Does Islamic Environmentalism exist? That is a question posed by researchers at Leiden University in a paper entitled Globalized Eco-Islam – A Survey of Global Islamic Environmentalism. The survey published earlier this year seeks to answer who is speaking out for Islam about environmental issues (the actors) and what ideas, theories, perspectives and views are proposed (the discourses)?
The researchers argue that a new type of environmental movement is emerging, Islamic Environmentalism, that includes Muslim engaged within a wide range of environmental and sustainability issues such as eco-philosophies, environmental law and eco-certified halal products and services.
The report is chronologically structured, documenting the rise of the environmental movement from the early seventies to the present, highlighting the evolution of Islamic environmental theories. It also covers Muslim environmental policy makers, interfaith platforms, civil society groups, individuals and communities, the financial and business sectors and the contributions of Islamic scholars towards the development of Islamic Environmentalism.
The findings of the review confirm that Islamic Environmentalism does exist and that it has taken on various forms over the last forty years, evolving from a more theoretical approach in the 1970’s that concentrated on Islamic theories of nature and its implications, to the last decade where these principles were put into practice. Recently it has spread to larger and more receptive audiences that aim to Green their Deen, through adopting renewable energy, clean technologies and sourcing organic and/or regionally grown food.
The survey summarizes the approaches taken by the Muslim community under the umbrella of Islamic Environmentalism. These include:
1) Theological and Islamic law based (classical normative)
2) Mystical philosophical nature or eco-philosophy (ethical)
3) Reform of science and technology (Islamic science)
7) Sustainable Islamic Finance and economics, commerce and trade
While the researchers readily admit that this is a snapshot of a developing movement, there is great potential for further research to be conducted, especially in capturing grass-roots projects and initiatives already in place but not documented in the developing world. Leiden University will continue research into the area Islamic perspectives on sustainable development and currently has a proposal before the Netherlands Scientific Research Fund.
Making the world around us a better place seems like a fairly universal, non-partisan goal.
But at least in Utah, the words “environmentalism” and “environmentalist” can have strong negative connotations. That connotation isn’t unjustified either; to me, the environmentalism of past generations seems grating, simplistic and occasionally condescending. Like the author of this Grist article, I’m concerned about the environment, but even I don’t really feel comfortable calling myself an “environmentalist.”
In response, I think that when we talk about the environment, especially in Utah, we need a better and less polarizing term that better captures our values. That term, I believe, is “stewardship.” Moreover, I think if we really want to push traditionally ”green” policies, we’ll only talk about “stewardship.” For the sake of effectiveness, let’s expunge “environmentalism” from our vocabulary.
One reason for using this word in Utah is obvious: stewardship is a canonical value of the LDS Church. “Environmentalism,” on the other hand, is vilified by the political right.
But stewardship is a broader term as well. Environmental writers from many locations and backgrounds use it frequently already. And in any case, it seems to capture a better sentiment: people are supposed to wisely take care of the earth. In that way, “stewardship” can help people see that widely held values align with concepts they might otherwise reject as “environmentalism.”
Stewardship is also an active value, rather than a prohibitive one. So, for example, stewardship might suggest that we should plant trees rather than not cutting them down, as environmentalism tended to emphasize. We should walk to get places, rather than not driving so much. We should conserve and recycle, rather than not dumping trash in landfills.
Where “environmentalism” has come to imply a whole slew of pain-in-the-neck rules and anti-behaviors, “stewardship” implies active engagement. The end result is similar — less pollution, more trees, etc. — but stewardship focuses on individual action and simply “deactivates” destructive behavior collaterally.
This isn’t a new or revolutionary argument. And of course it’s a semantic issue that needn’t change the actual policies currently being pursued by green-oriented Utah citizens. But it’s also an issue that if properly “packaged” with more accurate terminology, can help people see that they have more common ground than quarrels. In other words, Provo may never be a city of environmentalists, but it’s already filled with potential stewards.
A plaque on a foot bridge over the Provo River. It reads, “We do not inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”
He insists that focusing on “shared values” – rather, presumably, than share value – is “very profitable”. Whereas conventional companies “pay a whole bunch of money to advertising agencies to come up with a made-up story to try to make the public feel good about their brands, a value-led business puts its resources into adding to the quality of life in the community. That builds customer loyalty.”
But of course, this only works with those who share or desire those values that you are pushing. And there are some very different value systems out there. There is an, admittedly and thankfully very small, market out there for a company whose values include being beastly to Jews. I don’t think it will shock anyone at all to hear that there really are racists in our society who would respond to having their idiocy pandered to. Or sexists, capitalists, neoliberals and all sorts of groups that have slightly different value systems from those put forward by Ben and Jerry’s.
And yes, there are those who will respond to the idea that the Brazil nuts in their ice cream were harvested from wild forests. Although quite why they should, given that the nuts don’t grow well in plantations and are thus not commercially farmed in that manner is a tad beyond me.
So, companies that appeal to the values of their potential customers: yup, great idea. Have fiun and make money. But I’m afraid you cannot complain if some of them appeal to values you don’t share: for many will not share the values that you push.
Which leads then to the joy of this market thing. Companies that do define themselves by these values get to compete for the attentions of those who care about such things. Those catering to the rarer prejudices will either fail or stay small, those who cater to the mass ones successfully will prosper and grow fat. Which is excellent, isn’t it?
For it is how we get both Simon Cowell and the Royal Philharmonic, both Virgin Airlines and Ryanair and both Walls and Ben and Jerry’s.
The Green Detroit Festival, a fair that will make its first appearance in downtown Detroit this weekend, hopes to bring small business entrepreneurs and eco-enthusiasts together under one tent.
The event runs Friday and Saturday, with an ambitious set of goals, including to promote sustainable lifestyles in the city, to showcase local green businesses, to educate construction professionals about green building techniques and to support local businesses.
The fair was organized by Bliss Cureton, a local entrepreneur who runs the Greenbliss Group, a collection of companies that sell environmentally safe cleaning products and offer eco-friendly home design services. She also received help (and space) from the Horatio Williams Foundation.
This may be the first year for the festival, but Cureton is no novice at environmental event-planning; she sponsored Earth Day events in Detroit the last two years. She told The Huffington Post she became interested in environmentalism after hearing about global warming at a party in 2007.
“I had little idea about what it was about,” she explained. So she began to investigate, doing her own research and learning even more about green practices after spending some time at eco-friendly home supply stores in Los Angeles. In time, Cureton developed a passion for home-related environmentalism, launching the Greenbliss website in 2010.
The Green Detroit Festival will leave few green stones unturned, with sections on organic foods, holistic healing, pollution prevention, energy saving resources gardening, home remodeling, wealth management, Michigan products and Detroit businesses. It will also feature speakers and demonstrations, a green job fair, a car show and resources for businesses and homeowners. About 25 vendors and several food trucks will participate in the fair’s green marketplace.
Cureton said she realizes sustainability may not currently be a top priority for many in the city, but hopes the hands-on nature of the Green Detroit Festival will provide a friendly atmosphere for Detroit residents to begin to learn more about environmentally-safe products and practices.
“I’m still one of those old school people who think you still have to touch it, feel it, to get it,” she said. “No one’s going to change overnight. You take baby steps and you gradually get there.”
The Green Detroit Festival takes place at 1010 Antietam in Downtown Detroit on May 18 and 19. Friday’s events last from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and will include free asthma screenings. Saturday’s events run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will include a pet adoption section. For more information visit greendetroitfest.com
It can’t be realistic policy – that requires a suspension of disbelief of epic proportions – and so the new World Wildlife Fund report can only be posturing among environmentalists. Certainly no western government can even begin to implement its proposals:
Analysis Extremist green campaigning group WWF – endorsed by no less a body than the European Space Agency – has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world’s wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race’s energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.
…
But then we get onto the big stuff. First up, there must be an “immediate focus” on “drastically shrinking the ecological footprint of high income populations”.
That means you, Reg reader: you are to accept a massively lower standard of living, in order to reduce your “footprint” to match your nation’s “biocapacity”. Then you’ll have to take another cut, because your nation – being rich – has more “biocapacity” than a poor country does (despite their claim that planetary resources are finite, WWF acknowledges that new “biocapacity” can be created in the form of cropland, forests etc), but this should be shared with the poorer lands under “equitable resource governance”.
That means less heating when it’s cold – no cooling at all, probably, when it’s hot. It means sharply limited hot water: so dirtier clothes, dirtier bedding and a dirtier you – which will be nice as you will also have to live in a smaller home and travel almost exclusively on crowded buses or trains along with similar smelly fellow eco-citizens. Food will be scarcer and realistically much less nutritious (milk for kids will be a luxury, let alone meat, fruit, coffee, that sort of stuff. Get ready to eat a lot of turnips, if you’re a Brit.)
Want proof that these policy proposals cannot be implemented? OK, here you go:
Yet incoming socialist president François Hollande claimed after his victory over Nicolas Sarkozy that he would bring an end to this mythical austerity: “We will bring back Europe on a track for jobs, growth and the future… We’re no longer doomed to austerity.”
This is just a willful, purposeful distortion. What the heck is he talking about? Certainly not France.
If not France, then where?
In Italy and Spain, which have been dependent on tens of billions of cash infusions from the European Central Bank (ECB) to refinance their debts, cuts are hardly anywhere to be found either. In Spain, spending was cut by just €11 billion in 2011, a mere 2.3 percent reduction. In Italy, spending actually increased by €4.3 billion.
Both countries borrowed an additional €117 billion last year alone, raising their combined debts to €1.939 trillion. So, no austerity there. Just debt slaves.
It’s dumbfounding to watch the environmental movement in action, as they become increasingly divorced from reality. It’s like nobles in the ancien régime, knowing that something was different but never talking to anyone who might know just why. Bloody commoners – glad nobody invites them to our parties. And so, the collapse.
The media echo chamber seems very damaging to the entire environmental movement here, as does the (so far very successful) fundraising strategy of dialing the fear up to eleventy. While that brings in perhaps a Billion dollars a year to the WWF machine, it’s divorced from reality.
The whole spectacle is rather sad, really. A once noble cause has become the crazy guy in the intersection, shouting about the end of the world.
The theme of this year’s Latornell conference, Prescription for a Healthy Environment, brings into focus the relationship between human society and its environment and more specifically our dependence on the environment.Indirectly though it also draws attention to one of the most enduring dichotomies in our business.
was organizer and first chairman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform” (FAIR), a non-profit educational group that advocates for a reduction in the level of immigration into the U.S. He also helped to start two other groups with a similar goal: the Center for Immigration Studies, a non-profit research group; and NumbersUSA, a grassroots lobbying group. He has also been a leader in efforts to make English the official language of government in the U.S. To that end, he was co-founder (1983) and chairman of U.S. English and later (1994) of ProEnglish, of which he is still a director.
A retired ophthalmologist and political lobbyist
has also held national positions in environmental organizations and founded local chapters of the Sierra Club. He is a strong conservationist and leading advocate for the environment.
In 1975, his essay “Human Migration” won the Mitchell Prize contest and was published as the cover article of The Ecologist. He founded the Petoskey regional Audubon Society and has been active in a large number of environmental organizations.
Dr. Tanton’s recognition that continued human population growth is a
significant contributor to environmental problems lead to his
involvement with the Sierra Club Population Committee and to becoming President and board member of Zero Population Growth.
Of course, these are the same person – Dr. JohnTanton. For the past 40 years, the retired doctor has led an almost one-man crusade for immigration restriction AND environmentalism. From internal memos, Tanton easily fits into the race realist wing of the conservatism. Yet he’s an avowed environmental conservationist, championing that cause with equal gusto as he does immigration restriction.
Basically, he’s a tree-hugging race realist conservative – not exactly the most common political amalgam. But I applaud Dr. Tanton for his relative heterodoxy. As I’ve lamented on many occasions, both mainstream and anti-PC conservatism are plagued by a reflexive stance in which they reject anything nominally liberal and even sometimes support the exact opposite just out of spite.
Environmentalism, which has now become perverted into the pseudo-religion of global-warming backed Gaiaism, is one of those issues. Conservatives view any defense of the environment as an acceptance of hippie-liberalism, the granola-eating, dirty-haired fruits who tie themselves to trees and protest oil companies. Instead of preserving natural landscape, most conservatives would prefer to stick it to those liberals by mocking their cause and advocating on the part of oil companies and other polluters.
I understand the knee-jerk reaction; I too feel uneasy accepting any liberal-leaning ideal, but there’s nothing inherently politically liberal about trying to carefully blend civilization into nature, instead of just bulldozing anything that gets in our way. Sure, go for a hike at your nearest park and it’ll be full of SWPLs, but just because they do it the most often, doesn’t mean a conservative should hurt himself by refusing to participate. It goes without saying that there’s a valid reason for doing so – nature provides humans with a sense of satisfaction and pleasure that the artificial constructs of man can not mirror.
The notion of melding conservatism and environmentalism is especially interesting in this particular sphere where paleo-thought, in regards to evo-psych and diet, underpins much of the ideology.
Today’s questions: Are you an “environmentalist” in the sense of wanting to preserve the environment? Or do you just not care, apathetic to shopping malls and parking lots replacing green space? If you’re an environmentalist, how do you feel about the connection to liberalism?Can conservatism and environmentalism coexist? Can alt-conservatives and liberal environmentalists pursue the same goals (Tanton tried this when he first started FAIR)?
Today children and families around the country will be celebrating their love for their mothers. Along with the flowers, brunches, and cakes this Mother’s Day, take a minute to recognize important environmental issues affecting the well-being of mothers and their children in this country and around the world.
On the environmental front here in the United States, it is well-known that pesticides and other chemicals make their way into many products that we eat, drink, and use in our homes. In the United States, a 2012 study was conducted to take a closer look at a common insecticide used to treat fruits and vegetables. “Chlorpyrifos” is a pesticide that is often applied to products in order to kill insects. In this study, exposure of pregnant mothers to this chemical was linked to changes in the brains of small children. The side effects of pesticides bring to light the need for local and organic produce. We can also advocate for women who work in agricultural settings by supporting organizations such as Project HOPE and Project LEAF.
Worldwide, there are even more challenging environmental issues affecting mothers-to-be. According to Water.org, poor nutrition and drinking dirty water leads to the tragic deaths of thousands of babies and young children every day. And by the same token, access to fresh water for pregnant women is extremely important in allowing them to maintain their health and to protect them from serious diseases that can be transmitted by unclean water. In addition, women in these communities are often required to travel many miles by foot to collect whatever water is available to them, regardless of how clean it is. Having to collect water in this way is grueling work, and puts a very great strain on both mothers and children in these communities.
The Mother’s Day Every Day campaign aims to address the challenges faced by mothers and children in this country and around the world. This campaign, a collaboration between CARE and The White Ribbon Alliance, is drawing attention to the fact that thousands of women and children die during pregnancy and childbirth daily, and often for reasons that are preventable. Skilled birthing attendants, family planning, and strong health care systems can save women and newborns’ lives, and the organization continually works to generate support for these services.
Mother’s Day is indeed a special day of the year where families come together to celebrate the important role that mothers play in all of our lives. This Mother’s Day, Sierra Club Green Home encourages you to consider all of the mothers around the world who can benefit from the work of organizations such as Water.org and The White Ribbon Alliance and, if you think your mother would appreciate it, maybe make a donation in her name.
Look how little the leopards have lost their spots!
Professor Gasman’s Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology provides insights into the coherent fascist intellectual doctrine that, by 1920, was embraced by a wide swath of European academics and artists. Defining features of this cohort were:
They referred to themselves as: ecologists, naturalists and socio-biologists.
They were pseudo-scientists bent on subverting real science.
Their mantras were: natural, holistic, and organic.
Their Religion of Nature was basically a revival of Pantheism. They worshipped Earth as a divine living organism. Human achievements were disparaged as scant and fleeting compared to Nature’s glory.
They desired scientist-led governance. Scientists probed Nature’s divine realm, hence scientists alone understood the political implications of Nature’s laws.
They were pessimistic and denied the existence of progress.
They exhibited a longing for primitivism.
They were organizationally and ideologically linked to the organic foods movement.
They were organizationally and ideologically allied with the occultist/neo-pagan milieu.
They were divided between those who wanted to replace Christianity and those who wanted to modify Christianity.
They dreaded human overpopulation and were active in eugenics/population control strategizing.
They considered humanitarianism to be scientifically incorrect.
They described society as an organism that grew organically out of Nature.
They saw direct continuity between biological and sociological laws, and contended that bio-evolutionary laws should literally be the basis for human laws.
They believed human survival required abject conformity to the environmental totality. Human liberation would come not through dominion over Nature but through submission to Natural Law.
They opposed capitalist industrialization and sought to reinvigorate beleaguered countryside interests undermined by the rise of industrial cities. Hostility to industrial capitalism manifested in criticism of what was deemed lifeless scientific-mechanical thinking.
They stridently opposed democracy.
Gasman did not set out to expose similarities between environmentalism and fascism. His book makes no reference to environmentalism nor ventures off the topic of European academic trends circa 1870-1920.
I just got an email from the Sierra Club, wanting me to get on board for a piece of environmentalism that goes like this:
This year, Assembly member Felipe Fuentes has a bill that would allow the Calico Solar Project, a solar project in California that will cover 4,613 acres—four times the size of the Golden Gate Park- within an area key to the survival of the desert tortoise- to bypass the environmental review process that almost all other projects are subject to.
I see no reason that anyone or anything should be exempt from the standard environmental review processes. Having said that, it’s always struck me as inflexible to refuse to make tough choices. Imagining 4,613 acres as all PV, we’d have about a gigawatt (after using a capacity factor of 0.2) , a replacement for a coal-fired power plant. I hate to sound insensitive, but considering the larger ecological and health-related issues of burning coal, I would think that the savings would justify exiling some desert tortoises.
