On Monday 8/17/09, I was on a field expedition jumping wetlands and streams, hoping to catch a glance of a few pretty birds. The water from the brook was trickling down as I walked up to the green riparian corridor with a few trees that the builders have not paved over to make a killing profit. Unfortunately I got to see a brook defiled with floating paint buckets near apartment buildings in Hamilton, NJ.
In disgust, I approached the stream hoping that these buckets would be empty. I could see a few fish swimming in the brook. But this happy moment turned belly-up when I found a thin film of blue paint on the water surface. I quickly jumped on the other side of the bank and put my hand auger to haul in the three buckets of death – paint is poisonous to the aquatic life.
Someone had painted their walls and decided to dump the remainder in the stream. I was shocked and outraged by the stupidity of those who decorate their walls and destroy homes of other living creatures. Every life is precious and their habitats are sacred. When we act blasphemously toward these sacred creatures of God, we risk our own demise.
In the words of James Speth:
“Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us.
Human impacts are now large relative to natural systems. The earth’s stratospheric ozone layer was severely depleted before the change was discovered. Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide up by more than a third and have started in earnest the dangerous process of warming the planet and disrupting climate. Everywhere earth’s ice fields are melting. Industrial processes are fixing nitrogen, making it biologically active, at a rate equal to nature’s; one result is due to overfertilization. Human actions already consume or destroyed each year about 40 percent of nature’s photosynthetic output, leaving too little for other species. Freshwater withdrawals doubled globally between 1960 and 2000, and are now over half of accessible runoff. The following rivers no longer reach the oceans in the dry season: the Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, and Nile, among others” (James Speth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World 1-2).
Such is the picture of a world guided by a troubling ethic or perhaps lack of it. These episodes of environmental pollution are milestones or signs of humanity run amuck. The problem is not the environment but rather human stupidity, selfishness, arrogance, and the gluttonous bottom line.
Environmental Ethics
Environmental ethics is an emerging field of philosophy that deals with the moral implication of human interaction with their surrounding. Environmental ethics and environmentalism was a reaction or response to the environmental degradation due to the rapid industrialization. Humans are destroying this planet fast. All of us are in this boat that is fast sinking while nations and corporations of the world compete in capitalistic venture to outdo each other.
Muslims & Environmental Ethics
Islam calls for environmental integrity. The Qur’an reminds us “Eat and drink but do not waste”. God says about the planet “the Earth he created for all of the living creatures [not just humans]”. Modernity brought a new way of looking at the world as it is clearly demarcated in the new fields of Islamic bioethics, Islamic economics, and the emerging Islamic environmental ethics. There are experts in this new field as well. A few names that come to mind:
S. H. Nasr
Mawil Izzi Dien
Fazlun Khalid
Richard Foltz
Othman Llewellyn
Ibrahim Ozdemir
Ziauddin Sardar
However, this emerging field of ethics has yet to develop into an Applied Ethic (practical involvement of Muslims not just ink on paper about how Islam views environmental protection as a religious duty). Neither fish nor humans drink paint. If pollution kills marine life, it will surely not pardon us. We are not detached from the environment. I hope and pray that Muslims in the West would lead the rest of the world in protecting the environment.
Faraz Khan
