Dear Mr. Crook,
Hi. I’m a law professor at
Boston University, and I’m working on a book about examples from
around the world where religious practices happen to harm the
environment. One of the examples I’m interested in investigating is
the practice of burning paper and incense in China and countries with
significant Chinese populations (other examples include idol
immersion in India, depletion of palm tree populations from Palm
Sunday celebrations, and Native American uses of bald eagles in the
US).
I came across a terrific article that you wrote about joss paper
in Taiwan in Taiwan Today, and I was wondering if I could
ask you a couple of questions about the issue that might help me in
my research. At some point I’m hoping to make a trip to Taiwan
and/or Singapore and/or Hong Kong to try and investigate the issue a
little myself, but right now I’m at the very beginning of my
research and just trying to figure out the basics...
Thanks so much in advance for
whatever help you might be able to provide.
In my reply, I suggested "mercy release" as another angle he could look into. He responded:
I had not heard of the mercy
release issue. It's exactly the kind of thing I want to talk
about in the book. Thanks very much for pointing me to it. I
might have some questions on that after I do some reading on
it.
It's definitely true that many religions do a lot of good
things for the environment. I'm going to be clear about that in
the book, but that's not what the book is going to be about. Nor
is it going to be about how some religious beliefs lead to bad
environmental results (e.g., because some beliefs cause some people
to devalue scientific findings on climate change, etc.). What
I'm really interested in here are religious practices specifically
that have environmental consequences and how society and government
ought to deal with those collisions. That's why the mercy
release issue is perfect...
