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This article is part of the Buddhism and International Relations article series, edited by Raghav Dua.

It is well known that space travel is an inherently international exercise. The resources required and complications encountered in off-Earth sojourns often demand multinational cooperation for their management.  Even when operating alone, though, national space programs like NASA in the United States or JAXA in Japan still employ multinational staffs so that they may enjoy the work of the best and brightest. Rocket launches are common these days and each one is a testament to international cooperation, with a variable helping of international competition thrown in the mix, too.

Less recognized are the environmental problems posed by space travel and their widespread international effects. Human beings with no connection to space programs have been harmed by falling space debris. Additionally, the glut of obsolete hardware in orbit notably fouls the views of both radio and optical astronomers despite the existence of students of the cosmos in every country. Perhaps most dramatically, a gold rush to mine our moon currently unfolds, and just like terrestrial miners, moon miners can level entire mountains. This could result in the erasure of the figure known to Westerners as the “Man in the Moon,” and every human being forever after will be able to witness this cultural as well as ecological destruction. A number of environmental issues in space, like the orbital debris or lunar mining that I have mentioned, impact all humans and therefore remain inherently international in character and concern.

Unfortunately, as commonly appears, in this case our technological development outstrips our ethical development for using that technology. Hence, despite the severity of space environmental issues that we face, little has been done to provide positive policy guidance that is ethically grounded. Even when scholars have tried to create such guidance, moreover, efforts have been hamstrung by some traditional moral codes that are in many ways unprepared for tackling space age issues, especially environmental issues like how to value and protect non-living things like our companion moon or the startling rings of Saturn.

Recent environmental ethics research undertaken among Buddhists, however, helps us to see space-related moral issues more clearly. Additionally, this research overcomes some obstacles to our development of space travel morality. Along with a control data set from the general public, American Buddhists from across all three major sects of Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna completed a space ethics survey, and the results of this survey, when combined with traditional Buddhist teachings, provide innovative new directions for resolving ethical problems in space. As described in my book Buddhist Ecological Protection of Space: A Guide for Sustainable Off-Earth Travel (2023), Buddhists from the contemporary ethnographic field clarify the appropriateness of our extraterrestrial actions involving the managing of space debris, the proper mining of our moon, the handling of off-Earth microbes that may be discovered in the future, and the overhauling of the climates of planets like Mars as proposed by people like Elon Musk. As I will explain more, Buddhist ethics from the field can help to guide us to a cleaner and more responsible presence away from Earth.

An interesting theme that emerged in the course of the research involves an ad hoc construction of an ethic of nonharm-in-interconnection, and this ethic ended up grounding all Buddhist space moral responses. This ethic of nonharm-in-interconnection, as employed in this case, cannot be found directly in Buddhist scriptures, and it does not seem to be an artefact of the survey instrument. Instead, it arises organically from the collective voices of grassroots Buddhists. That said, this ethic of nonharm-in-interconnection conjoins features of the tradition that long have been prominent among and treasured by Buddhists of different stripes. A philosophical cornerstone of Buddhism, after all, involves the notion of the utter interconnectedness of the physical universe across space and time. Called “dependent arising” in English or pratītya-samutpāda in the scriptural language of Sanskrit, dependent arising recognizes that everything phenomenal arises from one or more causes, so that nothing at all is fully independent despite possible appearances to the contrary. A classical Buddhist image of dependent arising involves a tripod made of three sticks that lean against one another. Take one stick away and the tripod disappears, so that the tripod, rather than being an independent entity, arises only because of specific time-and-place interactions between the sticks. The tripod is inherently interconnected with the sticks in terms of time and place. And if we trace the........

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