and Gen. Tenzin Jamyang La‟s classrooms. Finally, I supplemented this information with written material on the history of environmental thought in the exile community and printed and online material made available by various organizations.

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INTRODUCTION

What sets the plight of Tibet apart from that of Palestine, Rwanda, Burma, Northern Ireland, East Timor, or Bosnia is the picture of Tibetans as a happy, peaceful people devoted to the practice of Buddhism, whose remote and ecologically enlightened land, ruled by a god-king, was invaded by the forces of evil. Daniel Lopez, from Prisoners of Shangri-la [Lopez 1998:11]

Although Tibetophiles, Tibetologists, and the Tibetan exile community may all be criticized for overusing the fabulously ambiguous word “unique,”1 the aura of mystery and enchantment surrounding their cause does make them distinctive among refugee communities. The portrayal of

Tibet as an ecological paradise prior to the Chinese occupation has proven captivating to

Westerners and has become an important component of pro-Tibet political strategy. Much intellectual banter surrounds the debate about whether Tibetan society was as environmentally benign as Tibetans and Tibetophiles would have us believe2. For all the interest in their past ecological qualifications, less thought has turned to how Tibetans in exile have confronted environmental problems. Tibetans are quick to admit that their lives in exile are far from the ideal of sustainability this stereotype implies. Nevertheless, the many folds of created and experienced reality make for a singular backdrop, against which plays the Tibetans‟ modern struggle to live up to their ecological reputation. In exploring the new form of environmentalism that has blossomed in exile, we could learn how a community, abruptly forced from its traditional, sustainable lifestyle

1 The word is used to describe Tibet’s plateau (Tsultrim 2007:Back Cover), its national, cultural, and religious identity (DIIR Information Sheet 6), its educational needs (Tsultrim 2007:49) and the economic system government officials hope to enact in Tibet (DIIR 2010:9) 2 See Bradshaw 2007 for a positive portrayal of Tibetan ecology and Huber 1991 and Duo et al. 2006 ‘Paleoecological and Experimental Evidence of Former Forests and Woodlands in the Treeless Desert Pastures of Sourthern Tibet.’ Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology: Vol. 242, 18th May, p. 54-67 and Anon. (2006) ‘Tall Trees Once Topped Tibet’ New Scientist: Issue 2579, 25 November, p. 18 for alternative viewpoints (Bradshaw 2007:139).

3 Jennifer Rowe to modern life, endeavors to reestablish an ecological way of life, a perspective with important implications for ecological movements the world over.

I aim to explore how the undercurrent of environmental thought maps onto the cultural landscape of Tibet‟s exiled communities. In the course of this exploration, I will ask questions such as: has “traditional” ecological thought persisted in the exile environment and has the stereotype of the ecological Tibetan helped or hindered the Tibetan environmental movement?

How has the memory of traditional ecology interacted with the modern, western environmental ideas? Are Tibetan environmentalists motivated by political maneuvering or genuine concern?

And, what methods do they use to plant the seeds of ecological living in a foreign soil? In this quest, I found the Tibetans to be fellow adventurers, just as interested as I was in exploring their own mixed ecological inheritance. Despite inheriting an arguably fairy-tale version of their ecological past, I found them to be active agents in creating a completely non-fictional sustainably for the future.

NATIVE HABITAT

An understanding of the Tibetan refugees‟ environmental movement must be contextualized by the way they interacted with the environment before the diaspora. For over a thousand years,

Tibetans maintained a lifestyle much lighter on the land than modern Western people. Tibetans and Tibetan sympathizers like to call their historical relationship with their land “unique.” This assumption must be problematized: many so-called traditional cultures appear to have evolved highly sustainable lifestyles and each was, in some sense, “unique.” That said, the Tibetan way of life was singular if only due to the distinctiveness of the land itself (Gyatso 2007 Five:10).

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According to His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama3, “People are always looking for answers in our unique religion, forgetting that our environment is just as unusual” (Gyatso 1995:79). The

Tibetan Plateau towers an average of 4,900 meters above sea level; as the “Roof of the World,” it is the highest and largest plateau on earth (Bradshaw 2007:134). And yet, in spite of its elevation, life abounds with surprising diversity: Tibet is home to ecosystems that range from vast grasslands to delicate alpine highlands to rich old growth forests (Bradshaw 2007: 135 and EDD 3).

Ethnically and culturally Tibetan people also inhabit the entire plateau, which includes modern

Bhutan, parts of northern India (Sikkim4, Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh), regions of Nepal, and the three Chinese-occupied provinces of Ü-Tsang,5 Amdo6, and Kham7 (Bradshaw 2007:135 and

DIIR 2004).

Learned Ecology

And after living like this for hundreds of years, it has become difficult for any Tibetan to differentiate between the practice of religion and concern for the environment. Tenzin P. Atisha, founder of the Environment and Development Desk in Tibetan Approach to Ecology 1996, quoted in Apte.

Living in a forbidding landscape with minimal resources and technology, Tibetans (like many native peoples) built their society upon the necessity of conservation. They fashioned simple livelihoods of nomadic herding of yak and sheep on hillsides and farming of barley and hardy vegetables on flat tracts of land lining the valleys (Apte:1). To match the scarcity of resources,

3 I will henceforth referred to His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama as HHDL. 4 Sikkhim was once an independent Tibetan kingdom but was integrated into India in 1975. It is now predominantly Hindu with strong Tibetan Buddhist influences and hosts a Tibetan refugee settlement (Bradshaw 2007:135). 5 Ü-Tsang, the area of central and western Tibet, is currently recognized as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China. 6 Amdo, in the northeast of Tibet, lies within Chinese Qinhai Province and Angsu Province. 7 Kham, in the southeast of Tibet, is split into the Chinese Yunnan Province and Sichuan Province.

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Tibetans kept population densities low through a combination of androgyny and monasticism

(Galvin)8,9. Tibetans were constantly reminded of their dependence upon other life, a reality embodied in the yak. The yak made Tibet habitable, providing food, shelter, clothing and transportation (EDD 2009:17). Tibetans considered their yaks to be “like one‟s mother,” for the nomads were as dependent upon their yaks as children are upon their mothers (Apte:9). Likewise, the yaks‟ welfare hinged upon the health of Tibet‟s alpine pastures. Tibetan nomads acquired an integrated knowledge of pasture management, including seasonal migration10, mixed herds11, and splitting herds12, which they passed down through generations (EDD 2009:18-19). Therefore, although the Tibetan nomads had no numerical concept of carrying capacity, the ecological concept whereby a land can support only so many inhabitants, they achieved the same result: a steady, even grazing pressure balancing the need for forage consumption with the survival of pastureland (EDD 2009:19).

With constant reminders that their survival was inextricably linked with that of other species, Tibetans internalized a strong ecological awareness (Apte:6). As the HHDL writes, “The people of Tibet for centuries have adhered to spiritual and environmental values in order to maintain the delicate balance of life” (Gyatso N.d.). Although there is no Tibetan word for

“ecology,” Tibetan people never sought to tame but rather, to secure a partnership with the wilderness (Apte:6). Put elegantly by a Tibetan nomad interviewed by Melvyn Goldstein, “The

8 Interview by author, Shingo-la Pass, Zanskar India, 28 August 2010. 9 Population statistics for pre-1959 Tibet vary considerably between sources and are of dubious value, due to their modern political implications. Conventional figures range from two to six million (Bradshaw 2007:137). 10 Seasonal migration allowed alpine pastures to replenish. The nomads’ migratory sequence ensured the best forage for livestock to lay down fat stores to last the long and bitter winter and spring (EDD Tibet 18). 11 On most pastures, nomads raised a mixture of animal species, each with its own specific characteristics. Different species graze on different plants and together use the rangeland vegetation most efficiently while providing diversified products (EDD Tibet 20-21). 12 Nomads split their herds to accommodate different livestock needs and make best use of the rangeland vegetation.

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Chang Tang13 is a ferocious place. One minute the air is calm and the sun is shining, the next it is hailing. It is not possible to try to control and alter the Chang Tang. We don‟t try: instead we use our knowledge to adjust it” (Apte:3). Hence, the need to live in consonance with the delicate, but physically demanding plateau nurtured a sense of environmental responsibility in the Tibetan people.

Spiritual Ecology

Tibetan environmental ethics developed through a close association with the Plateau. However, a society‟s beliefs, including those concerning the environment, are not static (Bradshaw 2007: 105).

Bradshaw argues that there are separate “maintaining mechanisms” that perpetuate a peoples‟ worldview, which may operate after the “initial cause” is no longer present (2007:108). He identifies the local environment as the initial cause of Tibetan ecological wisdom, but argues that the maintaining mechanisms are ritualistic in nature (2007:108-109). Indeed, Tibetans tend to express ecology in spiritual rather than scientific terms. Choekyi, a staff member of the

Environment and Development Desk (EDD) admits that Tibetans do not have a “particularly scientific way of preserving, but they do conserve in the way of living and faith. For example there are many mountains, rivers, and lakes which are considered sacred for Tibetans.”14 Aspects of nature were seen as the result of gods and therefore objects of worship, resulting in a spiritual view of the world (Apte:1). Thus, gods and spirits embodied the capricious personality of the plateau, allowing the Tibetans to comprehend its character and work to pacify its perceived anger. Just as importantly, conceiving nature in spiritual terms allowed Tibetans to pass down environmental

13 The Chang Tang (Tib: Jhangthang) is the Northern Plateau of upper Tibet and is one of its most resource- poor regions (EDD Tibet 17,20) 14 Interview by author, EDD Office, Dharamsala, India, 28 April 2010.

7 Jennifer Rowe knowledge in the form of folk-tales, and rituals in a time of low literacy and a correspondingly large emphasis on oral tradition.

For example, Tibetans believe in spirits that live in the land and water. Nagas (Sanskrit for serpents) or, in Tibetan, lu, reside in water and must be honored by elaborate seasonal rituals.

Tibetan proverbs teach children to treat water with respect and to keep it clean so as not to disturb these spirits (EDD 123). Ven. Geshe Lakhdor La of the Tibetan Library of Works and Archives explains, “if someone comes and throws stones and breaks your glasses and destroys your houses, so you will try to revenge. Similarly the spirits also do the same thing15.” Tenzin Choedon of the

Clean Upper Dharamsala Project (CUDP) relates16, “we believe you shouldn‟t throw trash; you shouldn‟t pollute the water because there are spirits in it and they are everywhere, on the mountain, everywhere. So you are not supposed to do anything – you don‟t want to scare these spirits and you don‟t want to get into trouble. So it is almost like zero waste in Tibet and it is so beautiful.” Similarly, Tsering Yankey, founder of the Tesi Environment Awareness Movement

(TEAM), the only environmental NGO in exile, says, “When we pollute this air, we are also polluting our gods. So that [belief]… connect[s] us with our spiritual values. We do not know how

[the earth] is impacted.17” For the same reason, Tibetans frown on mining that disturbs the earth and its spirits. They are therefore not surprised when they hear of collapses and cave-ins at

Chinese mines in Tibet, thinking it entirely natural for the earth spirits to protest (EDD:151). It is

15 Ven. Geshe Lakdorla is the director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and Library Staff of the Science for Monks program. A distinguished Buddhist scholar, he was the English translator for HHDL from 1989 to 2005 and co-translated and co-produced several books by HHDL. Interview by author, Office, Tibetan Library of Works and Archives, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010. 16 Interview by author, Office, Clean Upper Dharamsala Project, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010. 17 Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

8 Jennifer Rowe inter-connection between spiritual and environmental beliefs that allowed for the continuity of ecological wisdom and values in a predominately oral culture.

Buddhist Ecology

Although sound ecological practices were requisite for life on the plateau, Apte notes, “the close rapport that had always existed between Tibetans and their environment found its perfect spiritual context in Buddhism, which teaches respect for all living things” (4). Tibetan Buddhism is a branch of the Mahayana, or “greater vehicle” tradition, also dominant in mountainous parts of

India, Bhutan, Mongolia, Kalmykia (the Russian north Caucasus), Siberia, and the Russian Far

East. In the Tibetan plateau, it co-exists with Bön, a pre-Buddhist indigenous animist tradition, which was influenced by and exerted influence upon Tibetan Buddhism (Bradshaw 2007:142).

Tibetans relate the Buddhist core beliefs of ahimsa (no harm) and pratitya-samutpada

(interdependence) to modern ideas of environmental protection.

While it is true that the majority of lay people were not well versed in the intricacies of

Buddhist doctrine, or dharma, the monastic community functioned as a repository of Buddhist knowledge. Monastics held great sway, especially in ethical and spiritual matters, representing the

“ecclesiastical link between the people and their environment” (Apte:3). Moreover, Tibetan

Buddhism became a pervasive and inextricable part of Tibetan culture, featuring in the daily routines of ordinary Tibetans to the exile government‟s policies. A „lived religion,‟ it is played out in rituals and ceremonies that incorporate religion into lives of the lay and monastic people and is reflected in the “ethos, social organization and very fabric of Tibetan society” (Bradshaw

2007:143).

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Ahimsa follows from the Buddhist principle of compassion (karuna). As Ven. Geshe

Lakhdor La explains:

The one simple idea in Buddhism is that all sentient beings want happiness and do not want suffering. Now, if they want happiness and do not want suffering, just like yourself, then you need to take care of these people and all the sentient beings. Taking care of all the sentient beings means that whatever harm is done to them is not good: destruction of environment, taking life, whatever. So long as you have this concern for all sentient beings, you take care of everything. But in the case of most of us we do not have this. At the best you may be thinking of Tibet, or you may be thinking about America. But in most cases… you are thinking of your family, and in your family you are the most important…. And the result of this is the greater destruction… the next generation will have to suffer. 18

Ahimsa in its strictest form precluded killing or eating animals. As Kham Jamyang, a semi-nomad exiled in India, explained, “Because our people were Buddhist, they didn‟t kill the foxes and wolves, even if they attacked our domestic animals” (Apte:6). The Dalai Lamas codified this norm in secular laws, or tstsigs (Tib.), begun in 17th century to protect animal life and the environment

(Choekyi19, Apte 7). The laws, punishable by law, allowed the killing of wild animals only in limited numbers and in certain seasons and regions. Village heads, governors, and officials of all districts were charged with reading the laws to the population, posting them on notice boards, and ensuring that the orders were enforced. The Tibetans took the decrees seriously, with the same respect as Buddhist directives. The decrees prohibited fishing, as it was considered more ethical to live off the meat of a few larger animals than many small ones. Tibetans abstained from fresh meat in Lhasa during the holy 4th month of the year and during certain times, one could not even lift a stone, cut grass, or dig soil so as not to kill any kind of insect life (Apte:4).

18 Interview by author, Office, Tibetan Library of Works and Archives, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010. 19 Interview by author, EDD Office, Dharamsala, India, 28 April 2010.

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Buddhist environmental thought draws heavily from a second principle: interdependence.

A more literal translation for this Sanskrit term – i.e., pratitya-samutpada – is “dependent origination” (Brashaw 2007:145). Dependent origination is the notion that all things or phenomena arise in dependence upon causes and conditions and thus lack intrinsic being or self

(atman). Phenomena can exist only in relation to other things; “nothing exists independently but only as a nexus of causes, relations and conditions” (Bradshaw 2007:146). It follows, then, that all reality is interrelated, and nothing can be considered completely separate from anything else. His

Holiness likens this relationship to an ancient scripture, which speaks of the world as the container or house and sentient beings as the contained, “From these simple facts we deduce a special relationship, because without the container, the contents cannot be contained. Without the contents, the container contains nothing, it‟s meaningless” (Gyatso 2007 Universal: 17).

Because reality is a single unity, Buddhists consider everything to be interdependent.

As a result, Buddhism teaches that there is a close interdependence between the natural environment and the sentient beings living in it (Gyatso 2007 Ecology: 11). As Jigme Lodue, a monk at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics (IBD) who translates environmental works into

Tibetan, explicates20:

The core philosophy of Buddhism is interdependence, which says that the welfare of oneself is completely related to the earth. So in this way the welfare of oneself is related with the wild animals, with the plants, all kinds of wild species. So in this way [Buddhism] suggests that we need to protect the environment.

Bradshaw clarifies this concept:

The Buddhist tradition reflects a conceptual framework rooted in the central intuition of an ecological perspective where nothing exists in autonomous isolation but everything is defined as the composite derivative and collaborative synthesis of

20 Lodue’s friend and translational partner, Tenzin Sangpo, translated Lodue’s words during our interview. Interview by author, Lodue’s room, Dharamsala, India, 6 May 2010.

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other elements. Through such a cosmology... Buddhism reinvigorates the human in an ethic of mindful awareness of, reflection upon, and care for life in its entirety” (2007: 124).

Thus, humanity and its environment exist in relation with one another; if one is harmed the other will suffer in turn. Ven. Geshe Lakhdor La summarizes:

This earth… is our home so naturally you need to take care of your home. The air you breathe, the heat you have in your body, the liquid you have in your body, all come from [the] external environment. So if you destroy the external environment how can you have health and happiness? …. We need a holistic view. We need the whole plateau for the individual person to be happy.21

The concept of dependent origination gives rise to a perception of the self that is continuous with its surroundings and the whole cosmos; people do not exist independently and autonomously and can be understood only in terms of their relationship to other things (Bradshaw 2007:151-153). In his speeches on the environment, His Holiness speaks of the need to develop an awareness of the interdependent nature of phenomena in order to solve the world‟s problems:

Because of the interdependent nature of everything we cannot hope to solve the multifarious problems with a one-sided or self-centered attitude…. Our failures in the past are the result of ignorance of our own interdependent nature. What we need now is a holistic approach towards problems combined with a genuine sense of universal responsibility based on love and compassion (2007 Caring:32-33).

Thus, the human mind, human heart, and the environment are closely linked and none can be neglected if any are to thrive (Gyatso 2007 Thinking Globally:31).

The primacy of this relationship motivated Tibetans to engage in rituals to encourage the cooperation of natural forces rather than to manipulate or subordinate them (Bradshaw

2007:155). To an outsider, these rituals may appear superstitious and illogical. However, in the

Tibetan worldview, dependent origination creates a web of interconnectivity that allows for the

21 Interview by author, Office, Tibetan Library of Works and Archives, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010.

12 Jennifer Rowe intricate workings of karma. Literally translated, karma is action, although we conventionally use karma to refer to actions, their effects, and the causal law that connects the two (Rowe 2010:1).

For Buddhists, the Law of Karma is a special, moral instance of the natural causal laws that operate throughout the universe and dictates that any conscious action produces an in-kind result. For instance, a negative action such as killing a toad will leave an imprint on one‟s subtle consciousness that will ripen into suffering in the present or future lifetimes (Rowe 2010:1-2).

Tenzin Tsundue, a leading Free Tibet activist, explains:

Somehow something will come back on your head if you did something wrong. Therefore you cannot escape your deeds if you did something wrong. You will never escape from [it]. It will always, somehow, come back on your head. And therefore, the idea of god-fearing, here it is not the god, it is the fear of your own behavior. You cannot escape, if it does not come in this life, it will come22.

Conversely, acting with the interest of all other sentient beings in mind, engaging in rituals to appease the natural spirits, and preserving the environment accumulated positive merit, a belief that served to constrain behaviors harmful to the environment (Bradshaw 2007:183). Thus,

Buddhism grounded, developed, reinforced, justified, and systematized the Tibetans‟ ecological thought habits (Bradshaw 2007:195).

Tall-TaleEcology? Here we must pause to check ourselves and maintain a balanced perspective; western writers have a long tradition of romanticizing Tibet, producing fanciful and uncritical images of a utopian society23. However, recent scholars have questioned the assumption that Tibetans left little or no impact on their environment and some have claimed that Tibetan nomadism created the extensive

22 Interview by author, at Tsundue’s Ashram, Dharamsala, India, 27 April 2010. 23 James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, popularized this utopian image in the United States during the great depression. Hilton’s characters find themselves in Shangri-la, an early paradise in the Western Himalaya. Hilton based Shangri-la on the legend of Shambhala, a mystical kingdom in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (Bradshaw 139).

13 Jennifer Rowe grasslands that cover much of the Tibetan Plateau (Bradshaw 2007: 139). Others counter that non-anthropogenic climate change led to the retreat of forests and drying out of the plateau.

Rangeland specialist Melvyn Goldstein has argued that nomads subsisted practicing traditional herding for centuries without destroying their resource base by finely adapting their herds to their challenging environment (Bradshaw 2007:19, EDD 2009:19).

Accessing the full impact of the pre-1959 Tibetan lifestyle is problematic; few westerners documented conditions in pre-1959 Tibet, the Chinese have already created massive change to the

Plateau and its inhabitants, and history (whether western, Chinese, or Tibetan) is not an objective science. However, some scholars have looked to Ladakh, or “Little Tibet” for answers. Ladakhis are ethnically Tibetan, speak a dialect of the Tibetan tongue, live in a landscape identical to parts of Tibet, and have practiced Tibetan Buddhism for the past one thousand years (Matthiessen

1991:xi). Helena Norberg-Hodge, a trained linguist who spent over 16 years in Ladakh as one of the first outsiders in several decades, witnessed a Ladakh essentially unaffected by the West

(Norberg-Hodge 1991:1). She found that the Ladakhis decried waste and efficiently husbanded the land and water, practices that stemmed from a deep respect and gratitude for the limited resources of the land (Mattheissen 1991:xii). When I visited the Zanskar24 region in the Indian

Himalaya, I witnessed a culture that closely matched Norberg-Hodge‟s descriptions. The Zanskaris wear clothes until they were threadbare and multiply patched. Even then their usefulness is not exhausted; the Zanskaris recycle them as house insulation or, in the case of nun‟s robes, as door hangings. Farmers grow barley in the short-lived growing season on land carefully divided into

24 Zanskar is a region deep within the folds of the Himalaya in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir with a harsh climate, remote terrain, and heavy winter snows that leave the area cut off from the rest of Kashmir during the winter. Zanskar and Ladakh were two west Tibetan kingdoms before India annexed them in 1947- 8. The area shared and contributed to Tibetan Buddhist culture since the 10th century; Zanskaris speak a west Tibetan dialect and 95% of the population is Buddhist of the Gelug or Kagyu traditions (Gutschow).

14 Jennifer Rowe irrigation beds that can be opened and closed to apply water with maximum efficiency. Ancient hydro-powered mills grind barley into four and hand-powered churns spun milk into butter. The

Zanskaris fence off large areas with stonewalls to protect carefully maintained orchards of poplars and willows from grazing animals [Figure 125].

Regardless of whether Tibetan society was as environmentally friendly as Tibetans and

Tibetologists would like the world to believe, the myth of Tibetan “environmentalism” holds great currency among the exile population. And no matter whether environmental behaviors were motivated by “enlightened” ecological thought or simple necessity, Tibetans continue to use

Buddhist environmental philosophy as a rallying point for Tibetan autonomy and to inspire ecological behavior in the exile population. As Jamyang Norbu writes in Behind the Lost Horizon,

“Though the Shangri-la stereotype is a Western creation, Tibetans, especially Tibetan refugees, are gradually succumbing to a similarly fantastic idea of their lost country” (2001:377). Thus,

“traditional” Tibetan environmentalism, while perchance a fusion of reality and historical revision, is nevertheless now entrenched firmly in the minds of exiled Tibetans and shapes their modern environmental discourse.

UPROOTED

Though almost any rich cultural heritage, such as that of the Tibetans, will contain the conceptual tools for sustainable living as well as a wealth of ecological knowledge, this does not mean that a people will know intuitively how to flourish if displaced and resettled in an alien environment (Bradshaw 2007).

The process of forcibly leaving their homeland has brought much change to the Tibetan community and their relationship with their environment. One must understand these changes in

25 All Figures are located in the Appendix.

15 Jennifer Rowe the context of their refugee story. Tibet and China have had a long and complicated history; from

A.D. 600 to 750 the Tibetan Yarlung Empire held many Chinese territories. Tibet was in some sense part of a larger Chinese Empire in the thirteenth century, under the Mongols and then in eighteenth century under the Manchu (Beckwith 1993 and Barnett 1998:179). Meanwhile, the

Dalai Lamas ruled over central Tibet since the seventeenth century (Barnett 1998:179). The

Tibetans describe the situation as a chö-yon, or protector-patron, relationship between the two governments, where the Tibetans offered spiritual guidance to the Chinese emperors in return for military protection (Barnett 1998:180-181).

In 1912, under the 13th Dalai Lama and following the collapse of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, the Tibetan government expelled all Chinese officials and residents in Lhasa. Lhasa thenceforth exercised full control over its own internal and external affairs. Tibet possessed its own coinage, postage, language, dress, food, and taxation and developed all the political and social institutions, from an army to a civil service, of an independent country (Barnett 1998:181).

However, in 1949, the People‟s Liberation Army (PLA) marched into Tibet‟s north-east, easily defeating the small Tibetan army on their way to “liberating” the entire Tibetan Plateau (DIIR

1994:7). Meanwhile, in 1950 the 15 year-old reincarnation of the Dalai Lama assumed full political authority as Head of State of Tibet in the emergency. In March of 1959, a Tibetan

National Uprising broke out in Lhasa and, in the wake of that uprising , HHDL and some 80,000

Tibetans fled into exile (DIIR 1994:3).

Communities in Exile

HHDL subsequently established the Central Tibetan Authority (CTA), which became based in

Dharamsala [Figure 2] in Northern India, where he had secured asylum, and declared, “Wherever I

16 Jennifer Rowe am, accompanied by my government, the Tibetan people recognize us as the Government of

Tibet” (DIIR 1994:7 and Methfessel 1997:13). Gradually, HHDL shifted power from himself to the CTA‟s democratically run Judiciary, Legislature, and Executive bodies (DIIR 1994:7). The

CTA both spearheads the Tibetan freedom movement and takes care of the now 140,000 Tibetans in exile, over 100,000 of which have settled in India near to their leader (DIIR 1994:4). The CTA has provided an organizational link between the Indian Government, Western aid organizations and the exile community, which has proven crucial in dealing with the crisis of displacement and in allowing Tibetans agency in their political and cultural affairs (Methfessel 1997:14).

The exiled population contains members from virtually every social, ethnic, and geographic that inhabited Tibet, from nobility to peasants to nomads to artisans (Methfessel 1997:13).

During their first years in exile, most refugees believed they would return shortly and so remained near the border, subsisting on international aid programs, selling jewelry or animals they brought with them, producing handicrafts, or working as wage laborers in India‟s road construction program in the Himalaya (Methfessel 1997:13). However, soon it became apparent that the PRC had no plans to leave Tibet and the international community would do little more than offer condolences and empty gestures of support. The Government of India established 11 communities in southern India and 21 communities in northern India, providing land, housing and the basic infrastructure necessary for survival (Methfessel 1997:14 and DIIR 1994:4). Western aid organizations funded the schools, health centers, handicraft centers and monasteries direly needed to support the growing population (Methfessel 1997:14).

Agricultural Ecology in Exile

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Upon entering India, Bradshaw‟s “initial causes,” the landscape and lifestyle that is thought to have shaped Tibetan ecological thought, were worlds away. Life in exile requires adaption, as

“material and environmental conditions are, anywhere that refugees settle, vastly different from those of pre-invasion Tibet” (Calla Jacobson quoted in Diehl 2002:24). Refugee settlements in

India are based primarily on agriculture, handicrafts, or business, and often a combination of these three. Around 50% of the exile population lives in the agricultural settlements located in south and central India. In these settlements, the Government of India gave the refugees an average of one acre of land each as well as modern agricultural equipment such as tractors. At this time,

India had only recently (in 1947) gained its independence and was in the midst of the Green

Revolution (Yankey26). As Tsering Yangkey explains:

When Tibetans first came, there were so many things to deal with – first the pain of losing their home, second the pain of dealing with all those who had lost their lives. And then people moved to South India – it was hot and then they were into how to live their daily lives…. India was also going with the flow. And then the force of globalization, it came stronger and stronger and stronger…. [In] agriculture … the westerners, especially the multinational companies, agribusiness … totally changed everything from organic to “conventional” – they called it conventional…. So our Tibetan nomads, our Tibetan farmers, including Indian farmers, they were taught to use fertilizers, they were taught to use pesticides, by all these Monsatos and Cargills, all these huge companies. But they never told them that their seeds that they were buying were you know, unproductive. All these hybrid seeds, you always have to buy from them. And when you buy seeds from Monsantos, what do you do, you also have to buy their fertilizer – a vicious cycle. There are so many farmers in India committing suicide (Yankey).

The Tibetan farmers were initially taught to grow various cash crops, especially corn, which proved to be the most productive and economically viable product in most places (Methfessel 1997:14).

Monoculture cash-cropping for sale to business men in, say, Bangalore would have been a significant adjustment for farmers and nomads who had previously functioned within what was

26 Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

18 Jennifer Rowe largely a subsistence, cash-free economy (Yankey). Tsering Yankey comments that “At that time, we were taught many new things but we were not taught the side effects of those new things – we were taught them as a panacea for everything” (Yankey). Thus, their position as refugees placed

Tibetans in a situation devoid of the “initial causes” that created their ecological sensibilities and scrambling to make it in an entirely different environment.

For all its touted benefits, income derived from capital- and energy-intensive methods of industrial agriculture is low, and most Tibetans must supplement their income with carpet weaving or seasonal business selling sweaters or other garments in Indian cities (Methfessel 1997:14).

Meanwhile, the methods of farming, herding, and taking care of the land that had been handed down to successive generations of Tibetans for hundreds of years were soon regarded as inefficient and backward. Contributing to this perception was the wide-spread idea that Tibetans had lost their country because they did not embrace a modernity symbolized by machine guns and hybrid seeds. As a result, much of the knowledge of how to farm and husband sustainably became devalued and was not passed down to the Tibetans born into exile. Now, decades later, Tibetan farmers suffer from a depletion of soil quality after fertilizers and pesticides polluted the water

(Yangzom27 and Norberg-Hodge 1991:147). After an initial increase, yields have declined.

Farmers‟ problems are compounded by an increase in pests; pesticides have disrupted natural systems of pest control, leaving the monoculture crop vulnerable to destruction by a single pest

(Yangzom and Norberg-Hodge 1991:147). Now, Tibetan farmers are being re-taught by

Agriculture Extension Officers from the CTA how to create compost and farm organically

(Yangzom).

Urban Ecology in Exile

27 Tashi Yangzom. Interview by author, Department of Home Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 April 2010.

19 Jennifer Rowe

Albeit less sharp a contrast in terms of climate and landscape, Tibetans living in north

India adapted to an even more divergent lifestyle than their compatriots in the south. In north

India, there was much less land available than in the south Indian plains, encouraging Tibetans to partake in alternate economic enterprises (Methfessel 1997:14-15). Consequently, Tibetans living in urban centers have made occupational shifts away from their previous means of employment in overwhelmingly rural Tibet (Methfessel 1997:18 and Department of Home 2009). Ten percent of

Tibetan refugees abide in handicraft centers or so-called agro-industrial settlements, engaged in carpet-weaving, woodcarving, the creation of other “traditional” Tibetan articles such as religious iconography, and tailoring. These alternatives fall short of the income necessary for survival, pressuring many families to leave the settlements in the winter to trade on the streets of major

Indian cities (Methfessel 1997:15). Another 25% of the refugee community28 is self-settled, the majority of whom live in neighborhood clusters in northern Indian mountain towns, such as

Darjeeling, Mussoorie, Simla, and near the HHDL and the CTA in Dharamsala or in a Majnu-ka-

Tila Katila, a Tibetan neighborhood in Delhi. The vast majority of these refugees engage in some form of business, from hawkers to restaurant-owners to large-scale entrepreneurs (Methfessel

1997:15). A higher standard of education in exile, with many Tibetan youths finishing class 12 and some acquiring college degrees, has both increased the number of people qualified for office jobs and contributed to out-migration from the settlements to cities. Meanwhile, population growth, constricted by a limited amount of leasehold land, has created a pressure to leave rural environments (Department of Home 2009). Finally, few Tibetans have chosen to take Indian citizenship, and thus land is quite difficult to buy.

28 This leaves 15% of Tibetans as new arrivals, children, monks and the elderly.

20 Jennifer Rowe

With the shift from rural to urban, technology increasingly mediates between the

Tibetan people and their environment. Bradshaw hypothesizes that an ecological sense of self is created by close and direct contact with a specific location (Bradshaw 2007:111).

Tibetans in exile, removed from the land they had inhabited for thousands of years, are losing their ecological knowledge. As Bradshaw expounds: “Detached from our land and ever present reminders of our ecological identity, our intuitive recognition of the interconnectivity of all life bec[omes] eroded and with it our respect and reverence for the broader ecosystem” (Bradshaw 2007:106-107). Tsering Yankey laments that now, environmentalism must be taught and only a small minority of educated Tibetans “gets it”

(Yankey29). Tibetans in urban environments are further disadvantaged by a pressure to modernize without knowledge of modernization‟s consequences. Tsering Yankey explains30:

“Many of the modern products, like plastics, came from the West…. But then all these commercial industries, they told our people – Indians and Tibetans – to buy, buy, and buy…. Our people are so into this modernization – especially the young people, they think that everything modern is cool. With the globalizing force, people want to do business, whenever people want to start a store they fill it up with Coca Cola and Lays potato chips…. [Westerners] told us all the good things, but they never told us the side effects of all these modern products.”

Tibetans, along with their Indian neighbors, have received a distorted impression of modern life with its purported ease and glamour, without insight into its environmental side effects through western tourists, Hindi movies, and TV commercials (Norberg-Hodge 1991:156). Tenzin Tsundue describes Tibetan environmental naïveté:

If you tell Tibetans you cut trees, hundreds of them, they will never do this. But if you tell them, okay, eat one potato chip packet, every day, for one year, they might

29 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 30 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010

21 Jennifer Rowe

like that…. They just think that this looks harmless and if you kill a bird that‟s harmful. It is a very Buddhist way of looking at it and not really understanding. So we are now educating people that violence is not just blood. Violence is an irresponsible way of consumption, a violent life.31

Tenzin Tsundue believes that poor environmental choices do not stem from a lack of caring, but for ignorance of the environmental effects of one‟s actions. However, Passang

Tsering, Principal of the College of Higher Tibetan Studies (CHTS), Sarah32, believes education is not enough. He finds that a telling difference exists between Tibetans who grow up in modern towns as opposed to the agricultural settlements:

[They] have a different perspective and their treatment with nature is not so careful as kids coming from settlement or coming from Tibet…. They try to be modernized or westernized but their definition of modernization or westernization is just how they dress or also how they eat or their bodily gestures. They are ra-ma-lug33s, neither goat nor sheep… you are not foreigner and you also do not have your origin – Tibetan – you are lost in between34.

Passang points to an underlying problem that runs deeper than a loss of environmental knowledge, what Bradshaw diagnoses as a fundamental shift in worldview and an erosion of ecological identity. Tibetans, immersed in rapidly modernizing Indian society, are adopting a western worldview imbued with anthropocentric, non-relational thought (Bradshaw 2007:267). In his Ph.D. thesis, Bradshaw catalogues the differences between the Tibetan relational worldview,

31 Tenzin Tsundue. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 27 April 2010. 32 Ven. Lobsang Gyatso and HHDL together founded the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics (IBD) in Dharamsala and its branch, The College of Higher Tibetan Studies (CHTS), in the nearby village of Sarah in 1991. The two institutions are defined by the goal to properly educate Tibetan youth in exile. The college at Sarah has grown to offer a Bachelors degree in Tibetan Studies, primary and secondary teachers training courses, study-abroad programs with Emory and Miami Universities, a foundation course in Tibetan language, and three years of Buddhist philosophy undertaken by monastics pursuing their Geshe degree at IBD (The College for Higher Tibetan Studies 2008). 33 Ra-ma-lug, translated “neither goat nor sheep,” is a traditional Tibetan saying describing the split personality of someone who tries to be someone he is not. Older Tibetans use the expression to describe both wayward exile youth and sinocized Tibetan culture (Wangyal 2006). 34 Passang Tsering. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010.

22 Jennifer Rowe where the self is seen as indistinct from its environment, with the modern atomistic worldview, where the self is viewed in isolation from its surroundings and other beings. He argues that the

Tibetan relational worldview is more conducive to environmental thought and behavior (Bradshaw

2007:268). However, the displacement and break-up of Tibetan communities as Tibetan youth leave settlements for the cities “disrupt[s] the process of education, enculturation and transmission of knowledge and values and has led to a loss of ecological sensibility and propensity towards sustainability, with exiled Tibetans steadily becoming „as guilty of ecological sin‟ as the world‟s most reckless industrial peoples” (Bradshaw 2007:305).

Indeed, Tibetans in Dharamsala (the place where Tibetans live in India that I am most familiar with) live increasingly unsustainable lifestyles. People can be seen dumping garbage in the streets and streams and the air is often filled with the smell of burning plastic. During my first day volunteering at Tesi, we went to photograph the CTA burning trash, ironically as part of a World

Health Day-inspired spring cleanup. Construction workers labor well into the night on the construction of an already impossible number of new hotels, commercial buildings, and apartments in the sprawling city. Dharamsala has long suffered from inadequate infrastructure, with a growing water shortage, a dearth of public latrines, crowded streets, leaky water pipes, and open sewage gutters (Diehl 2002:42-43). Taxis spew smoke as they carry loads of tourists up and down the hill. Plastic has become the material of choice, where once a plastic bottle was considered a luxury and “you just simply [didn‟t] have money to afford that” (Tsering35). School children are just as addicted to junk food wrapped in plastic as any American teenager

(Yangdon36), resulting in “so much garbage that, even if you want to do something [with it all], you

35 Passang Tsering. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010. 36 Yangdon. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 2 May 2010.

23 Jennifer Rowe can‟t” (Tenzin Palmo37). This being so, it is becoming clear ecological living is not an inherent property of Tibetans but, rather, was a learnt wisdom. Divorced from the land that inspired their ecological wisdom and the thrown into a situation inimical to its maintenance, exile Tibetans would have a hard time proving that they would be much better stewards of the land than the

Chinese.

A Broken Lineage

Having painted a rather bleak portrait of the exile situation, we must now acknowledge that,

Tibetans, despite their increasing modernization, are not conventional refugees (Lopez 1998:11).

Far from passively conforming to Indian society, they have made great efforts at preserving their culture in exile. As it happens, preservation of the “rich cultural heritage of Tibet” has been one of their primary and consistent concerns since 1959 (Diehl 2002:97). The exile community has been praised for the remarkable extent to which they have succeeded in this objective against all odds, with credit given to the Dalai Lama‟s leadership and liberal financial support from international aid agencies, individual foreign sponsors, and the generosity of the Indian government (Diehl 2002:64). Tibetan children learn traditional song and dance in school, the

Tibetan Institute of the Performing Arts (TIPA) performs operas each spring, the Norbulingka

Institute38 trains new generations of wood workers, sculptors, thangka39 painters, and appliqué embroiderers, and monastic communities are reestablished and flourishing all over India [Figures

3 and 4].

37 Tenzin Palmo. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 10 May 2010. 38 The Norbulingka Institute was founded to preserve Tibetan culture and artistic traditions in the 1980s (Norbulingka). 39 A thangka is a religious scroll painting, traditionally on cotton cloth and framed in silk brocade that could be rolled on wooden poles and transported long distances (Harris 2006:700-703).

24 Jennifer Rowe

With all this preservation, why, then, was Tibet‟s ecological tradition left defenseless in the face of modernity? What must first be understood is that cultural preservation was not applied to all aspects of Tibetan culture. As Deihl persuasively argues in Echoes from Dharamsala, cultural preservation “involves judgments and a degree of consensus regarding how the „past‟ should be articulated within the present” (Deihl 2002:95-96). Upon arrival in exile, environmentalism was not a high priority of HHDL or the exile government. The first Tibetan refugees believed their stay in India would be brief, one or two years at the most (Diehl 2002:39). Understandably, this

“emotionally and politically informed temporariness” (Diehl 2002:39) discouraged investment in their exiled environment. Moreover, as Diehl points out, institutionalized preservation may be influenced by what is efficient in eliciting ideological and even financial support (Diehl 2002:66).

And, at least in the beginning, environmentalism had no role to play in the political role of cultural preservation, as western audiences were, at that time, more interested in Tibet‟s religious and spiritual traditions (Norbu 2001:377).

Nonetheless, all this changed in the late 1980s, when environmentalism in the modern sense first entered Tibetan political discourse (Yankey)40. His Holiness the Dalai Lama first began speaking about the environment in connection with his “Five-Point Peace Plan for Tibet” in which he called for the “restoration and Protection of Tibet‟s natural environment ” (Gyatso 2007

Five:6). He contrasted the Tibet he remembered as an “unspoiled wilderness sanctuary in a unique natural environment” to the destruction wrought by the People Republic of China‟s (PRC) disregard for wildlife, aggressive forest policies, and dumping of nuclear waste. Meanwhile, he praised the Tibetan peoples‟ respect for all forms of life, “enhanced by the Buddhist faith, which prohibits the harming of all sentient beings, whether human or animal” (Gyatso 2007 Five:9). In

40 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

25 Jennifer Rowe one deft move, HHDL appended the modern concept of environmentalism to the Shangri-la image of Tibet that had long held currency among Western audiences. As Donald Lopez writes,

“Traditional Tibet” has come to represent “an ideal that once existed on the planet in high Tibet, a land free from strife, ruled by a benevolent Dalai Lama, his people devoted to the dharma and

(we have recently learned) the preservation of the environment and the rights of women” (Lopez

1998:8). Admittedly, this new environmental message was at least partially politically motivated; it strengthened the case for an independent Tibet and painted Tibetan culture in a favorable light to international sympathizers. In this way, HHDL and the CTA made Tibetan environmental stewardship over the Plateau part of the case that a free Tibet is in the international community‟s best interest.

SPREADING BRANCHES

Eco-Politics

Soon after HHDL began speaking about the environment, the Tibetan community followed in lock step. In March 1990, the CTA established the Environment Desk, now the Environment and

Development Desk (EDD), under the Department of Information and International Relations

(DIIR). The EDD was charged with monitoring and reporting the environmental situation inside

Tibet and providing environmental education among Tibetan refugees. However, over the years, the EDD came to focus more on environment and development issues inside Tibet at the expense of promoting environmentalism within the exile community41 (DIIR 2010). Now, the EDD acts to accumulate, organize, and disseminate information on the Tibetan environmental conditions

41 Choekyi, researcher for the EDD, explained that the Department’s reports come out first in English, targeting the international audience. Very few are translated into Tibetan.

26 Jennifer Rowe under Chinese rule in an attempt to encourage China to pursue sustainable development in the region (DIIR 2010). Jigme Norbu, a recent hire at the Desk, explains, “We go [to conferences] and share with scholars what is happening inside Tibet…. We are trying to get some kind of platform to get awareness to the maximum people.”

The EDD has brought unprecedented sophistication to HHDL‟s original critiques of

Chinese environmental policies, publishing lengthy reports detailing scientific and anthropological evidence and brimming with the environmental jargon du-jour. The Desk links Chinese policies to overgrazing of grasslands, wildlife decimation, deforestation, mining, climate change, and poor river management, stressing the importance of the Plateau to environmental health of the larger

Asian and world regions (Norbu 2001 and DIIR 2010). Their publications invariably contrast

Chinese mismanagement with Tibetan stewardship in the “Traditonal Era” (Tsultrim 17). As such, the Desk, although claiming to be “not just talking about political issues, we are just talking about the environment” (Norbu), has a thinly veiled political bias.

Other Free Tibet NGOs have added the EDD‟s environmental argument into their own messages, including the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC)42, Tibetan Women‟s Association (TWA)43,

Students for a Free Tibet (SFT)44, and the Gu-Chu-Sum political movement45 (Yankey and

42 With more than 30,000 members, Tibetan Youth Congress is the largest and most active NGO of Tibetans in exile. It aims to bring about the restoration of complete independence for the whole of Tibet (About Us TYC). 43 The Tibetan Woman’s Association was founded on March 12, 1959 in Tibet, when thousands of Tibetan women in Lhasa gathered at the Potala Palace to protest against the Chinese occupation and suffered brutally at the hands of Chinese troops. In exile, women’s groups were re-established and the TWA now boasts over 15,000 members and 52 branches worldwide. TWA's aspires to raise public awareness of the abuses Tibetan women suffer in Chinese-occupied Tibet and to serve the exile population by “addressing religious and cultural issues, educational needs, social welfare, the environment and the political participation and social empowerment of women” (About Us TWA). 44 Students for a Free Tibet is a chapter-based network of young people and activists based around the world working in solidarity with the Tibetan people in their struggle for freedom and independence through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action (Students for a Free Tibet). 45 The Gu-Chu-Sum (Tibetan for 9-10-3) Movement of Tibet was established in 1991 in Dharamsala. All 430 members, including monks, nuns, and laypeople are former political prisoners of the Tibetan freedom

27 Jennifer Rowe

Ruppersburg). Tenzin Tsundue, a leading Free Tibet activist, explains the NGOs‟ environmental argument:

The issue of Tibet is no longer about Tibet and China. Tibet, at the roof of the world, 2.5 million square km, is the last storehouse of ice and fresh drinking water and is also the deciding factor in creating a monsoon in India…. As the environment becomes a real issue internationally, especially to Asia, we are gaining more leverage for Tibet; people find more reasons to support Tibet…. We cannot therefore afford to industrialize Tibet, and the only way to solve this is to return Tibet to the Tibetan people…. who have found a unique way of living in that kind of environment as a small population and the whole ideology of Tibetans…. we say that as long as Tibetans are not really owner of Tibet, China is always going to run Tibet in the way they want to run it and industrializing it, urbanizing it.

Tenzin Tsundue and the Free Tibet NGOs cleverly relate the world‟s environmental issues to the romantic notions of traditional Tibet to garner international support for their cause. Here, the motivation is even more overtly political than the EDD, which takes pains to present unbiased, scientific facts. Tsering Yankey comments, “Their [campaign] is political, political in the sense that they want to tell the world what is happening in Tibet.”

For all their lofty environmental rhetoric, scientific claims, and polished publications, the

EDD is essentially a biased media machine with an ambiguous contribution to the larger environmental movement. The EDD serves to popularize the narrative of Tibetan environmentalism explored earlier in this paper. Setting aside the debatable effectiveness of the traditional ecology rhetoric in the independence struggle, this self-interested environmentalism may serve to hide and excuse ecological destruction in modern exile society. China bashing shifts focus away from unsustainable practices among exiled Tibetans and appropriates manpower and energy away from the local environmental movement. Tibetans become environmental celebrities without having to clean their city, much less their economy. Secondly, when the environment is movement. The organization formed out of the wish to help the Tibetans who remain in Chinese prisons and to support the ex-political prisoners living in exile (Gu-Chu-Sum).

28 Jennifer Rowe always viewed in the context of a distant land, it becomes less urgent and less interesting. When the EDD talks to students, they show pictures of mountains and animals the children have never seen and may never set their eyes upon (Norbu46). Thus, rather than teaching responsibility about one‟s local environment, the EDD encourages children to only care for their ancestral home and blame others for its environmental problems.

On the other hand, it is due to this campaign that environmentalism in the modern sense first entered the exile community‟s vocabulary and its circulation has increased exponentially ever since. Moreover, despite their main focus remains China‟s environmental record, the NGOs are beginning to acknowledge that Tibetans must live up to their lofty rhetoric. Tenzin Tsundue elaborates:

If you juxtapose this environmental damage as a result of Chinese occupation then it is an easy black-and-white… But if it is a Tibetan who is doing this, then what will we do? So these days, when I speak among Tibetan community, I say that the promises that we are making today, and the kind of reasons that we are bringing on China for their environmental damage in Tibet, is [what] we must deliver when Tibet is independent.47

Tsundue‟s thinking does admit the possibility of Tibetans acting in a destructive manner, although he still places the need to live sustainably in the future, absolving Tibetans of blame in the present.

The UN Climate Change Conference in 2009 (COP15), to which the EDD and the TWA sent delegations, seems to have pushed Tibetans to accept greater responsibility over their lifestyles and to have sparked a greater interest in sustainable living. For instance, COP15 inspired the TWA to create its own Environment Desk. Tenzin Daedon Sharling, the TWA‟s Research and Media

Officer explains, “we didn‟t really feel the need for [the Environment Desk] until we went to

Copenhagen with the UNFCC and there we did realize how we were lagging behind and how we

46 Jigme Norbu. Interview by author, EDD Office, Dharamsala, India, 28 April 2010. 47 Tenzin Tsundue. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 27 April 2010.

29 Jennifer Rowe had been so blind about this very important thing.48” Although still focused on teaching people the “theoretical path of these types of options”(Daedon49) to be implemented in a future, free

Tibet, the new TWA Environment Desk aims to engage the present refugees with environmental issues. Daedon explains that:

Even when we go back to Tibet and there is a solution to the political crisis the environmental crisis is bound to remain…. What has happened has happened; it cannot be undone and the future is something we have. So I think, more than trying to re-create or get hold of what has been lost, [we must] teach people to preserve and promote and take care of the environment and then to know what is happening inside Tibet (Sharling50).

Tibetans in exile seem to have convinced themselves of their own rhetoric, and are beginning to

“walk the talk.” Having engaged with environmental theory to suit their political needs, the highly reflective Tibetans have taken the message to heart. Thus, what was once a politically motivated concern has taken a more practical turn, evidence that compelling narratives, regardless of their veracity, exert large sway over individuals.

Eco-Government

The EDD and NGOs were not the only ones to take note of HHDL‟s environmental message. In

1989, HHDL won the Nobel Peace Prize for his peaceful philosophy and practice. The Nobel peace prize committee noted HHDL‟s “great reverence for all things living and… concept of universal responsibility embracing all mankind as well as nature. In the opinion of the Committee the Dalai Lama has come forward with constructive and forward-looking proposals for the solution of international conflicts, human rights issues, and global environmental problems” (Nobleprize.org, emphasis added). Clearly, HHDL‟s environmental message had made an impression on the world

48 Tenzin Daedon Sharling. Interview by author. TWA Office, Dharamsala, India, 1 May 2010. 49 Tenzin Daedon Sharling. Interview by author. TWA Office, Dharamsala, India, 1 May 2010. 50 Tenzin Daedon Sharling. Interview by author. TWA Office, Dharamsala, India, 1 May 2010.

30 Jennifer Rowe stage. And yet, despite these accolades, Tibetans in exile continued to live increasingly at odds with the sustainable ideal HHDL espoused. Dharamsala lacked any form of organized waste management and “foreign delegates came to Dharamsala and asked, you say we should live in harmony with the natural environment but what about starting at home?” (TDT, quoted in

Romanowicz51). The environmental fame without environmental substance had finally caught up to the Tibetans. HHDL admitted his embarrassment to these comments, which prompted swift action in the CTA.

Tsering Tenduk, Secretary of the Department of Home52, took responsibility and planned for the Tibetan Welfare Office (TWO), now the Settlement Office, to take charge of Dharamsala‟s waste problem. The TWO initiated the Clean Upper Dharamsala Project (CUDP) in 1994 on

World Environment Day with the primary aim to “raise awareness of environment and waste management and to promote a clean and healthy environment,” according to Tenzin Choedon, an enthusiastic member of the CUDP staff53. The implementation of CUDP would provide Tibetans with their first challenges in actively crafting a sustainable lifestyle and give rise to some of the reoccurring themes that have emerged in the unique brand of Tibetan environmentalism.

The TWO began by confronting the most visible environment problem; they established a waste-segregation system at the home level, separating dry waste (paper, cardboard, plastic, glass) and wet waste (moisture-containing items, such as food). The Office hired “Green Workers” to go door-to-door each morning collecting dry waste. The Green Workers had a tough job; they carried

70-80 kilograms at a time up and down Dharamsala‟s hilly terrain. In 2003 the CUDP received

51 Tenzin Damdul Tenboom, a worker at the Environmental Educaiton Center of the Dharamsala Tibetan Settlement Office. Quoted in Romanowicz. 52 The Department of Home is responsible for looking after the social welfare of the Tibetan citizens (Tashi). 53 Tenzin Choedon. Interview by author, Office, Clean Upper Dharamsala Project, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010.

31 Jennifer Rowe funds to buy three trucks: one that follows the Green Workers, one that drives around the town calling for people to dump their wet waste, and one for collecting large dumpsters. The CUDP established a segregation center on Jogiwara Road, where the Green workers segregate the dry waste into glass, paper, and plastic, which they sell to a middleman. Eventually, the recyclables make their way to their respective recycling factories. Also in 2003, the CUDP worked out a contract with the local Indian municipal council, granting them responsibility and jurisdiction over the Upper Dharamsala area and allowing them to employ 15 sweepers to clean the streets and drainage areas (Choedon). Finally, the CUDP inaugurated the Green Shop in 1994, where a paper workshop produces 100% recyclable paper, notebook, cards, envelopes, and many other paper products that are then sold, along with boiled, filtered water to reduce plastic bottle use

(Choedon) [Figures 5 and 6]. Now, the city recycles a full 60% of its waste (Romanowicz). In this way, the Tibetan government began to take responsibility for keeping clean their immediate environment and Tibetans finally paid more than lip service to environmentalism.

However, creating a sustainable society in a refugee setting turns out to be no easy task, requiring persistence and creativity. Wet waste has proven especially difficult. The Green

Workers bring wet material to a dumpsite under the care of the Indian Municipal Council.

Choedon warns that “you do not want to see the dumpsite because it is gross; you can see animals and sometimes you can see fires, so really, you do not want to see it.54” With the objective of reducing waste, the CUDP attempted to compost the wet waste but the initiative failed because, as

Choedon explains, “the public has its own myth that composting stinks and it attracts unwanted

54 Tenzin Choedon. Interview by author, Office, Clean Upper Dharamsala Project, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010.

32 Jennifer Rowe animals and there are lots of them in India.55” However, Tibetans, accustomed to adapting to endless challenges presented by the exile situation, were up to the task. Not ready to give up, the creative and enthusiastic team at CUDP convinced Upper Tibetan Children‟s Village School

(TCV)56 to collaborate on a demonstration compost project. The school donated a plot for a new compositing building and CUDP began to experiment with composting at the facility. Recently,

TIPA consented to a similar trial project for vermicomposting57. CUDP would like these two projects to serve as examples to other institutes and to eventually kick-start a home-level composting program (Choedon58). In this way, the waste problem has given Tibetans their first challenges and successes in tackling environmental problems and demonstrated what they were capable of if they chose to combine their creativity and fundraising aptitude with environmental will.

In this way, the CUDP has served as a model for other Tibetan and Indian communities

(Choedon59). They regularly hosts workshops in Dharamsala and send staff members to the other

Tibetan settlements. Waste management began in the five southern Tibetan settlements in 1992,

55 Tenzin Choedon. Interview by author, Office, Clean Upper Dharamsala Project, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010. 56 Following the urging of HHDL, his elder sister, Mrs. Tsering Dolma Takla, founded the Nursery for Tibetan Refugee Children in 1960 as a center for destitute children arriving in Dharamsala from road construction camps. The Nursery soon passed into the hands of HHDL’s younger sister, Jetsun Pema after Tsering Dolma Takla’s untimely death. When residential schools in exile filled to capacity, the Nursery re-organized into a small village, now Upper TCV, with its own school and homes and was renamed Tibetan Children’s Village. TCV has since expanded with the help of international funding to other Tibetan settlements in Ladakh, Bylakuppe, Bir, Gopalpur, Chauntra, and Dehradun (History). Forty-nine years after its founding, it cares for 16,726 children (Pema). 57 Vermicomposting is the use of worms to convert organic materials into a humus-like material can be added to agricultural soil to help in retaining moisture, holding nutrients, developing soil structure, and encouraging microbial activity (Munroe 2, 30). 58 Tenzin Choedon. Interview by author, Office, Clean Upper Dharamsala Project, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010. 59 Tenzin Choedon. Interview by author, Office, Clean Upper Dharamsala Project, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010

33 Jennifer Rowe backed by the Department of Home and funded by IM-SOIR60 (Dorjee). Mr. Ngodup Dorjee, a

Department of Home staff member, explains that each community‟s Settlement Officer61 is charged with implementing a waste management system: communicating to the citizens how to segregate at home, hiring staff to collect the waste, maintaining a collection point, and selling the recyclable material in a way that “doesn‟t affect the environment or atmosphere62.” The major obstacle, Dorje explains, is in creating a landfill. Most Tibetans lack Indian citizenship and are thus prohibited from owning land, and acquiring an area for the purpose of trash disposal is even more problematic. Consequently, the 55% of garbage that is not sold to retailers is simply added to a “dump-pit,” which is little more than a covered hole63. The waste management situation was therefore spread active Tibetan environmentalism from its locus in Dharamsala to outlying settlements, creating a unique set of advantages, such as sympathetic donors, and obstacles, such as poor infrastructure in its wake.

Tsering Lhamo, the current Bir Settlement Officer, further exemplifies the resourcefulness and determination Tibetans have show carrying out a social movement in a refugee situation. Bir is a small community of 1,000 Tibetans a few hours from Dharamsala and the location of TCV

Suja school, which itself is home to 2,000 children. Lhamo decided to start working on environmental issues in her community and began learning from others with exceptional openness to opinions and ideas, a characteristic I found characterized of many Tibetans. Tesi

60 IM-SOIR is a Swedish aid organization that works to fight and expose aid and exclusion (IM-SOIR 2008). 61 Exiled Tibetans have the right to elect their own settlement officers or request appointees from the Home Department. Most have decided in favor of appointees. CTA is making concerted efforts to encourage people to elect their own leaders, which is seen as important to Tibetan political maturity. (Department of Home 2009). Tsering Lhamo, Bir Settlement Officer remarked that “as a settlement officer I need to have knowledge of each and every thing: education, health, finance, social activities, religious activities, physical activities.” 62 Ngodup Dorjee. Interview by author. Department of Home Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 April 2010. 63 Ngodup Dorjee. Interview by author. Department of Home Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 April 2010.

34 Jennifer Rowe

Environmental Awareness Movement (TEAM)64, a Tibetan NGO, came to Bir to give a workshop about garbage segregation. Lhamo notes that, “it was a very big coincidence, maybe the gods know that we [were] in need of a teacher65.” Lhamo also received “hope and inspiration” from Prashant

Varma and Jennifer Yo, administrators of Deer Park Institute.66 Deer Park, under the guidance of ecological coordinator Srinjoy Ghosh, had previously launched a zero-waste system [Figure 7]. The

Institute segregates garbage, sells what it can recycle, composts biodegradables, and re-uses the rest in handicrafts it sells in a campus shop (Gosh67). Through maintaining a positive relationship with executives at Deer Park, Lhamo has learnt from the Institutes‟ prior experiences. Besides working her local partners, Lhamo, has further displayed the Tibetan flair for generating international support; she obtained funding from a group of Canadian students to purchase bamboo trash bins for each family. Finally, she arranged a weekly pick-up schedule and appointed a woman to maintain the segregation facility [Figure 8].

However, funding is not the only hurtle Lhamo has come up against while implementing waste management in the refugee community; she faces an uphill battle because most of the Bir inhabitants are either elderly or uneducated and therefore ignorant of modern environmental knowledge. Furthermore, she struggles “Trying to get people to understand that it is their

64 TEAM is a non-profit Tibetan environmental organization that “aims to empower Tibetans to live a sustainable and eco-friendly way of life through the combination of traditional Tibetan spiritual values with modern scientific knowledge about ecology” (TEAM). TEAM will be discussed in depth later in this paper. 65 Tsering Lhamo. Interview by author. Settlement Office, Bir, India, 3 May 2010. 66 Originally a Buddhist College of Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, Deer Park Institute was transformed in 2006 into a center for the study of classical Indian wisdom traditions with the vision of re- creating the spirit of Nalanda, the great university of ancient India in which Buddhism was studied and practiced (The Institute). Deer Park has initiated an impressive ecological program, beginning with a zero- waste system for its own waste, while simultaneously becoming active in the local community by hosting workshops on segregation sustainable agriculture, developing an environmental education resource center, creating a sustainable livelihood training program, and even convincing the Himachal government to create a government-run recycling system and to reuse plastics for road construction (Ecology & Gosh). 67 Srinjoy Gosh. Interview by author. Deer Park, Bir, India, 2 May 2010.

35 Jennifer Rowe responsibility to come and bring the garbage and not throw the things everywhere” (Lhamo68). In the past, although Tibetans did not understand their world scientifically, they harbored a respect, which Roy Rapport considers more important in ecological living:

Knowledge will never replace respect in man‟s dealings with ecological systems, for the ecological systems in which man participates are likely to be so complex that he may never have sufficient comprehension of their content and structure to permit him to predict the outcome of many of his own acts (Roy Rapport cited in LaChapelle).

Here, again is the “ra-ma-lug” (neither goat nor sheep) to which Passang Tsering referred. Tibetan environmentalists have had to face the Tibetan community‟s lack of both modern environmental awareness and the innate respect and awareness of the environment that had allowed them to live sustainably for centuries.

To address this predicament, Lhamo endeavors to “combine Tibetan culture with Western education… to try to make a common ground” so that the people “will [better] understand.

Otherwise, if they think that the traditional way is different and the modern education is different, then they won‟t relate to it. We need to make a relationship between Western education and

Tibetan education.69” The need to adapt to the exile situation with its inescapable modernity, while simultaneously maintaining the positive qualities of Tibetan culture, is a puzzle Lhamo shares with many of the other Tibetans working on environmental issues. Emphasizing both the modern and traditional aspects of environmentalism, Lhamo has initiated the creation of 34 modern compost structures, highlighting the traditional, “common sense” use of organic matter in

Tibetan culture. Meanwhile, she spreads modern environmental awareness through film showings

68 Tsering Lhamo. Interview by author. Settlement Office, Bir, India, 3 May 2010. 69 Tsering Lhamo. Interview by author. Settlement Office, Bir, India, 3 May 2010.

36 Jennifer Rowe and discussions70, while engendering a feeling of responsibly through a 10 Rupee per month environmental fee. Lhamo expects feels that “even if they are not working directly…they are contributing something for the environment” (Lhamo71). The attention given to the cultivation of ecological values, as opposed to simple awareness building, is unique, in my experience, to the

Tibetan approach to environmentalism. As HHDL articulated in his speech Ecology and the Human

Heart, “In order to succeed in the protection and conservation of the natural environment, I think it is important first of all to bring about an internal balance within human beings themselves… if we have a genuine sense of universal responsibility as our central motivation, then our relations with the environment will be well balanced” (Gyatso 2007 Ecology:11).

Eco-Agriculture

As progressive and important as the waste segregation programs emerging in the settlements were,

Tibetans could still be criticized for worrying only about their appearances. As Tsering Yankey of

TEAM notes, “Before… the environment was never a serious issue. Environment meant only cleaning rubbish from your area and being healthy72.” However, the Tibetans, with their toes already dipped into the environmental current, were beginning to wake up to environmental issues beyond McLeod Ganj‟s streets. Tsering Yankey explains that:

Now, the environment is a danger. Our collective industrialization, random consumerist culture and practices [have] denuded the resources of the world to such a level that today [they have] become a scare. The water that is dirty is now becoming a hazard, people are going blind, people cannot drink water…. so it is really becoming a threat. People are really awakening to this reality very recently.73

70 Lhamo finds that “Teachers talking all day is boring” and so prefers to show films and provoke discussion. 71 Tsering Lhamo. Interview by author. Settlement Office, Bir, India, 3 May 2010. 72 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 73 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

37 Jennifer Rowe

Thus, following the trajectory of the Environmental Kuznets Curve74, the Tibetan exile community first came to realize the importance of sustainability after their immediate needs as refugees were met but modernization had begun to take its toll on their quality of life. With waste disposal improving in leaps and bounds, the CTA turned its attention to making more sustainable food production. As mentioned earlier, exiled Tibetans were taught new methods of agriculture in the hey-day of the Green Revolution. Chemical farming proved very attractive to the Tibetans; one had only to work 3 to 5 months per year, in contrast to the year-round effort demanded by natural production. Consequently, almost all farmers began using fertilizers and pesticides, unaware of their negative effects on the soil and environment.

In 2005, the CTA launched an initiative to replace the existing chemical-oriented practices with organic and natural farming in Tibetan settlements (Department of Home 2009). Tsering

Yankey notes how the organic farming policy came from the government in exile whereas, in most countries, citizens must lobby “against the government to enact certain policies… but for us, our government is very pro-nature.75” With newfound sincerity, the Tibetan government became taking bold steps to address environmental issues. The Department of Home installed an agriculture extension officer in each settlement to introduce and educate organic and natural farming concepts [Figure 9]. Without forcing anyone to convert unwillingly, the officers provide expert training on soil nutrition using different manures, methods of sowing, seasonal cultivation of vegetables, animal husbandry, and orchard planting. The officers teach in Tibetan and try to

74 The Environmental Kuznets Curve is a hypothesized relationship between indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. In early stages of economic growth, degradation and pollution increase but then the trend reverses after a certain level of per capita income, creating an inverted U-shaped function (Stern). 75 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

38 Jennifer Rowe focus on practical learning (Tashi76). In urban areas and small settlements, the CTA hosts trainings on maintaining organic kitchen gardens.

For many, switching to organic is a difficult process of re-learning. As Tsering Yankey explains, “Our people are not willing to go [organic] because they say, when we first came into exile, we only knew organic and at that time you told us to go conventional and now we don‟t have

[enough] hands – we are [only] two elderly people… and now you are telling us to go organic?77”

Chinese and Indian authorities had characterized organic farming methods as regressive and backward, leaving a powerful impression. To convince Tibetan farmers of organic production‟s merits, the department drew upon both the traditional heritage of Tibet and modern ecological thought. Tashi Yangzom, a staff member of the Department of Home working on the organic program, says, “We explain that we are not going to new things with organic but we were already doing these things in Tibet. We were not using chemicals.78” At the same time, the department brings in a mix of modern organic agriculture specialists to give talks and workshops. The organic program has been a true test of Tibetan environmental will, as the initial conversion results in a longer working season and a lowering of yield before the soil quality recovers. The jury is still out on the program, but Tashi says the farmers know organic will take a while to pay off but are nevertheless in it for the long haul, having witnessed the slow depletion of their soil and environment and corresponding decrease in production over the past few decades. Thus, with the organic program, the Tibetan government has taken a risk, trusting that the Tibetan people will rise to the challenge with their faith in HHDL‟s leadership and signature adaptability. In doing so,

76 Tashi Yangzom. Interview by author. Department of Home, Dharamsala, India, 30 April 2010. 77 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 78 Tashi Yangzom. Interview by author. Department of Home, Dharamsala, India, 30 April 2010.

39 Jennifer Rowe the CTA demonstrated its commitment to creating a sustainable society against all obstacles.

Eco-Activism

Behind the maturation of the Tibetan environmental movement from garbage collectors to climate activists stands a strong and endearing woman, often quoted in this paper: Tsering Yankey.

Yankey was born in a Tibetan settlement in Ladakh, India, where she remembers writing on the blackboard with dry cell batteries collected from dumpsters and burning plastic to keep herself warm. When she attended college in the United States, she was shocked to learn how toxic many of her behaviors had been. However, her initial astonishment paled in comparison to the dismay she felt when she returned to Ladkah to find her nieces and nephews engaging in the same activities. Yankey judged that:

If I want to tell my nephews and nieces, [they] are just two people. But if we have one organization and we go village to village to village then maybe more people will know… so that is why we started this campaign... we thought we should do something because the government in exile sent us to school to study environmental pollution and control. We know this information, but if we don‟t tell our people, then they will not know79.

Yankey became painfully aware that her people lacked the information necessary to make sound environmental choices. She felt that “if you want to get information then you have to know the language of the elite… so we felt that we should at least translate everything that is available in

English so that people can at least know about it. But the choice is in their hand…. We wanted to give a choice to our people… they have the right to know.80”

Yankey began working for the EDD but tired of blaming China “because as a Tibetan we are doing the same to India. We are not building railroads, we are not building huge mining

79 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 80 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

40 Jennifer Rowe zones… but we are still participating and doing all these environmentally destructive things.81”

Yankey realized that living in exile had disrupted education, enculturation and the transmission of knowledge and values, leading to a loss of ecological sensibility and propensity toward sustainability (Bradshaw 2007:305). Where, fifty years ago, Tibetans would never burn trash or pollute a water source, nowadays Yankey frequently observes 70-year-old men burning in their backyard. Yankey claims, “They have lost their gods. People lost their connection with something grand” and she worries that, “the kids have lost the most. In Tibet all kids grew up with their parents. Now, almost 80% of our kids grow up in boarding schools where they learn everything modern and nothing Tibetan. We are losing our wisdom culture”82.

In an attempt to reverse this worrisome trend, Yankey founded the Tesi Environmental

Awareness Movement (TEAM) along with five colleagues in 2005. The team aimed to restore

Tibetan ecological consciousness and to rekindle a sense of respect for and feeling of interdependence with the environment (Bradshaw 2007:305). Yankey notes that, in contrast to the western world, Tibetans have only lived separated from the natural world for 50 years.

Therefore, “for us it is easier to get back to nature than for those people who lost their connection

400 years ago… So we tell them that it is our chance. If we pass another 20, then we may not even get it [back]83.” For the past five years, the organization has worked to spread awareness to students, monks, nuns, government officials, and lay people. The staff members, currently numbering three Yankey, Phuntsok, a monk, and Karma Sonam Dhargyal, a young man recently

81 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 82 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 83 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

41 Jennifer Rowe arrived from Tibet [Figure 10] have visited at least 60 to 70 schools and institutions in Tibetan settlements from Kalachakra in south India to Ladakh in the north.

TEAM‟s approach is similar to Tsering Lhamo‟s in its combination of traditional belief systems and contemporary ecological knowledge (Bradshaw 2007:305 and Yankey). TEAM‟s educational programs emphasize Buddhist metaphysic of interdependence and the virtues of ahimsa and compassion (Bradshaw 2007:306). Nonetheless, Yankey borrows freely from modern ecological thought, and has been deeply affected by the deep ecology84 movement, in particular the writings of John Seed, and uses methods such as the “Council of All Beings”85 in her workshops

(Bradshaw 2007:306 and Yankey). Yankey is clear that she does not want to prevent people from having open and progressive minds. She freely makes use of PowerPoint, laptops, and projectors and strives to maintain a balanced view of modernity:

We also tell them that okay, modern science [has given] us atom bombs and… all these pesticides and fertilizers… But then there are scientists who are doing research day and night and [tell] us: do not burn this plastic, and this has got dioxin, and do not eat this thing it is GM86. So there are pros and cons about everything. But then you have to know what good scientists are saying, what environmentally conscious people are saying. So we say that one thing is developing our ecological consciousness and another thing is telling people what the modern scientists have told us… So not only we tell them that our traditional wisdom culture is good but we also tell what modern scientists have taught us…. using solar lights to cook your food… harvesting rainwater… composting.87

Yankey‟s approach seems to be making inroads; one woman at a lecture said afterward that she had become “guilty-conscious” and remarked that, “so many things, bad things, are happening in

84 Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the term ‘Deep ecology’ in the early 1970s to describe a new approach to looking at and relating to the natural world (Definition). He called for a return to a more personal, holistic, and ecological sense of the self and an understanding of the inteconnectivity of all life at both intellectual and experiential levels (Barnett 16-17). 85 The ‘Council of All Beings’ is an exercise developed by John Seed and Joanna Macy in which participants explore their ecological identity by taking the perspective of another being in the world, by wearing a mask and lending their voice to the being, in an imaginary council (Barnett 111). 86 Genetically Modified. 87 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

42 Jennifer Rowe this earth: earthquake, tornadoes, so many things. She talked about global warming or climate change and she felt that it was because we are polluting the heavenly world too much” (Yankey88).

This combination of Tibetan spiritual conviction and modern environmental vocabulary typifies

TEAM‟s style of environmental activism.

At first, TEAM‟s ideas were not met with enthusiasm. The CTA, Delek hospital, the

Tibetan Medical Institute, and the Tibetan Women‟s Association continue to burn their trash following campus clean-ups, despite Yankey‟s frequent lectures on the topic. This year, the TEAM staff photographed CTA staff as they ironically burnt trash on World Health Day. During important pujas89, Tsunlagkhang, the temple of HHDL, serves rice in disposable foil plates and butter tea in Styrofoam cups. The most common offerings for the pujas are biscuits covered in plastic wrappers. Aside from the consistently environmentally minded HHDL and His Holiness the Karmapa, the monastic community has proved an even tougher nut to crack. Tsering Yankey recollects, “When we tell them not to burn, they burn. When we tell them not to mix biodegradables and non-biodegradables, they mix. So they do not listen to us90.”

In a representative incident of the community‟s resistance, TEAM received negative feedback for a poster depicting Tibetan people sporting tiger and leopard skins. People commented that “you have [gone] to a western school and you have that western mentality. All this good culture of ours, all this very beautiful-looking Tibetan culture, you are linking that with killing animals and you are bringing a bad name to our community” (Yankey91). However, the issue gained considerable traction when, in 2005, HHDL admitted his embarrassment that

88 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 89 A puja is an act of devotion, usually involving the offering of food or drink. 90 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 91 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

43 Jennifer Rowe

Tibetan people wore endangered species skins. Following his speech, people all over Tibet and

India stopped wearing furs and wished to dispose of them. TEAM received hundreds of animal pelts from all over India, and, being neither allowed or inclined to keep them, decided to chop up the skins to create an endangered species memorial pillar in the image of the Buddha located along Tsunlagkhang‟s ling-khor92. Yankey recalls that, “when His Holiness the Dalai Lama [said] something, then the movement came. So it made our work so easy93.” This incident would provide inspiration for TEAM‟s current campaign involving monastics in her environmental message, to which I will return later.

Tsering Yankey takes minor setbacks in stride and endeavors to educate but never preach.

She feels that her job is to provide the Tibetan people with knowledge of the environmental consequences of their actions:

We felt that information is needed and that people do not have information. Everything is in English or German or French but nothing in Tibetan. If you want to get information then you have to know the language of the elite- and that is not available. So we felt that we should at least do something to translate everything that is available in English that we can find so that people can at least know about it.94

Towards this goal, TEAM works to translate important environmental works into Tibetan, gives presentations in Tibetan language, and provides copies of published material on the organization‟s website. However, Yankey is careful never to push her audiences too far and recognizes that individuals‟ choices are ultimately in their own hands. TEAM‟s goal is not to coerce. Instead, the staff members wish to:

92 Ling-khor is Tibetan for a longer circumambulation (or khora) around a temple. The Tsunlagkhang Temple’s ling-khor is frequented, often twice daily, by a large percentage of Dharamsala’s Tibetan population. 93 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 94 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

44 Jennifer Rowe

Give a choice to our people. If they know that this coca-cola has got pesticides, if they know that coca-cola has just carbonated water or water from some Indian, pesticide-laden city, then if they still want to drink it, that is their own fault…. But at least they have the right to know95.

TESI has also become more skillful in conveying environmental concepts to their varied Tibetan audiences. At first, they felt an “urgent need to tell them of everything they [didn‟t] know”

(Yankey96). However, this only resulted in confusion. Now, they prefer to choose one topic and speak at the level of their audience. In schools, they tell convey their message with skits and dramas. For adults, they explain using analogies how nature knows what to do with its own products, but is confused by man-made products produced by machines. Thus, by responding to criticism and learning from its mistakes, TEAM has become a highly effective in communicating and engaging with its target audience.

TEAM‟s efforts have paid off. When the NGO began, “it was just one organization”

(Yankey97). Soon after, however, HHDL, Samdhong Rinpoche, and His Holiness the Karmapa

(henceforth HHKM) began talking more and more about environmental issues in their major talks and speeches. HHKM started environmental organizations in each of his 36 monasteries (Yankey).

With the support of the Tibetans‟ most respected role models, TEAM‟s message has caught on in the exile community, making their work “so easy” (Yankey). Just a few years ago, when TEAM handed out their pamphlets, people would say “Aw, this is about environment and [they] didn‟t even read them or take them. And then last year people kept coming and asking us for more”

(Yankey98).

95 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 96 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 97 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 98 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

45 Jennifer Rowe

FUTURE GROWTH

Eco-Kids

The work of the CTA and TEAM has transported environmentalism from a romanticized past into the present reality of the refugees‟ lives. However, awareness building takes time and changes in societal values, even longer. The exile community has a long way to go before it is completely sustainable. Thus, CTA and TEAM have taken the long-view, as HHDL always encourages, and have focused efforts on two populations critical to an ecological future: children and monastics.

Schoolchildren form one of TEAM‟s core target groups, for it is in their hands that the future of Tibet, and indeed the whole world lies. Student involvement in the environmental movement began in the 1990s, when a number of Green Clubs sprung up in TCV schools.

However, these clubs, in parallel to adult environmental interests in the time, focused upon garbage. The clubs were therefore reduced to providing janitorial services, a sure-fire way of smoldering student interest (Yankey99). For example, at CHTS, the Green Club‟s activities are limited to collecting garbage on Saturdays to sort and sell (Sonam100). Tenzin Jamyang, enigmatic leader of the Upper TCV „My Climate‟ Club explains that:

It depends upon the in-charge, who is involved. It should be a good leader and if there is no leader then definitely it will fade away because of that. That is the reason- no one is taking that little bit more effort. You need that to carry on these environmental projects; you need these sensitivities, these values, otherwise these are all social work and may not give you any kind of money. It will just take something from you…. That is the main reason – we do not have capable personalities or people who can take special initiative101.

Thus, without engaging leaders to provide inspiration and new ideas and their time, student interest quickly fades.

99 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 100 Sonam. Interview by author. Department of Home, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010. 101 Tenzin Jamyang. Interview by author. Upper TCV Office, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010.

46 Jennifer Rowe

However, in a few schools, environmental clubs remain popular. TEAM supports these students financially, as Yankey wants “kids to think that serving earth is serving humanity. Picking trash may be part of it but enjoying nature is more than that” (Yankey102). TEAM members speak at school assemblies and organize a leadership program where they take kids out on a type of nature quest in an attempt to encourage the enjoyment of nature. This has become increasingly important as young children spend more and more time indoors with the TV, video games, and the Internet (Tsering). Although the land they spend time in is not their homeland, Yankey tells children that “Whatever you do in India will also benefit all sentient beings including Tibetans, including yaks in Tibet, including all the wildlife in Tibet.103” Yankey finds children highly receptive to her message, remarking that, in some ways, “Kids are brighter, kids are more intelligent than adults104.” Indeed, many of the green club members show an impressive desire to serve their communities. Inpa Loden, president an Environment Club, told me that he is happy to wake up early on Sundays to clean because “we have to do something for our society or our school.105” Lobsang Yiken, Inpa‟s classmate, adds that at TCV, “Foods and room are free so we must do it. I do not feel regret, I feel happy.106”

Inpa and Lobsang‟s Environment Club belongs to TCV Suja107 and is headed by Passang

Tsering‟s sister, Yangdon. The TCV Suja Green Club was formed to run the school‟s waste segregation program; the 18 students wake up early on Mondays and Fridays to segregate the campus garbage and meet each Sunday for a campus cleaning [Figure 11]. However, their work

102 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 103 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 104 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 105 Inpa Loden. Interview by author. TCV Suja, Bir, India, 2 May 2010. 106 Lobsang Yiken. Interview by author. TCV Suja, Bir, India, 3 May 2010. 107 TCV Suja is a residential school located 75 km from Dharamsala (TCV). The majority of students were sent over from Tibet for schooling as young children.

47 Jennifer Rowe extends beyond cleaning. Under Yangdon‟s guidance, they have found creative ways for recycling the materials collected around the school, fashioning seat cushions out of shredded wrappers, bookmarks out of milk cartons, small stools out of egg cartons, and penholders out of old computer floppy disks, which they sell along with recyclable materials and old clothes they collect and wash by the river (Yangdon108).

The students are inspired by HHKM, who takes a great interest in their school. HHKM recently gave a talk about the interaction between Buddhism and the environment. Encouraged by HHKM‟s book, 108 Things You Can Do for the Environment, the Environment Club has broadened their efforts beyond the schoolyard, volunteering for monthly cleanings of the local Bir community. The determined children persisted despite insects, injuries involving broken glass, and a hot mid-day sun. Students recently hosted a street campaign for saving water and preventing air pollution and are planning a beatification campaign for the school, as soon as funds are raised for buying flowers. Meanwhile, a new green shed, sponsored by an outside group, is under construction, which will house a storeroom and office (Shine109). The combination between hard- working students, HHKM‟s encouragement, and Yangdon‟s continuous new supply of interesting projects has kept the Suja Environment Club thriving.

A young and enthusiastic science teacher, Tenzin Jamyang, has recently reinvigorated the

Upper TCV Green Club in Dharamsala, demonstrating how, in the right hands, environmental issues can be made exciting enough to lure school kids away from their after-school activities. In

April of 2009, Jamyang became the staff leader of the Green Club, which he renamed „My

108 Yangdon. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 2 May 2010. 109 Sonam Shine. Interview by author. TCV Suja, Bir, India, 3 May 2010.

48 Jennifer Rowe

Climate110 Club,‟ allied with an organization of the same name based in Europe that serves as a network of student environmental clubs [Figure 12]. Jamyang selects 30 of the now hundreds of interested students to join him in carrying out a diversity of projects, including a CFL111 replacement campaign involving skits [Figure 13], signed contracts, and saved-energy calculations, reusing milk cartons with English teacher Tenzin Palmo112 [Figure 14], bamboo planting, anti-litter patrolling, additions to the My Climate website113, and conversations with their partner class in

Switzerland (Jamyang114). Jamyang‟s devotion to the cause, focus on “straight action” and endless new ideas has given the club new life. Tenzin Shagya, a My Climate member in class eleven remembers:

During the first time when we participated in climate project [other students] just think it is a waste of time but after seeing the consequences and the active participation and the different way of integrating the way of saving the environment… a new interest developed in their minds. There are so many new comers and there are so many students who used to tell our teacher, can I participate?115

110 My Climate is run by a carbon-offset corporation of the same name. The goal of My Climate’s “hot stuff- chill out” climate education project is to connect young people from various countries in an information- sharing network about climate change. Interested classes from across the world work together to analyze their own climate habits, swap stories about climate change impacts in their homeland, and share sustainability advice while learning about interdependence, empathy, shared responsibility, and solidarity (My Climate). 111CFL stands for compact fluorescent bulb. CFLs pass electricity through a gas-filled tube, initiating a chemical reaction that gives off light, producing a cooler, more efficient light than conventional incandescent bulbs which lose 90% of their energy in the form of heat. 112 Tenzin Palmo is in charge of supplying teaching materials to TCV’s English classrooms. She uses recycled materials, primarily milk tetrapack cartons, to create an astounding diversity of teaching aids, including bookmarks, newspaper clippings, comic strips, synonym-antonym playing cards, language games, and dictionary flashcards. 113 www.hotstuffchillout.org. 114 Tenzin Jamyang. Interview by author. Upper TCV Office, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010. 115 Tenzin Shagya. Interview by author. Upper TCV, Dharamsala India, 10 May 2010.

49 Jennifer Rowe

Talking to Jamyang and his bright, enthusiastic young students, such as Tenzin Dadeon, class nine, who professes “I want to do something for my society through this environment club,116” it is hard not to become optimistic about the community‟s sustainable future.

Despite these active clubs, the Tibetan school system scores less spectacularly in its inclusion of environmentalism into its curriculum. The Basic Education Policy for Tibetans in Exile, the cornerstone of Samdhong Rinpoche‟s campaign for Prime Minister, includes as a purpose of education the propagation of HHDL‟s principle of Universal Responsibility and training the

Tibetan people to “preserve the natural environment of Tibet” (Department of Home and

Department of Education). However, the TCV schools do not generally teach about the environment as a separate course. Instead, they arrange occasional talks from TEAM or CUDP, include class sections on the environment in science and social studies classes, and emphasize the responsibility to keep one‟s surroundings clean (Shine117 and Gyalpo118). Recently, TCV has begun including more information about the environment in its textbooks and structuring lessons around the themes of the environment, society, communities, and families (Gyalpo119). Inclusion of environment as a subject in class will hopefully encourage students to view the study as a serious subject and stimulate a maturation of the environmental movement in the exile community.

Eco-Monks and Eco-Nuns

Another key group to the future of Tibet‟s environmental movement is the monastic community, which serves as the community‟s moral compass. The influence of monastics has lent the Tibetan environmental movement a character distinct from similar campaigns across the world. As

116 Tenzin Daedon. Interview by author. Upper TCV, Dharamsala India, 10 May 2010. 117 Sonam Shine. Interview by author. TCV Suja, Bir, India, 3 May 2010. 118 Dhondhup Gyalpo. Interview by author. Upper TCV Office, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010. 119 Dhondhup Gyalpo. Interview by author. Upper TCV Office, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010.

50 Jennifer Rowe explained earlier, Buddhist philosophy contains strong ecological messages and encourages a holistic, interdependent view of life. Moreover, HHDL, the religious head of the Tibetan community, has spoken strongly on the environment for over two decades. However, the larger monastic community has been less involved in social issues. Ven. Geshe Lakhdor explains, “with your traditional studies it is more intellectual study and philosophy. You have good motivation and [are a] nice person and all these things are great but still you are not so much fully engaging….

I am trying to also encourage them to come out and do something practical.120” Moreover, monks have not remained environmentally faultless; many monasteries burn trash, fail to compost or recycle, and have canteens selling Coca-Cola, Lay‟s potato chips, and other packaged goods

(Yankey121). Tsering Yankey at TEAM has even found some monks to be resistant to her suggestions, attributing her difficulty to the uncomfortable reversal of the usual roles of advisor

(monastic) and advisee (lay person).

Rather than become discouraged, Tsering Yankey decided to use the respect afforded to monastics to her advantage:

Because we are Buddhist… we believe in the wisdom of the monastic community. For us as an NGO we can do this much, but if we have the monks and nuns support then we can do much more122. We need help from the monastic community (TEAM).

To this end, TEAM recently hosted a day-long monastic eco-forum the week of June 5th (TEAM).

At the forum, monks were solicited for their ecological wisdom. In this, TEAM intended to both learn from the monks and engage them going into the community together to create a bigger movement. Two monks or nuns each from 15 monasteries and nunneries gathered to discuss the

120 Ven. Geshe Lakhdor La. Tibetan Library of Works and Archives, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010. 121 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010. 122 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

51 Jennifer Rowe theme: The Role of Tibetan Monastic Communities in Environmental Protection. The forum emphasized the role the monastic community has played in shaping Tibetan society toward better living and brainstormed on how the monastics could now help lead the way toward increasing sustainability (TEAM). Topics included from Buddhism and Ecology, Traditional Tibetan Eco- friendly Culture, Tibet‟s Current Environmental Conditios, and Health and Junk Food (TEAM).

TEAM also bestowed an environmental service award to HHKM‟s environmental association of

Kagyu monasteries, Rangjung Khoryug Sungkyob Tsokpa. The conference met with spectacular reviews. Ven. Lobsang, one participant said, “This is my first time attending such an eco-forum. I am now all committed and energized to truly do something for Earth. There are many things we can do. I like writing and from now onwards I plan to write on environmental issues to promote environmental awareness in our communities” (TEAM). Thus, Yankey‟s tactics of cooperation and quiet encouragement have turned a once reluctant community into environmental activists.

However, not all monastics are in need of ecological encouragement. Rather, a growing number have taken a keen interest in environmental issues. Of note is His Holiness the Karmapa, who has become exceptionally active on environmental issues (Yankey123). HHKM writes that, born in 1985 in a very remote area, he grew up experiencing the old Tibetan way of life imbued with traditional ecological knowledge and respect. He remembers planting a tree as a child to protect his family‟s local spring and then asking his father to look after it once he joined the monastery (Dorje 3008:2). This seemed to have made an impression on the young monk, and he requested that environmental protection be incorporated into the program of the 25th Kagyu

123 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

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Monlam124 in 2007, where he advised all his monasteries and the public to engage actively in environmental protection (Dorje 2008:2).

From this beginning, HHKM began an annual environmental conference attended by each of the 37 Kagyu monasteries from India, Bhutan, and Nepal over which he presides. At these seven-day-long gatherings, the monasteries share what ecological actions they have undertaken in the past year and commit to a plan for the next. HHKM gives his advice and invites experts to speak on an assortment of environmental topics. During the year, HHKM and his monasteries post news and updates on their projects at a website launched for this purpose in 2009,

Khogyug.com. Finally, after the conference is over, HHKM encourages the monks to share what they learned with their monasteries and communities (Wangpo125). HHKM has agrees with

Tsering Yankey that monks and nuns, as influential people in Tibetan society, should take responsibility moving society in a positive direction, as their impact will be more powerful than that of ordinary people (Dorje126). As monk, Karma Tenjong Wangpo explains, “People believe the monks, lamas, and Rinpoches even when they do not believe each other. So it is important for monks to teach about the environment.127” HHKM also feels that more current messages on environmentalism are too few and too focused upon the scientific viewpoint; he wishes to see environmentalists incorporate traditional ways of thinking such as Buddhist teachings into their campaigns (Dorje128).

124 Monlam, also known as The Great Prayer Festival, is a large religious festival occurring at the start of the Tibetan year. 125 Karma Tenjong Wangpo. Interview by Author. Gyuto Monastery, India. 12 May 2010. 126 Ogyen Drodul Trinley Dorje. Interview by Francisco Santamarina. Gyuto Monastery, India. 26 May 2010. 127Karma Tenjong Wangpo, Interview by Author. Gyuto Monastery, India. 12 May 2010. 128 Ogyen Drodul Trinley Dorje. Interview by Francisco Santamarina. Gyuto Monastery, India. 26 May 2010.

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HHKM has embodied these ideas in two publications. In One Hundred and eight Things You

Can Do to Help the Environment [Figure 16], he details 108 suggested environmental actions for

Tibetans inside and outside Tibet (Dorje 2009). The exhaustive list is an accumulation from many sources, reflecting HHKM‟s willingness to learn as well as advise. Tsering Yankey notes that, when she gave TEAM‟s publications to HHKM‟s monks, “They were so happy… and people keep coming and asking us for more” (Yankey129). In 2008, HHKM presented his advice in a more sophisticated and organized booklet entitled Environmental Guidelines For Karma Kagyu Buddhist Monasteries,

Centers, and Community. The booklet begins with a forward by HHKM and a summary of

Buddhist environmental thought. It then continues with sections on forest protection, water protection, wildlife protection, waste management, and climate change, each including an outline of the problem and what can be done about it before listing specific guidelines. Beautiful illustrations and an aspiration prayer painted and written by HHKM himself, easy-to-read diagrams, and a professional presentation make the guide as accessible as it is informative (Dorje

2008).

HHKM‟s efforts have started to have tangible effects on the monastic community. At

Gyuto monastery, where HHKM resides, Karma Tenjong Wangpo, a young Kagyu monk, came to meet me after he heard I expressed an interest in environmental matters, remarking that he enjoys teaching and sharing on the subject. Karma excitedly listed the projects his monastery has completed: learning from scratch how to grow a vegetable garden, installing solar safety lights, switching to bio-gas in the kitchen, cleaning a nearby river every three months, installing three-part

129 Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

54 Jennifer Rowe dustbins and selling recyclables [Figure 17], substituting fruit, tsampa130, and tso131 in place of offerings containing plastic, switching to vegetarian fare, and picking litter off the adjacent road.

“You have to know about environment here132,” he declared. The monks also work to spread the ecological message to their community and have hosted an environmental meeting with the local

Gram Panchayat133. HHKM‟s efforts have therefore validated Yankey‟s intuition that monastics, as leaders of the Tibetan community, can become powerful proponents of environmental stewardship.

Environmental interest has spread beyond HHKM and the Kagyu monks. In Dormaling, a

Gelugpa134 nunnery in Norbulingka, Himachal Pradesh, a charismatic nun, Ven. Lobsang Dechen has adopted in parallel many of the same sustainability measures. The nuns run a waste segregation program and compost system, have solar panels installed on their bath house, reuse grey water135 after purification in a large pool, grow organic vegetables using manure from their 14 cows, bake biscuits for offerings, and employ solar safety lights (Dechen136). Meanwhile, Jigme

Lodue, 11 years into his Geshe137 degree at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics (IBD), is working to translate into Tibetan the EDD‟s book, The Impacts of Climate Change on the Tibetan Plateau: A

Synthesis of Recent Science and Tibetan Research during his free time with the help of Tenzin Sangpo, a lay student at the Institute. Jigme and Tenzin gladly agreed to translate the book for the general

130 Tsampa is the Tibetan staple food, roasted barley. It is eaten raw, as porridge, mixed in broth, in tea, in Chang, Tibetan barley beer, or rolled into balls with butter and sugar (Shakya). 131 Tso are cone-shaped rolls of tsampa flour mixed with butter ???? 132Karma Tenjong Wangpo, Interview by Author. Gyuto Monastery, India. 12 May 2010. 133 Gram Panchayats are local, village-level governing bodies in India. 134 Je Tsongkhapa founded the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism, in the fourteenth century. Tsongkhapa stressed the importance of strict monastic discipline and scholarship. Gelug became the largest religious school in Tibet and is the school of HHDL. 135 Grey water is water used for domestic activities such as laundry, dishwashing, or bathing, that can be recycled. 136 Lobsang Dechen. Interview by author. Dolma-Ling Nunnery, Norbulingka, India. 13 May 2010. 137 The Geshe degree is a 16-year course in Buddhist philosophy that may be undertaken by Gelug monks and nuns.

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Tibetan people because they share a concern about the Tibetan environment. They pointed out that in the past, Buddhists respected the environment to avoid suffering in the next life but that

“nowadays with modernization we [are] able to see that, look, it is not far to the next life. We can see our decisions in our own lives” (Lodue138). The pair was also eager to learn about the climate situation in Tibet, and asked me to recommend my favorite books on ecology, climate change, and the environment. And yet, despite their interest in modern environmental solutions, they maintained, “the core thing is that one needs to live a simple life, a sustenant life, a content life”

(Lodue139). The monastic community is therefore waking up to their potential as environmental advisors and activists. In this role, monks and nuns are able to offer a singular perspective informed by Buddhist philosophy increasingly informed by Western science.

CONCLUSION

Tibet may have been an ecological paradise of shepherds, green pastures, and fluffy sheep and yaks all living in perfect harmony under clear blue skies. Or it may have been nothing of the sort.

Although we cannot know the Tibet of the past, this has not stopped exiled Tibetans from striving toward the environmental ideal of romanticized Tibet. Tradition, Tibetans have realized, is not a finished object but something that is “continually recreated through the decisions of historically situated individuals in conversation with inherited knowledge” (Diehl 2002:99). Tibetan environmentalism in the refugee community, originally mere political maneuvering, has matured into a genuine drive to become an ecologically responsible society. Key to this quest is the

138 Jigme Lodue and Tenzin Sangpo. Interview by author. Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, Dharamsala, India, 6 May 2010. 139 Jigme Lodue and Tenzin Sangpo. Interview by author. Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, Dharamsala, India, 6 May 2010.

56 Jennifer Rowe restoration of centuries of accumulated ecological wisdom and values, eroded by modernity and estrangement from the land, and their reapplication to the Tibetans‟ modern context as refugees in India. Although the Tibetans in exile are far from their goal, they have learnt to embrace tradition without becoming enslaved by it, freeing them to become active shapers of their ecological destiny. It is this fruitful combination of traditional and modern knowledge and values that all cultures would do well to imitate as our world reckons with an environmental crisis stemming from our collective failure to strike such a happy balance.

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INTERVIEWS

Dhondhup Gyalpo. Interview by author. Upper TCV Office, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010.

Ven. Geshe Lakhdor La. Tibetan Library of Works and Archives, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010.

Inpa Loden. Interview by author. TCV Suja, Bir, India, 2 May 2010.

Jigme Lodue and Tenzin Sangpo. Interview by author. Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, Dharamsala, India, 6 May 2010.

Jigme Norbu. Interview by author, EDD Office, Dharamsala, India, 28 April 2010.

Karma Tenjong Wangpo, Interview by author. Gyuto Monastery, India. 12 May 2010.

Lauren Galvin. Interview by author, Zanskar India, 28 May 2010.

Lobsang Dechen. Interview by author. Dolma-Ling Nunnery, Norbulingka, India. 13 May 2010.

Lobsang Yiken. Interview by author. TCV Suja, Bir, India, 3 May 2010.

Ngodup Dorjee. Interview by author. Department of Home Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 April 2010.

Ogyen Drodul Trinley Dorje. Interview by Francisco Santamarina. Gyuto Monastery, India. 26 May 2010.

Pasang Tsering. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 29 April 2010.

Sonam Shine. Interview by author. TCV Suja, Bir, India, 3 May 2010.

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Srinjoy Gosh. Interview by author. Deer Park, Bir, India, 2 May 2010.

Tashi Yangzom. Interview by author. Department of Home, Dharamsala, India, 30 April 2010.

Tsering Yankey. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 30 March 2010.

Tenzin Choedon. Interview by author, Office, Clean Upper Dharamsala Project, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010.

Tenzin Daedon. Interview by author. Upper TCV, Dharamsala India, 10 May 2010.

Tenzin Daedon Sharling. Interview by author. TWA Office, Dharamsala, India, 1 May 2010.

Tenzin Jamyang. Interview by author. Upper TCV Office, Dharamsala, India, 7 May 2010.

Tenzin Jamyang. Interview by author. Upper TCV Office, Dharamsala, India, 10 May 2010.

Tenzin Palmo. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 10 May 2010.

Tenzin Shagya. Interview by author. Upper TCV, Dharamsala India, 10 May 2010.

Tsering Choekyi. Interview by author, EDD Office, Dharamsala, India, 28 April 2010.

Tenzin Tsundue. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 27 April 2010.

Tsering Lhamo. Interview by author. Settlement Office, Bir, India, 3 May 2010.

Yangdon. Interview by author, TEAM Office, Dharamsala, India, 2 May 2010.

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APPENDIX

Figure 1: Tungri Nuns in Zanskar by Completed Wall Fencing in Poplar Plantation

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Figure 2: Dharamsala, HP, India

Figure 3: TIPA Performers Anticipating the Entrance of His Holiness the Karmapa

Figure 4: Norbulingka Artist Sewing Appliqué Thangka

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Figure 5: Recycled Paper Notebooks and Folders in the Green Shop

Figure 6: Boiled, Filtered Water in the Green Shop

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Figure 7: Deer Park Waste Segregation System

Figure 8: Bir Settlement Segregation Facility

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Figure 9: Poster to Illustrate Organic Farming Concepts in Department of Home, Agriculture Division

Figure 10: The TEAM Staff

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Figure 11: Students in the TCV Suja Environment Club Sorting Trash Early Monday Morning.

Figure 12: The Upper TCV My Climate Club and Tenzin Jamyang (center) with their famous CFL bulbs.

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Figure 13: The Upper TCV My Climate Club Performing a Skit to Younger Students about Energy Efficiency.

Figure 14: Tenzin Palmo with Teaching Aids Created From Recycled Milk Tetrapack Cartons

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Figure 15: Monastics Attending the Eco-Forum Organized by TEAM

Figure 16: HHKM’s Book of Environmental Suggestions

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Figure 17: Waste Segregation at Gyuto Monastery

72