Dekila Chungyalpa: Engaging faith leaders for planetary healing (ep411)
“I started realizing that engaging with faith leaders and having these deeper dialogues around contemplative exercises might be beneficial to the environmental community.”
In this episode, we welcome our guest Dekila Chungyalpa, who reminds us of our intra-dependant existence with all of life. Traced by a lineage of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, Dekila weaves together teachings from her cultural and religious upbringing with her work as an environmental program director—from which she invites us to reflect on the ways in which Western conservation efforts fall short. In her work with faith-based organizations, Dekila prompts a dialogue around binary paradigms that persist even within environmental and activist movements.
Join us as we dive further into Dekila’s world and unravel the intricacies of interdependence, deep time, and more.
About our guest:
Dekila Chungyalpa is the founding director of the Loka Initiative, an award-winning capacity building and outreach platform at the University of Wisconsin – Madison for faith leaders and culture keepers of Indigenous traditions working on environmental and climate issues. She is an experienced environmental program director, with over two decades of experience in designing and implementing global conservation and climate strategies and projects. Known as an innovator in the environmental field, Dekila has expertise in faith-led environmental and climate partnerships, biodiversity landscape and river basin strategy design, and community-based conservation.
Dekila is originally from the Himalayan state of Sikkim in India and is of Bhutia origin. She is the daughter of the late Tsunma Dechen Zangmo, a Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Scissor-tailed Flycatcher by Ben White
Episode-inspired artwork by Sun
Dive deeper:
Find out more about The Loka Initiative, Dekila’s education and outreach program
Discover the Sacred Earth: Faiths for Conservation program created by Dekila Chungyalpa
Learn more about Zen Buddhist Shunryū Suzuki (Roshi)
Read about the Laudate Diem, text addressed by Pope Francis
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Dekila Chungyalpa: I come from a place called Sikkim. It used to be a Buddhist kingdom. It was taken over by India in 1975. And for those of you who know the Himalayas, it's basically that little wedge that is right under Tibet and in between Nepal and Bhutan. It is a very small landscape, or a really small state, I should say, the size of Rhode Island. And I belong to the Bhutia people. We are a schedule tribe in India. And we are essentially, I suppose, an Indo-Tibetan tribe. And I come from a family of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners. So my mother took her vows when I was a child. My grandmother was a nun. My mother was a nun. And so I was raised very much in a remote part of the Himalayas and in a remote part of Sikkim in a lot of wilderness areas. And I was raised amongst very serious Buddhist practitioners and teachers.
So I think both the culture and the religion really shaped my own cosmology and my way of viewing the world. And the lens I saw the world through, which led me to become an environmental scientist, was interdependence. It was part of the Buddhist teachings that I was given as a child, and it was very much a part of our cultural values as well. We are a community that is not individual.
There is something extremely beautiful about being part of a community where there is interdependence at play constantly in the relationships—but also with this understanding that the interdependence goes beyond the human species.
For part of my childhood I was raised in West Sikkim where, for example, we do not call an animal just by its name. So we would say, for example, the word for a bear is dom in Bhutia and Tibetan language, and you would refer to them as akudom, which means uncle bear. So there is this sort of extension of relationship, kinship, a sense of obligation and responsibility towards other species, all of which meant that I was an environmentalist at a really young age, and I had this very love for wildlife. And when I came to the U.S., that's what I studied, and I went on to work for the World Wildlife Fund, which is the largest conservation group in the world. And, you know, it was my dream to go back and work in the Himalayas and in Asia, which is what I ended up doing. I worked quite a bit on community-based work and a lot on free-flowing rivers in both.
However, I think one of the challenges that I began to have was this realization that a lot of what was offered to us as mainstream conservation solutions were really dependent on capitalism and dependent on a worldview where everything is transactional and all values can be condensed to economic values. And therefore, if you do not fall within that set of values, it is discounted, right? And so this brings me to this idea of the sacred value of something, the sacred value of nature, the inherent non-economic value of free-flowing ecosystems.
And I think at some point this tension just became so bad for me and so difficult for me, I essentially ended up creating a program called Sacred Earth at WWF. This was in 2008-2009 and began working with religious leaders around the world on environmental and climate issues. And that led me to eventually create what was the prototype for the LOKA initiative here at UW. I ended up creating the prototype at Yale. And it was a three-year exploration where I was basically just in conversation with faith leaders and culture keepers of Indigenous traditions, asking them what they would like to see, how would they like to engage on environmental and climate solutions. And so when I launched the LOKA initiative, there were certain principles that I'd already really built through these three years of dialogue and my previous several years of working with faith leaders.
You know, which meant that LOKA had to from the very beginning presume that nature is alive, right, that there is inherent value in that the earth has inherent value, that all of the living systems have inherent value beyond what it means for human beings, that we need to find a safe space or create a safe space where religion and science can come together and be in a dialogue and people can disagree, walk out, people can do all of those things, but ultimately that there is a commitment to dialogue as the solution to all the disagreements and the polarization we have in our society. And that whatever we built, it would be community based, by which I mean we would not come in with our own mission and our own agenda. We would actually focus on the process of building trust, right? A project together that faith leaders and Indigenous leaders valued along with us as the resource, you know, sort of the resource providers, right? So all of these things came, I would say, out of my background really and my upbringing, which, you know, condenses to this concept of interdependence.
Kamea Chayne: I'm curious to dive deeper into many of the themes that you mentioned here. You juxtaposed the values and philosophy of interdependence with this John Wayne paradigm. Can you share more about that narrative of individualism and saviorism, where and how it tends to show up and perhaps how it might feel out of context from the realities of life and what enables and sustains life?
Dekila Chungyalpa: This idea, the John Wayne idea, I had heard a couple of people talking about it and it made so much sense to me that, and I could see it everywhere I looked. I can see it in the mainstream climate movements, I can see it in environmental movements, I see it in civil society mobilizing, I see it everywhere, which is essentially this idea that one person will save us. And typically that one person happens to be a white male and he is somehow imbued with superhero characteristics, you know, and the moment we subscribe to this kind of philosophy or this kind of I would say almost a mindset, right? What happens is the rest of us get to sit back and the rest of us get to soothe ourselves in a way, right, and disengage with the problem.
And we see it all the time. I think our societies, especially individualistic societies like the United States, they are really designed for this kind of superhero character. And what that means is that the collective is not responsible. And given the politics and the polarization that happens in our society, the deliberate obstacles that are put in front of us for civil society to engage with politics and engage with larger issues like the economic paradigm, the neoliberal paradigm, right? I think this ends up being a solution that really only works for people who want and have power already. It does not work for the rest of us. And like I said, I grew up in a collectivist society, so I know what that feels like when it is actually approached to be part of the solution, an approach to design the solution versus, you know, just sign off, right? Or just even this concept of voting, right? We are brought in a way that is almost paralyzing, I would say, because it gives us this binary of two choices. You either vote or you don't vote. And there is very little state level sanction processes where we get involved in other ways.
A lot of the work I do with faith leaders and a lot of the inspiration I get from working with faith leaders is breaking this idea of a binary, breaking this idea that we only have two choices. That there are other ways we can engage in community-based solutions. And there are other stakeholders who are equally powerful, right? Who actually can influence and change what happens on the ground.
Sometimes when I talk about the fact that I work with faith leaders, I get resistance from my own peers. I get resistance from scientists and policymakers.
And it's interesting because then I often use what I think of as transactional arguments, which are things like, you know, they're the largest stakeholder group, if you think about it, on the planet, right? Over 85% of the human population subscribes to a religion. Collectively, they're the third largest financial investor group in the world. You know, over 8% of all total habitable land. I think 50% of all schools worldwide are run or affiliated with a religion. So there are all these reasons we need to engage faiths.
But I think there are also deeper reasons we need to engage faith, and that's partly because they are brilliant community organizers. And in a society where I would say we have deliberately been polarized, where we have deliberately been isolated like America. But you know, just recently I was reading that the surgeon general declared that loneliness is an epidemic in America. And I think that is such an obvious impact of the way our society is organized in America, right. And so given that so many of us feel isolated, I think there is a real power to thinking about how collectivist communities, organizations, and wisdom can actually break the sense of isolation. We are at the point when it comes to environmental and climate issues where we are really now in crisis. We are at the precipice of a cascade of impacts that we actually will not be able to turn around. And so…
How do we think of solutions that protect our most vulnerable people? How do we think of solutions that protect non-human species?
We need to engage everyone and we cannot afford to sit back and wait for a John Wayne character to come into town and save us. The town has to organize themselves, you know. This analogy I use is very much is a way of saying, actually, the hero in the movie is always the town. It's always the townspeople, right? Well, I mean it could be the native folks because John Wayne's movies were incredibly disturbing, but I think ultimately recognizing that this is very comforting as a concept and that this does not in reality help us. This idea that someone else will come and fix things.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And I also wonder how culturally that might limit people's collective imaginations of what's possible. And you started touching on this a little bit earlier, but how have you witnessed the storyline and approach of individual heroism show up within the conservation movement? And why does noticing this matter as we reorient ourselves towards collective healing and thriving?
Dekila Chungyalpa: So I mean, it is no surprise that the conservation movement probably has a diversity problem in the West, right? And I think a lot of the work is carried out by people who are really committed to environmental issues, to wildlife, to addressing poverty, to addressing all kinds of social issues as well. But the system as it is does not really challenge neoliberalism. It doesn't really challenge that at the heart of everything, one of the major problems we have is this incredible inequity in terms of consumption, that the Western model of consumption is problematic. And globalization has ended up creating a really lopsided sort of impact on the planet itself.
Part of questioning the John Wayne model, for me, has been to question why we are comfortable with the binary with there being the people who are deserving and therefore the people who are not undeserving. Why it must be that we have this model of scarcity. There are a whole bunch of presumptions behind the John Wayne model, right? There is this idea, first of all, that there isn't enough for everyone. Therefore, you kind of have to get what you can, why you can. There is this idea, I would say, just generally in the nonprofit community, which is that, you know the world is set up the way it is, and we are comfortable getting the crumbs off the table. We are not questioning who is at the table necessarily, as long as we get our share, right? And I think this is a big, big challenge for philanthropy in general, you know, and the model of philanthropy.
I think also there is really this mindset that when things fall apart, when everything comes to an end, with the climate and the environmental crisis, I hear this language all the time where people say, well, I'm going to go, I'm going to head for the hills. I'm going to just pick up my family or I'm just going to go alone and go to a cabin because I can live by myself. And so all of this to me presupposes a world where it's better for you to be alone. It's good for you, it's smart for you to get everything you can while you can and no one cares about how that affects other people. Other people are out to get you and to get what you have. Therefore, you better arm yourself, right? And you better be competitive and smart. And you do not question the system. You're just thinking about how to survive on your own, right? Now, what happens if we were to turn that around and say, well, what if actually we thought about a world of plenty, right? What if, you know, I've heard people talk about it, like the gospel of scarcity and the gospel of plenty, and that's really appealing to me, because…
What if we were talking about the fact that we require community to survive? This is actually an ecological principle.
No species survives on its own. We require this interdependence between species for that if we actually design for the people that are most vulnerable, we would end up benefiting everybody else, right? Which is this principle that comes from architecture, called designing for access. And so I think one of the most reassuring and I don't know, beautiful teachings I've received in my life has been the work I've seen done by women leaders on the ground, especially black and indigenous women leaders on the ground.
And what I see again and again is that, you know, and this came up even when I remember this one time I was doing a disaster training with a bunch of faith communities and I ended up asking people what would be your first instinct when, you know, let's say, and this was in California, we were having a meeting and I said, let's see an earthquake hit right now, what would you do? And everybody had to write their responses. What was fascinating was that there was a vast I will look to see who else needs help. I will look for my neighbor who is in a wheelchair. I will take care of my kids and look for all the kids who don't get to their parents, right? And then what we could see was a lot of the men were saying, well, I'm gonna run for the hills because that's the smart thing to do, you know? And I think I saw, I joke about it because I don't think we have to generalize it and say all men and all women, but I definitely have learned so much about. The basis of community building from women.
What I've learned is that when you presume that there is infinite goodness, you create infinite goodness.
When you presume that there is finite resources of anything, will you then end up actually replicating that and making that happen. And I think you mentioned sort of the lack of imagination. And I think a lot of that does come back to where we stand and how we view the world, right? And how compassion arises from that view.
Kamea Chayne: Beautiful. Thank you for sharing this. Well, I would love to move deeper into this idea of non-duality, particularly as it pertains to how you've combined your faith and spirituality with your work as a trained environmental scientist. And earlier, you mentioned about your colleagues questioning your approach. So I'm just curious what more you would like to share about the dominant cultural views on the relationship between science and religion or science and spirituality, and what have been some of your key insights from taking a both and approach to actually learn from faith leaders in the work of protecting our more than human living world?
Dekila Chungyalpa: So initially when I first designed this program, Sacred Earth at WWF, I actually looked around for someone else to run it. For me it was like, here is this great problem solving mechanism that we didn't consider, let's design it. And now someone who actually has studied religious studies should take over, because I have never taken a religious studies class, right? So I think I just had this idea that someone way more experienced than me should run it. And then it became obvious that it had to be me, so I gave up the field conservation work and moved into this. And when I moved into this, I did get quite a bit sort of, you know, negative reactions in some cases, you know, from a whole range of friends and colleagues.
There was the very much, I absolutely hate religion, religion is the opiate of the masses group. There was women, especially, I would say, indigenous women, women from the Himalayas who were essentially saying to me, you've made it and you represent possibly me taking a step back, you know, because it evoked a certain imagery that we, as women of color, really struggle against, right? So the imagery being, in my specific case, the fluttering flags, you know, over the Himalayas, and beautifully smiling monks, and little kids doing namaste, and you know, like there is this sort of, mm, what's the word I want? Like...Global South tourism, right? That kind of imagery. And I think there was this real concern that by choosing to talk about spiritual values and work with religions that I'm in some sense losing my ascension, losing the status I was given in this very, you know, Euro-derived sense, right? I think for me it felt initially like I had no choice because I was awake to the potential of how working with faith leaders could solve and heal so many things. So the first part for me that was really obvious was it brought back something into the science that had been lost, right? It brought the sacred back into the science. And one of my biggest frustrations with science as a movement, especially in the late 2000s, mid to late 2000s, was that everything for us was sort of condensing around this idea of payment for ecological services.
Was that if we could come up with an economic rationale to protect something, then that would solve the crisis. And that, by the way, has never been the case, right? Has not turned out to be true.
I had this real frustration that we really need to talk about nature, environment, anything that matters to us in ways that are much more than economic. Working with religions allowed us to do that.
There was this other piece where we got to talk about things we had stop talking about because it was no longer trendy, like ethics, like morality, like environmental values, right? So this whole non-tangible, non-economic set of principles that actually motivate people to do things or not. To protect or not, to vote or not, all of these things which we had ignored. It allowed us to have this dialogue that was much deeper and complex and not as black and white.
And then finally, for me personally, one of the things that happened was, at that time, I had sort of become the WWF's director for the Greater Mekong region. And I was, I think, the only brown woman who had that role. And I also was the youngest director at that time. So here I am supposedly very successful in the Euro-derived way, right? I'm making great money, I'm really, you know, getting validated for this work. And what was actually happening was that I was having nightmares because I was working in the field and in the region and I began to understand how the combination of environmental and climate stressors would impact the community and would impact wildlife and the ecology. And we now have terms for those emotions, right? We say eco-anxiety, climate distress, solastalgia, but at that time there were no words. No one had come up with the theory. And when I realized that other environmentalists, my friends and peers were having the same experience, it became really important to me that I find ways to talk about it.
And during that time, I'd begun to work with His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, who heads the Karmakagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. And he had asked me to create environmental guidelines for Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in Himalayas, nunneries in the Himalayas. And in the process of doing that work, I'd found some of my anxiety starting to disappear.
I started realizing that engaging with faith leaders and having these deeper dialogues around contemplative exercises might be beneficial to the environmental community.
There was something there that really helped us deal with our existential panic, our existential horror about what we've unleashed on the planet. And these are all reasons for why I think it really ended up mattering to me that we have this free-flowing exchange of ideas and solutions between faith and science.
Kamea Chayne: For now, we are nearing the end of our main conversation, but I would love to hold space for you to share anything else you wish to share, whether related to our conversation so far, or otherwise that I didn't get to ask you about. And also your calls to action and deeper inquiry for our listeners.
Dekila Chungyalpa: So I feel like we are right now in a time where we are just starting to experience climate impacts, right? And this is the year I think that is honestly setting a new baseline for us in terms of what the future holds. And so what I really invite people to think about is the concept of sanctuary, right? I really invite people to think about how do you create it? What does it look like? Who do you create it for? And that if we are in the Anthropocene the way we are right now, and all the implications of the Anthropocene are so negative, right, that humans have destroyed the planet, I don't think it says anywhere that it has to be negative. We could actually turn this thing around. We can have responsibility and model ways of building sanctuary for all other species, model ways of building sanctuaries for humans, for our communities at every level, whether it is you're thinking of a butterfly sanctuary, whether you're thinking about people who are homeless or immigrants, or you're thinking about conflict and conflict zones, or at much larger levels.
Like, you know, creating community-based movements and social movements and so on. But I think for those of us who are worried about this and concerned about what's coming….
I really invite us to think about what sanctuary looks like for us. How do we build sanctuary and how do we connect to each other's sanctuaries? I hope that this way of thinking really opens up imagination, the collective imagination, you know?
// Musical intermission //
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?
Dekila Chungyalpa: Right now I'm reading Laudate Diem, which is the extension for the Laudate Seed, the 2015 encyclical that Pope Francis wrote, which is all about environmental and climate issues. And it is incredible. He questions capitalism. He questions this idea of infinite and unlimited growth. He questions the reality of how, if you're American, what your emissions are versus any other individual he questions the issue of sort of responsibility and responsible ways of living. I really recommend it.
And I think one of the things that I absolutely am struck reading the Laudate Diem is that he's in some sense inviting faith leaders to see themselves as activists and problem solvers. He's really inviting them to understand that they have a stake in how the world is run. And I think that is incredibly powerful and needed, very much needed.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Dekila Chungyalpa: For me personally, being in nature and being in wilderness is absolutely necessary for my own mental well-being. The moment I start feeling overwhelmed or drained or even start getting a taste of feeling burned out, that's my first reaction is to run and be in a wilderness space. And I think just do meditation on being connected with nature and meditation practices from Tibetan Buddhism.
Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Dekila Chungyalpa: I think for me, I just am always amazed by how Indigenous peoples, no matter where they are on the planet, put their bodies on the line to protect the earth. And I'm thinking about my own community in Sikkim. Some of you might know that there was a major flash flood last week. It was literally as prescribed or as planned. It has been brought up by every scientist I know in the Himalayas. We all knew this was coming. There was a cloud burst, which was followed by a glacial lake outburst, which was followed by the large hydropower dam, completely unsustainable for Sikkim bursting, and then it led to this massive flash flood. And, you know, for 30 years, the indigenous Lepcha tribes up in the north of Sikkim have been fighting dams and no one has supported them. And to me, it's so noticeable everywhere I go on this planet that it's indigenous people that always put their bodies on the line, because they don't make this distinction about being separate from nature. What happens to nature is personal for them.
We can learn from this, right? That they are so clear about the relationship, kinship being the primary relationship with nature. And I wish the rest of us would understand that they are the real leaders of the environmental and climate movement.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we’ll have additional links and references from this conversation in our show notes at greendreamer.com. But for now, Dekila, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been an absolute honor to have you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Dekila Chungyalpa: I think just saying that, I think the final thing I want to say is that it's really important that we center joy in this work. It's not enough to just work ourselves to the ground trying to save the planet. It's not enough to just think about, you know, distress reduction. We really have to actively center joy and make that part of our work, our resistance, our creation, all of it. Thank you.
