Sublime

In this chapter, I will develop the analytics to grasp what I am calling global modernity and in particular to grasp the crisis of sustainability that it has produced.

The movement advocates a holistic philosophy that takes non-human life as an intrinsic value and seeks a better quality of life grounded by values rather than goods. This holism is particularly sympathetic to Asian and pantheistic wisdom traditions such as Daoism, Buddhism and Native American religions.

Buddhist economics, dark green religion, animal ethics, ecofeminism and, not least, Green political ideology, have already established the possibility of elevating nature and natural sustainability to a transcendent ideal.

As the American ecologist Aldo Leopold deftly put it, we need to transform the way we see ourselves, ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’.41 Thanks to forty years of Earth-system research, we have a rapidly improving scientific understanding of how the Holocene epoch – with its stable climate, ample fresh water,

Thanks to the Maharaja’s guards, Ghalib was one of the only citizens of Delhi to remain unmolested in his house, and almost the only member of the courtly elite to survive the fall of Delhi with his property, such as it was, intact.

The goal of this work is to identify traditions in Asia that have been consonant with global imperatives in the Anthropocene – when humans have begun to significantly affect nature and the environment – not only by revealing different attitudes and ideals regarding nature (and other subjugated entities) but also by showing us different methods and