Fordham Opening Remarks

This past week, I had the pleasure of being a panelist on Fordham University’s EcoACTION 2025 “Faith-Based Approaches to Environmental Justice and Climate Action” panel. My opening remarks below:

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Hi everyone, my name is Sumana, she/her/hers. The faith perspective I’m bringing to the panel today is Hinduism and a bit of a mix of different Dharmic and South Asian belief systems. I’m representing Hindus for Human Rights, which is a faith-based human rights organization.

We advocate for pluralism, civil and human rights in South Asia and North America, rooted in the values of our faith: shanti (peace), nyaya (justice) and satya (truth). We provide a Hindu voice of resistance to caste, Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), racism, and all forms of bigotry and oppression.

Our vision is a world defined by lokasangraha (the universal common good) — where there is peace among all people, and our planet is honored and protected.

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I want to get away from scriptural-based justifications or framework for my approach to my work because scripture tends to be intentionally exclusive and quite frankly irrelevant in the Hindu context for most people. My personal background and upbringing rely much more on South Indian folk beliefs, an agrarian connection to the land and other beings, and honing in on my people’s pantheistic tendencies as opposed to the Brahmanical, scriptural focus, like citing the Bhagavad Gita, that tends to dominate the global understanding of Hinduism. I also want to center historically marginalized frameworks because in reality, the people who interact most directly with nature and steward the land are tribal and oppressed caste communities and women, who have been excluded from access to these scriptures. So instead of drawing from scripture, I want today’s conversation to be about belief.

And my belief system, informed by Hindu and South Asian indigenous cosmologies, is that nature, peace, and the Divine are one and the same, making ecological conservation and stewarding the Earth an inherently theological issue. [To serve God is to serve the Earth and vice versa.]

Unlike Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism isn’t anthropocentric in its view of climate action and environmental justice. Dharmic faiths emphasize that all life has rights. All living things have rights individually and life itself, as collective consciousness, has agency, personhood, and rights. And nature is viewed as a living thing. This fundamentally changes the conversation, which isn’t about conserving nature for our sake or the sake of our future generations but for the sake of nature itself.

There is a concept, similar to other faiths, of “Mother Earth” - Bhudevi, the Goddess of the Earth. But once again, I want us to go beyond Brahmanical, Sanskritized teachings and dig deeper into indigenous beliefs, which highlight concepts of local village deities who protect the land and are the land. In many parts of South Asia, these deities protect the village (meaning the land) and its people, wander/patrol at night, and in many ways are personifications and embodiments of the nature that exists in that village. These deities are often rooted in the soil, the rivers, the trees of a specific place. In Bhutan, for example, mountains and rivers are understood as physical parts of a deity’s body. In Bhutan, landscapes, such as mountains and rivers, are thought to be physiological parts of the deities’ bodies that lay there. The ecoscapes constructed in the Dharmic regions of the world are viewed as sacred in and of themselves, independent of any sacredness imbued by a separate higher power. So harm towards a landscape is a direct offense to both the local deity and larger concept of a collective Divine, especially when done without the consultation of or paying obeisance to the Divine.

And the socionatural relationships [between man and god] go beyond simple unidirectional resource extraction; they are seen as reciprocal and cyclical. Both man and nature are inherently sacred and are part of the same ecosystem and system of universal laws but man can be polluted whereas nature cannot. [We see this today in the treatment of the River Ganges, which is heavily polluted and toxic, but in the Hindu imagination is still the pinnacle of purity.]

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When we talk about faith-based approaches for environmental justice, I want us to be cognizant that using the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. While we are highly critical of the West’s colonialism, we ignore Hinduism’s own colonial and feudal structures and instead import colonial frameworks into the resistance. Modern environmental discourse often imports colonial or nationalist frameworks to reclaim “our roots” or go back to “simpler times.” Using right-wing and nationalist framework and language of “returning to our roots and values” and harkening glory days that did not exist will not work, no matter how good the intention.

The reality is that Hinduism, other Dharmic faiths, and South Asian belief systems are plagued by intense casteism, patriarchy, and other unspeakable atrocities that continue to this day but have been swept under the rug due to highly successful rebranding campaigns throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, including current greenwashing. For example, vegetarianism in Hinduism is not derived from an environmentally-conscious belief or interest in animal rights but is a caste-indicator that signifies caste status and purity and reinforces hierarchy and segregation.

The pursuit of righteousness and justice cannot only be outward, it must also be inward. Environmental justice demands internal reckoning. We have to confront how the historical realities of how Hinduism and Dharmic faiths have suppressed Indigenous conservation systems, criminalized tribal forest dwellers, and enabled the rise of eco-fascism under the guise of religious revival. We have to have deeply uncomfortable conversations about how Hinduism is being used as a vehicle for the Indian fascist state to implement and disburse its political agenda.


We must dismantle Indo-centricity and elevate the pluralities that have long been marginalized. We must have honest conversations around the role of diaspora, which tends to be reactionary, conservative, and upper caste, in how Hinduism and Dharmic faiths can be part of the solution and not the problem. We must understand that neoliberal developmentalism, which targets the “Global South” aka some of the most biodiverse, resource-rich nations of the world, is simply neocolonialism being enforced by a group of international and national actors, including people we might have considered to be allies. Our work must be to create something new: to rebuild a sacred relationship between people and land that centers social justice, gender justice, and epistemic justice.

To do this, we need to draw from our faiths and our collective, historical wisdom, centering indigenous voices, to create alternative life-worlds that enforce mutualistic socionatural relationships and exalt the inherent sacredness of landscapes.

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Environmental justice means social justice which means gender justice which means human rights which means all the other forms of justice. And as we visualize and build new realities, we cannot lose the framework that we are all bound by, despite our different faith backgrounds: that taking care of the Earth and of each other is a mandate. It is a spiritual and communal obligation, a calling from a higher power that we simply cannot turn away from.