Credits Dimitris Xygalatas is an associate professor in anthropology and psychological sciences at the University of Connecticut. He is also the director of UConn’s Cognitive Science Program and Experimental Anthropology Lab.
I
In the mountainous heart of Mauritius lies a remarkable lake. Known as the Grand Bassin (the Great Pond), it sits inside the crater of an extinct volcano and is surrounded by one of the island’s last remaining patches of native rainforest, a rare survivor of colonial-era deforestation that destroyed swathes of the pristine ecosystem that once blanketed the island. On the lake’s northern shore stand two statues, each 108 feet tall. One is of Shiva, the smiling, trident-bearing destroyer of evil, the other of his fierce consort Durga. Together, they form a striking tableau of divine guardianship of the hallowed grounds at their feet, where nature, myth and devotion converge.
I first visited Grand Bassin in 2009 as an anthropologist interested in local rituals, and I was immediately struck by its natural beauty. When the mountain mist settles over the lake, the tiny islet at its center vanishes into the fog. On any given day, the scent of incense from nearby Hindu temples spices the air. Beneath the surface of the lake swim thousands-strong schools of fish and enormous sinuous eels — creatures so bizarre that they seem to belong to another world.
But what kept pulling me back is a question the lake helped me confront: Why do some sites inspire a reverence so great that it restrains the impulse to extract and destroy, while others don’t? The answer, I came to realize, lies in practice. Certain sites are marked off not only physically but morally, through repeated symbolic acts and shared narratives.
For more than a century, Hindus from across Mauritius have come to Grand Bassin to worship. Local legend has it that in the 19th century, before any human had set eyes on the lake, a Hindu priest received a vision in a dream: a hidden body of water deep in the island’s interior that was mystically linked to the Ganges, Hinduism’s holiest river. Moved by this revelation, Pandit Giri Gossagne led a search party into the dense, unmapped jungle. Before long, other Hindus were crossing the island on foot to reach it. In the years that followed, the lake became a site of mythic significance. Small shrines were built along its banks, and oral traditions and devotional acts passed from one generation to the next, sustaining a shared reverence that has endured to this day.
The question I kept asking about the lake’s significance gradually shifted the nature of my research toward an exploration of how sacralized places and practices — especially those rooted in collective ritual and cultural memory — can reorient human motivations toward long-term ecological stewardship. The sacred, I discovered, is not merely a matter of belief or tradition; it is a powerful and underutilized cultural technology for managing common goods. Ritual is one of the primary ways humans have historically marked certain acts, places or relationships as sacred. And the capacity to sacralize may offer vital tools for confronting environmental collapse — not by inventing new doctrines, but by drawing on a deep human impulse to protect what we hold meaningful.
“Why do some sites inspire a reverence so great that it restrains the impulse to extract and destroy, while others don’t?”
II
The story of the lake and its place in the imagination of Mauritian Hindus might have turned out very differently. Just a few decades after the Dutch settled Mauritius in the 17th century, most of the island’s ancient ebony forests had been felled to make way for sugarcane plantations, and the dodo — the emblematic flightless bird that roamed them — was wiped out. When Charles Darwin visited in 1836, he documented the decline of the giant coconut crab, once abundant but already on the brink of extinction. Today, less than 2% of the indigenous rainforest remains.
In the modern era, over-harvesting, habitat degradation and illegal extraction have taken a similarly heavy toll on the island’s fisheries. Climate change exacerbates these pressures, and year after year fishermen watch their catch shrink. But each time I visit Grand Bassin, I am struck by the teeming life that survives within it. Now that roads connect it to nearby towns, it would be easy enough for struggling fishermen to journey here and harvest the tilapia, koi and eels that populate the lake. But they don’t.
The lake’s ecosystem has been safeguarded from exploitation not by technological interventions or state regulations, but by norms that prescribe respect and restraint, rituals of pilgrimage and offering that bind the community through shared devotion, and myths that link it to divine origins and ancestral duty. Its thriving fish population stands as an exception to the rule in Mauritius — evidence of a tragedy of the commons averted. It reveals something fundamental about human nature and points to a provocative possibility: That the key to protecting our most vulnerable ecosystems may lie not only in science or policy, but in our capacity to treat certain places as sacred.
What makes the case of Grand Bassin especially instructive is that it has been preserved from below through everyday practices, shared narratives and embodied reverence. Pilgrims fast before visiting and walk long distances to get there; they bathe in its waters, offer incense and flowers, go around barefoot; they collect the sacred water in bottles to pour over their home shrine. The lake’s sacrosanct status does not rest on formal enforcement or economic incentives but on a moral orientation that has become embedded in the community’s relationship to place. Visitors care for the lake of their own accord; threat of punishment is not required.
If such frameworks can arise organically in one corner of the world, the question becomes whether they might be cultivated elsewhere. Grand Bassin challenges us to reconsider the role of the sacred in shaping sustainable futures — not as a relic of tradition but as a living cultural force with the power to reframe how we inhabit and protect the natural world.
“Sacralized places and practices — especially those rooted in collective ritual and cultural memory — can reorient human motivations toward long-term ecological stewardship.”
III
Spiritual practices have fascinated anthropologists since the discipline’s inception. The symbolic acts through which people express themselves are as diverse as they are captivating. But what do these practices actually do? How do they shape people’s motivations, perceptions and behaviors in subtle, enduring and deeply consequential ways? And what lessons might cultural practices, particularly those shrouded in sacred values, have to offer for addressing coordination problems where individual interests must be aligned with the common good, like climate mitigation, resource conservation or collective restraint in the face of environmental degradation?
One answer may come from the other side of the Indian Ocean. In the 1970s, a young American anthropologist named Stephen Lansing traveled to Bali. Like other researchers before him, he intended to explore the island’s famed aesthetic traditions expressed in ritual, music and the arts, focusing on the chants and ceremonies of water temple priests. What he discovered became a landmark example of how sacred practices can serve symbolic or spiritual ends and also practical ones — sustaining complex ecological systems without formal regulation or modern infrastructure.
When Lansing ventured into the Bali highlands, he discovered that the rituals of the temple priests were tightly interwoven with the management of water — a finite resource for the island’s rice farmers. At the heart of this system were the subak, cooperative irrigation networks that sustained the island’s terraced paddy fields.
As water flowed from the highlands through an interlinked web of canals, one might have expected each farmer to prioritize their own use, depriving those downstream of vital resources and leading the system to collapse under the weight of individual self-interest. But this apparently never happened. Instead, water usage was coordinated through an elaborate ritual calendar, anchored in the cosmological rhythms of the Balinese lunar cycle.
Each temple, dedicated to a specific deity and associated with a particular watershed, oversaw the ritual activities that marked the start of planting and the release of water. But before any of that began, each farming community sent delegates to the mother temple on Lake Batur, dedicated to the water goddess Dewi Danu and the main water source at the top of the mountain. Delegates would bring offerings and return with holy water to pour into local streams and rivers. Temple priests were not mere managers of the water source but spiritual intermediaries charged with maintaining harmony between people, nature and the gods. Opening a floodgate was a ritual gesture embedded in a web of spiritual meaning. The result was a system that controlled pests, conserved water and optimized yield.
This system, which aligned agricultural practices with deeply rooted spiritual traditions, had worked efficiently for over a thousand years. But in the 1970s, it was upended by a wave of state-led modernization. The Indonesian government introduced sweeping agricultural reforms aimed at boosting production. They forced farmers to abandon traditional methods in favour of chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides and fast-growing rice varieties engineered for higher harvests. The effects were disastrous. Soon, there was a surge in pest infestations, massive crop failures and polluted waterways. The damage extended far beyond the rice paddies: Excess nutrients from chemical fertilizers entered the rivers and eventually reached the sea, where they fueled algal blooms that began to choke the pristine coral reefs surrounding Bali.
Less than two decades later, the government reversed course and reinstated the traditional temple-based system. The turnaround was swift and telling. As synchronized planting schedules resumed, pest populations declined, reducing the need for chemical inputs and allowing ecosystems to recover. Crop yields stabilized through the restoration of ritual-based social coordination. The system proved more sustainable and more resilient. In 2012, UNESCO recognized the Subak network as a World Heritage Site, describing it as a living expression of Tri Hita Karana, the Balinese philosophy of harmony between people, nature and the spiritual world. It was a rare case in which a modern state acknowledged that the path to sustainability might lie in listening more closely to traditional practices.
“The sacred is not merely a matter of belief or tradition; it is a powerful and underutilized cultural technology for managing common goods.”
IV
The question of how individuals make decisions in situations that resemble the tragedy of the commons has long preoccupied social scientists, inspiring a range of behavioral experiments. One widely used model is the common-pool resource game in which two participants — typically seated in separate booths or at different computer terminals — are presented with a shared pool of money and asked, simultaneously and without communication, how much they wish to withdraw. Whatever they choose is theirs to keep; whatever is left is increased by half and split evenly between them. But if their combined requests exceed the available amount, the pool collapses and neither player gets anything. This is a high-stakes social dilemma: For each participant, the optimal strategy is to take as much as possible without pushing the system over the edge — but if both do this, both lose. Such games illustrate how people navigate the tension between self-interest and collective well-being.
With a view to determining how sacred spaces and practices might help address collective action problems, I tried a similar experiment in two locations in Mauritius: a Hindu temple and a nearby restaurant. What was being manipulated, in effect, was the psychological frame: One location was sacred, the other secular.
The contrast proved consequential. Participants in the temple behaved more cooperatively than those in the restaurant, withdrawing, on average, 26% less from the shared resource. Afterward, those in the temple were more than twice as likely to explain their decisions in terms of fairness, moral obligation or a sense of shared responsibility. By contrast, participants in the restaurant spoke of strategy, personal gain or risk management.
Colleagues and I found the same effects among Christians in a church — and, remarkably, even among participants situated in sacred spaces associated with religious traditions other than their own. As they had been randomly assigned to their location, this could not be explained by personality differences. It wasn’t just doctrinal belief that made the difference, but the atmosphere of reverence and symbolic meaning. Simply being in a setting marked as sacred seemed to trigger a shift in moral orientation, nudging people toward more prosocial behavior.
The idea that the sacred can heighten one’s sense of duty to the collective was further supported by other experiments we conducted. Following a group prayer, individuals gave more generously to charity than they did on days when they hadn’t prayed. After engaging in a procession that involved body piercing, they gave even more. In fact, on those occasions, people who simply walked alongside the procession gave as much as those who endured the body piercings. The sense of duty extended to the entire community.
To deepen our understanding of this psychological shift, we designed a new study that asked people to evaluate the impact of various everyday activities. Individuals’ perceptions of effort and enjoyment, it became clear, changed depending on whether an act was framed in a sacred or a secular context. Walking five miles to work was rated as more burdensome than walking the same distance as part of a pilgrimage; carrying a ritual offering was judged to be easier than carrying a crate of fruit of the same weight, even when the ritual involved more demanding elements, such as body piercing. In a sacred frame, effort became imbued with meaning, and meaning seemed to lighten the load.
The fact that sacred practices performed communally can nurture a heightened concern for the common good may come as no surprise — such practices have long been known to reinforce social ties. But what struck me most in these experiments was that shifts occurred even when the activities themselves remained unchanged: Taxing acts became easier, more meaningful and enjoyable; people acted more cooperatively. It was the context and the meaning that reshaped people’s orientation to action.
These findings point to an intriguing possibility: If ritual is humanity’s most enduring way of designating the sacred, could it be reimagined as a tool for reframing our relationship with nature toward more sustainable lifestyles?
“The key to protecting our most vulnerable ecosystems may lie not only in science or policy, but in our capacity to treat certain places as sacred.”
V
When the Hindu priest dreamed of a Gangetic lake in the center of Mauritius, he was doing as spiritual leaders across religious traditions have long done: locating the sacred in personal, experiential encounters. Upon first hearing of the origin story of the Grand Bassin, I was reminded of my earlier fieldwork among the Orthodox Christian communities of the Anastenaria in Greece. There, too, the locals spoke of holy wells and springs whose locations, they claimed, had been revealed to their ancestors through dreams. These accounts reinforce the broader pattern of cultural practices; sacred traditions typically emerge gradually and organically, from the ground up.
Yet experiential notions of the sacred are oftentimes amplified by deliberate, top-down actions. In 1972, a delegation of Mauritian politicians traveled to India and returned with a bottle of water drawn from the Ganges. In a grand public ceremony, they poured it into the Grand Bassin, symbolically binding it to the holy river thousands of miles away — a connection further reinforced by renaming it Ganga Talao, after the goddess Ganga, the divine embodiment of the Ganges. The towering statues of Shiva and Durga that now stand watch over the lake are more recent additions.
These carefully orchestrated symbolic acts deepened the lake’s spiritual significance and cemented its role as a unifying symbol for the Hindu community in Mauritius. Today, it is home to the largest Hindu pilgrimage outside of India, the Maha Shivaratri (Great Night of Shiva), which draws hundreds of thousands of devotees each year. The lake’s thriving fish population is a direct outcome of sacralization and a reflection of the norms that govern the space. When nature is placed within such a moral frame, it is more likely to be protected — and to flourish.
Where does this leave secular societies in which technological or policy-focused solutions to environmental problems are not working, but where identification with the sacred has waned over time? Can something as deeply personal and experiential as the sacred be meaningfully shaped by design? Could mundane, often thankless tasks — cycling, tree-planting, recycling — be reframed not as chores, but as rituals of care and connection that inspire deeper commitment to environmental stewardship?
The sacred need not be confined to formal religion. While the Grand Bassin’s significance is rooted in Hindu mythology and practice, the orientation it reflects — a sense of reverence, moral weight and emotional resonance — can arise in many forms. Sacredness emerges wherever people set something apart as meaningful beyond its utility: a forest grove, a war memorial, a national flag, a moment of collective silence. What matters is not the doctrine behind it but the way it shapes how people think, feel and act.
Of course, one might ask whether it’s even possible to promote rituals of care in the absence of care itself. Wouldn’t such efforts ring hollow or fail to resonate with those who feel disconnected from the natural world in the first place? But this is precisely where sacralization matters most. Sacredness does not only emerge from what people already revere — it actively helps generate that reverence. Rituals can bring people into a different frame of mind, one in which meaning accumulates through repetition, symbols take on weight and ordinary acts begin to feel purposeful. If environmental stewardship is to take root, it may not be enough to wait for people to care. Sometimes the path to care begins with practice.
“Simply being in a setting marked as sacred seems to trigger a shift in moral orientation, nudging people toward more prosocial behavior.”
VI
The steady advance of secularism in Western societies might seem like an obstacle to such practices finding a foothold. But while traditional religiosity appears to be in decline in much of the West, the shift hasn’t erased the role of the sacred. In some ways, that role may even be expanding.
Surveys consistently show that many of those who step away from institutional religion are not rejecting spirituality altogether. Rather, they are seeking it elsewhere, in practices that draw on ancient traditions: yoga, for instance, or neopagan movements such as Wicca, or through new forms of collective meaning-making like the Burning Man festival or the Sunday Assembly. Common to these movements is an emphasis on ritual, symbolic experience and the cultivation of a renewed sense of wonder, belonging and connection to something larger — often Earth itself.
At the same time, liberal democracies are becoming increasingly attuned to the value of Indigenous and other traditional belief systems both as cultural heritage worthy of preservation and as sources of ecological insight, ethical orientation and community resilience. Around the world, governments are granting legal personhood to natural features — a cloud forest in Ecuador, rivers in New Zealand, an entire ecosystem in Spain. Such acts provide recognition that Indigenous worldviews offer alternative models for living in balance with nature — models grounded in humility, reciprocity and appreciation of human interdependence with the environment.
At the global level, the United Nations Harmony with Nature program affirms Indigenous and spiritual worldviews as essential for reimagining our relationship with Earth, recognizing that such perspectives carry both ecological wisdom and moral authority. Similarly, Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical “Laudato si’” called for urgent climate action not through appeals to economics or efficiency but by framing the problem as a spiritual crisis and the solution as a solemn duty. He invoked a “sense of deep communion with the rest of nature,” urging believers to care for the planet as stewards, not consumers. Such efforts bridge the traditional divide between spirituality and policy, positioning the sacred as a vital foundation for sustainability.
Yet sacralization is not limited to religious frameworks or Indigenous cosmologies. Even in secular contexts, societies have found ways to imbue natural spaces with reverence and symbolic weight. The U.S. National Park system offers a powerful example of this. Though established by law and managed by the state, these landscapes have come to evoke a reverence akin to that found in religious sites. This was by design. Advocates like naturalist John Muir, who helped persuade Congress to create the system, framed wild landscapes as “temples” and “cathedrals,” using spiritual metaphors to inspire care and restraint.
This framing stuck. Today, visitors enter through formal gates, follow ritualized trails and engage in practices like collecting National Park passport stamps — tokens of a journey similar to a religious pilgrimage. Ranger talks often include moments of reflection, gratitude or silence, inviting visitors to pause and attune themselves morally to special spaces. In some parks, permits are granted to scatter human ashes, recognizing the land as more than scenery — as sacred ground. Annual events such as National Public Lands Day are marked with ceremonial speeches, volunteer rituals and symbolic gestures of access and care.
This could be replicated. Imagine if, instead of a field trip, schoolchildren undertook a pilgrimage to a forest or marine sanctuary. If “Plant a Tree Day” became a global civic holiday. What if heads of state took their oath of office in national parks or nature reserves rather than government halls? These are modest, low-cost interventions — rituals in waiting — that could help reframe our relationship with the planet, embedding meaning, care and a deeper sense of obligation to our common future.
VII
Just as civic rituals sustain national identity, environmental rituals can cultivate an enduring form of ecological citizenship — an embodied understanding that we are participants in the living world, not separate from it.
Philosophers have long pondered what separates us from the rest of the animal world — what traits, if any, can be seen as uniquely human. Candidates have varied from toolmaking to language, from abstract reasoning to moral conscience. Yet perhaps one of the most striking is our deep-seated ability, propensity and desire to imbue the world around us with symbolism — to treat certain things as special, even when there is no immediate practical reason to do so.
It is this quest for meaning that makes us truly human. It motivates all our higher pursuits: art, music, religion, and moral and legal systems. It compels us to build monuments, tell stories, bury our dead and preserve memories. And it is through this sensemaking impulse that we interpret the world and reshape it in the process, transforming landscapes into homelands, rivers into ancestors, routines into rituals.
Recognizing this sheds light on a crucial truth: Sustainability is not merely a technical or economic challenge, but a cultural and symbolic one too. If meaning is the lens through which we engage with the world, then our place in it must be reimagined through narrative, ritual and shared moral commitments as much as through data and policy.
By tapping into our innate capacity to sacralize — to treat certain things as invaluable — we may discover new pathways for cultivating care, restraint and ecological responsibility. The challenge before us is not simply to preserve the natural world, but to re-enchant it.
