ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates two related topics: how religious organizations address environmental management, integrating local with regional scales, and how consilience evolves among stakeholders. It explores contemporary ecosystem-based management and watershed planning with culturally and economically diverse cadres of stakeholders and finishes with transboundary, environmental peacekeeping. The temple networks are effective in maintaining rice production because farmers act cooperatively to take optimal advantage of ecological processes. The irrigation systems pass through weirs directing controlled levels of water flow into channels and aqueducts delivering water to terraced hills. In contrast to the religious unity of the water temples, today's watershed management for American southwestern pueblos and acequias transpires in a multi-religious context. Ecosystem-Based Management, for example, approaches environmental problems at supra-local but less than national scale, and requires monitoring of outcomes. In the United States and Canadian context, where organizations like acequias are rare, faith-based motivation to participate in watershed management often materializes at the level of families and neighborhoods.
