In the late 1980s, monks across Thailand began to act, especially in the wake of water shortages and village-destroying landslides linked to denuded hillsides. By then, Thailand had already lost 82 percent of its historical rainforest cover. Monks took on the mantle of teachers and forest defenders.
As documented by anthropologist Susan Darlington and others, their activism put them at great risk. Taking stances that could be interpreted as political, such as protesting at dams, left monks at odds with their own leadership and longstanding Thai tradition that monasteries concern themselves only with spiritual life. Activist monks found themselves publicly criticized and sidelined from leadership roles within the Buddhist hierarchy. Additionally, in a country where criticism of the monarchy is a crime, and where until the early 1980s there was an active communist insurgency, resistance to paradigms of rapid development had to proceed delicately or risk severe reaction from the state. On top of that, obstructing the development agenda of the powerful and well-connected almost always incurs danger. One monk, Phra Prajak Khuttajitto, was arrested for blocking a military-backed plan to establish eucalyptus plantations, and in 2005, Phra Supoj Suvacano, a monk involved in efforts to protect his meditation center from a proposed tangerine farm, was murdered.
Over time, though, the monks found a language for activism that drew on their moral authority — indeed, even enhanced it. As Darlington writes in her book on the Monk-led Thai ecology movement, The Ordination of a Tree, their focus on environmental awareness helps to “maintain the relevance of the religion in a rapidly changing world of industrialization and modernization.”
A signature example of this activism — and the endeavor that gives Darlington’s book its title — is marking particularly significant trees as sacred. This is done by conducting rituals of consecration, complete with wrapping the base of their trunks in monks’ orange robes. First practiced by monk Phrakhru Manas Natheepitak in 1988, and taken up by Wat Pa Sukato as early as 1990, this creative use of ritual caught on rapidly as a way to lend trees symbolic significance and help preserve community groves.
Obstructing the development agenda of the powerful and well-connected almost always incurs danger.
At first these ordinations were seen as radical protest. But as many saw it, the goal — raised awareness — was consistent with monks’ traditional roles as educators and conductors of religious rituals. Not only that, but monks found ways to involve rather than antagonize their potential opponents. That included a 1996 initiative to ordain 50 million trees in honor of the 50th year of Thailand’s King Rama IX’s rule, which helped establish tree ordinations as part of the national conversation, even the national identity. By 2010, contestants for the crown of Miss Universe Thailand were ordaining trees as part of the beauty pageant.
At Wat Pa Sukato, in addition to tree ordinations, Phra Paisal Visalo continues the public education work of his predecessor, Luang Phor (venerable father) Khamkhian Suwanno. In the 1980s and 1990s, Khamkhian strove to protect the local villagers from the cycle of debt and environmental harm caused by clearcutting forests to grow eucalyptus plantations, a policy the state misguidedly promoted in the pursuit of export commodities. (By 1994 the fruits of his efforts were already visible. An article that year in the Bangkok Post vividly captures the difference between the “lush, cool forest” protected by the monastery and the “hard, cracked” and eroded eucalyptus plantations, calling it a vision of heaven versus hell.)
As part of that effort, the monastery holds dhamma walks. (Dhamma, in Buddhism, broadly means to uphold the teachings of the Buddha). In these walks, which have taken place near-annually since 2000, groups of monks set off across the district for stretches of up to eight days and seven nights, mostly barefoot and bearing no food or provisions for shelter. They subsist only on what villages and towns provide. Laypeople join in, too, lending numbers and support to the monks as they conduct outreach to officials, residents, and especially children, to raise awareness of the benefits of forest conservation, organic cultivation, and sustainable development.
Laypeople, in fact, are crucial to the monks’ conservation efforts. At Wat Pa Sukato, the partnership between Phra Paisal, with his air of intellectual abstraction, and community leader Vichai Naphua, is striking. Where Phra Paisal emphasizes principles and teaches meditation, weighing each word carefully, Naphua laughs readily and focuses on the practical, putting his incredible range of skills to use. He uses photography and social media to support the dhamma walks. He runs an organic rice farm with his family as a way of supporting the monastery and its message of sustainable livelihoods. And he’s an artist. Among his projects are watercolors of local wildlife, such as hornbills, sold to support conservation, and a vast mural using traditional pigments that adorns the interior of a newly constructed temple. He describes an exhaustive process of sourcing the key minerals and plants under the tight supervision of one of the very few living experts, and how merely preparing the walls to hold the pigments took almost a year. This focus on upholding tradition coexists with a playfulness of imagery. Among the figures meant to convey greed and suffering we spot a “little green man” — a soldier in olive drab and a gas mask. “Putin’s war on Ukraine,” he explains.
We ask at one point if he considered becoming a monk, given how purpose-driven his life seems. He says that he was in fact ordained at one point — it’s not uncommon for Thai men to join a monastery for a time — but didn’t stick with it. He starts to offer a long explanation in Thai, but gets impatient before the interpreter can translate. Instead, laughing, he offers a joke in English. Referring, evidently, to his hearty appetite for food and for life with a wife and children, he says that as a monk, “I’d make Buddhism look bad.”
A particular focus for both Phra Paisal and his predecessors has been the establishment and protection of a community forest, connected to a second nearby temple site, Wat Pa Mahawan. Also called “Lost Mountain” for the near-miracle of it having been overlooked by logging crews and thus retaining old-growth trees of immense size, the forest was at one point home to astonishing biodiversity, including hornbills and elephants, binturongs and macaques. Then fires broke out in 2020. Despite valiant efforts by the monks and villagers to maintain a fire break by hand, since they lacked all equipment or even a water source, the fire burned the forest’s last stands of old-growth along with ten years’ worth of laboriously restored former plantations. The hornbills and much of the other wildlife died or fled, and the monkeys, displaced, now hang opportunistically around the temple.
Within nearly every school of Buddhism, and across the many lands where Buddhism is practiced, a reading of the religion as being broadly in accord with ecology has risen to the fore.
One of our tasks as visitors, I learn, is to help with a renewed effort of reforestation. “How do you not despair about it possibly just burning again, especially given climate change?” a student asks Phra Paisal. He acknowledges the pain of losing so much work, and so much of the forest, and speaks of both learning — this time, the emphasis is on planting species that are drought and fire resistant — and the inner work of resisting despair. “We have to make sure we’re doing things out of the right motives, without anger or bitterness, or it well could be that we will be doing harm instead of good. We have to first make sure, with any action, that we are not adding to the problem.”
When we climb to the hillside where we will be planting the native tree seedlings, I can see why the work needs to be done. With the rainforest gone, the bare soil is ominously dry, so hard and barren that even with steel tools we struggle to hack the clods apart. Worse: Despite it being rainy season, the absence of forests means there are no assurances of rain, so we tuck a layer of moisture-retaining polymer underneath the seedling roots before splashing in a few ounces of water from a bucket. My own consolation against despair comes from seeing, just downslope, the evidence of past years’ plantings, already several feet taller.
ALL OF THIS ECOLOGICAL work would seem a far cry from the detachment Buddhist monks might be expected to cultivate. Indeed, this was a key reservation the Thai activist monks had to overcome, doing so in part by revisiting the history of Buddha and his relationship to forests and trees in just the way Phra Paisal had demonstrated. They succeeded to the extent that now, Susan Darlington says, it would stand out as strange for monks to refuse acts like tree ordination or shirk roles as community educators and protectors of the commons.
