Introduction: Why Religion, Ecology and the Indonesian Archipelago?

摘要

It is my privilege to be the guest editor for this special issue on Religion and Ecology in the context of Indonesia. Although it has been a challenge because I am not a Southeast Asian scholar, I, like many others, find Indonesia to be a special case and representation of our contemporary era of globalization and global warming. This young democratic nation, made up of over 10,000 islands and hundreds of languages, captures the struggles that we all experience in trying to tackle global environmental issues: the struggle of applying unified solutions in radically different local contexts; the struggle of beginning to realize that our cultures and traditions are more and more hybrid and what this means for values and ethics; and the struggle of choosing what to accept and reject as we come into contact with many different ways of being in the world. In addition to trying to capture all of these struggles in one issue, we were faced with the challenge of bringing together a group of scholars from all over the disciplinary and geographic map, from Indonesia and the United States, to produce this issue.