Walking Meditation and Slow Marches: Buddhist Responses to Climate Change Protest

Abstract

The climate crisis is arguably one of today’s greatest challenges and the Buddhist doctrine offers a foundation for a comprehensive approach to environmental activism, grounded in core principles such as mindfulness, compassion, and dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). Consequently, many Buddhists have turned to environmental activism, trying to find their own ways of expression. This study explores how Buddhist climate change activism manifests in protests in Germany and the UK, particularly through performative techniques. Building on the concept of climate activism as edgework in the Anthropocene (Hentschel 2023), it examines how XR Buddhists Germany have reimagined the traditional Buddhist mindfulness practice of walking meditation as a public, embodied intervention. During XR Germany’s Autumn Rebellion in Berlin (September 2022) and subsequent protest events, walking meditation was repurposed as a form of protest to raise public awareness and a means of cultivating alternative ways of being in the world. Based on textual analysis, online resources, interviews, and fieldwork, this paper analyses how Buddhist activists can participate in shaping new life worlds amid an ecological crisis by transforming a contemplative practice into a mode of secular civil disobedience.