Environmental “Miracles” after 2020

From Fragmented Solutions to Relational Thinking

In his Gifford Lectures (1981), the philosopher of religion Seyyed Hossein Nasr issued a warning that, at the time, sounded radically out of step with dominant development paradigms:

environmental crises cannot be solved without addressing the worldview that produced them.

Nature, he argued, is not an external object to be managed but part of a relational order in which human ethics, cosmology, and material practice are inseparably entangled.

Four decades later, global environmental governance rarely cites Nasr. Yet since 2020, a series of developments across Asia suggests that the world is increasingly acting upon precisely this insight—often without naming it.

These shifts do not take the form of grand philosophical systems. Instead, they emerge through law, storytelling, data infrastructures, art, and local governance, revealing a transition from technocratic environmentalism toward relational and planetary approaches.

What follows are not success stories in the sense of resolved crises. Rather, they are signs of epistemic change—moments in which the human–nature divide begins to erode in practice.

1. China: Making Environmental Harm Visible—and Accountable

From Awareness Campaigns to Infrastructures of Responsibility

Early Chinese environmental documentaries such as Under the Dome (2015) demonstrated the political power of storytelling by translating pollution statistics into embodied experience.

After 2020, however, environmental awareness in China increasingly moved beyond narrative exposure toward institutionalized transparency.

The Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE), led by Ma Jun, developed publicly accessible platforms that integrate satellite data, local emissions records, and corporate supply-chain information. Environmental harm thus becomes traceable across scales—from local factories to global brands.

What this shift demonstrates:Environmental ethics no longer rely solely on moral appeal. They are embedded in data-driven systems that align public knowledge, consumer pressure, and regulatory oversight. Responsibility becomes structural rather than symbolic.

2. Taiwan: Environmental Protection as Constitutional Practice

From Activism to Intergenerational Justice

Since 2020, Taiwan has witnessed a quiet yet profound transformation in environmental governance: environmental protection is increasingly framed as a constitutional issue. Courts have begun to link ecological degradation directly to violations of the right to life, health, and dignity.

Notably, legal arguments now incorporate:

• Indigenous ecological knowledge,

• intergenerational justice,

• and the long-term consequences of extractive development.

What this reveals: Environmental sustainability is no longer treated as a policy preference but as a foundational condition of democratic legitimacy.

The environment enters the legal sphere not as “nature” but as a living system upon which future citizenship depends.

3. Art as Slow Environmental Infrastructure

Taiwan: Sustainability Without Campaigns

Post-2020 environmental art in Taiwan increasingly rejects spectacle and urgency-driven messaging. Instead, artists working in the lineage of figures such as Wu Mali engage in long-term, community-based processes that connect ecological recovery with local identity and livelihood.

In rural areas affected by typhoons and land degradation, artistic practice has functioned as:

• a mediator between scientific knowledge and lived experience,

• a catalyst for collective reflection,

• and a platform for alternative economic imaginaries.

Key insight: Environmental transformation often requires temporal depth rather than immediacy. Art here operates not as representation but as relational infrastructure.

4. Hong Kong: Ecology as Archive and Memory

When Environmental Politics Retreat, Stories Remain

After 2019, overt environmental activism in Hong Kong diminished sharply. Yet ecological consciousness did not disappear; it migrated into literature, poetry, and artistic archives documenting vanishing species, neighborhoods, and sensory landscapes.

Writers and artists engage with endemic flora and fauna as symbols of:

• impermanence,

• contested belonging,

• and ecological loss intertwined with cultural erasure.

What this illustrates: When political agency is constrained, environmental storytelling assumes an ethical function, preserving ecological awareness through memory and affect rather than mobilization.

5. India: Heat, Inequality, and the Politics of Survival

From Development to Existential Risk

Since 2020, climate discourse in India has increasingly foregrounded heatwaves as a human rights issue. Courts, urban planners, and writers alike now frame extreme heat as a threat to life itself—especially for informal workers, women, and marginalized communities.

Environmental writing has shifted accordingly:

• from romanticized nature to lived climate vulnerability,

• from abstraction to bodily exposure.

What changes here:Nature is no longer aestheticized or sacralized. It becomes the material condition of survival, forcing ethical and political reckoning.

6. Southeast Asia: Mangroves as Co-Actors

Beyond Conservation Toward Co-Governance

Post-2020 mangrove restoration projects across Southeast Asia illustrate a significant conceptual shift. Mangroves are no longer protected from people but regenerated with them—serving as living infrastructure against flooding, erosion, and biodiversity loss.

This approach recognizes ecosystems as:

• active participants in resilience,

• partners rather than resources.

Implication: Environmental governance evolves toward collaborative cosmologies of practice, where human and non-human agency intersect.

Conclusion: From Prediction to Practice

Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s 1981 claim—that environmental crises stem from fractured worldviews—finds unexpected confirmation in contemporary Asia.

Not through religious revival or philosophical consensus, but through legal innovation, cultural production, and infrastructural experimentation.

The environmental “miracles” emerging after 2020 do not resolve ecological crises. They signal something subtler and perhaps more consequential: a transformation in how nature is understood—from object to relation, from backdrop to condition, from externality to shared destiny.

Key Takeaways

• Environmental crises are increasingly addressed relationally, not technically alone.

• Post-2020 developments show a shift from awareness to accountability infrastructures.

• Law, art, and literature function as critical agents of environmental transformation.

• Sustainability depends on who decides, whose knowledge counts, and who bears risk.

• Asia offers crucial insights into post-capitalist and post-dualist environmental futures.

• Environmental Humanities provide essential tools for navigating ethical, cultural, and planetary complexity.