The attempt to do so - seen in such examples as the creation...

The attempt to do so - seen in such examples as the creation of national parks from which human inhabitants are forcibly expelled - too often constitutes a “direct transfer of resources from the poor to the rich.”[^8] It hardly comes as a surprise, then, that environmentalist policies and initiatives in the Muslim world are often seen as merely another example of Western imperialism, an attempt by foreigners, foreign interests, or foreign puppets to meddle in the affairs of Muslim communities for purposes of exploitation and control.

It would seem that under such circumstances, environmentalism in Muslim societies would have to develop in an indigenously-derived form seen as locally-relevant, if it hopes to take root and flourish. Unfortunately examples of home-grown environmentalism are not yet easy to find in the Muslim world, though they are not non-existent.

Probably the credit for first beginning to think about the environmental crisis in Islamic terms should go to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian-American academic who has been preoccupied with the effects of human activities on natural systems since before Rachel Carson, during his student days in Massachusetts during the 1950s when he would trace Thoreau’s footsteps around Walden Pond.[^9] A historian of philosophy and science, Nasr was struck by how much had changed since Thoreau’s time, and began to feel that there was a marked difference between Islamic science, in which the pursuit of understanding nature was seen as a sacred undertaking, a way of better knowing the mind of God, and the de-sacralized scientific approach of the post-Enlightenment West in which nature was seen as mechanical, devoid of life or inherent meaning, and existing only to serve human ends.

Nasr spelled out this distinction in his book Science and Civilization in Islam and other works, even preceding by several months Lynn White, Jr.’s famous critique of human exceptionalism in Western religions, a 1967 paper titled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,”[^10] with a similar argument in a lecture series Nasr gave at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1966.[^11] Over the past four decades Nasr has continued to describe the environmental crisis as one that originates as a crisis of values; his works are cited widely by Muslim environmentalists, and as a representative authority by Westerners seeking to include “the Islamic perspective” in discussions on the environment.