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This piece is part of Sustainable Faith: An Interfaith Season of Creation, a series from MassIPL in which leaders from across Massachusetts' religious and ethical traditions write, in the first person, about how their faith connects with climate. New essays publish each Sunday through October 11th, 2026. Read all articles here.
The intersection of religion and environment may seem like a niche interest until you realize that our values stem inevitably from the traditions that have been passed down to us. Whether that tradition is liberalism, yoga, or Islam, there are values embedded in the theories and practices of that tradition. But the real world is more complicated than ideal forms, and one can hardly say what liberalism, yoga, or Islam have to say about the environment. Instead, you would ask an individual person, one whose historical trajectory, lived experiences, and conceptual baggage give them a series of emotional and reasoned reactions to the question: what do you think about the environment? I suppose I am no different.
I was born in Pakistan in the early 1990s and moved to the United States at the end of the millennium, just as the global consensus seemed to be that we had solved politics and perhaps it was best to turn towards other pressing problems facing humanity; this was the purported End of History. Since then, history has marched on. I remember Al Gore, the Democratic candidate in the 2000 presidential election, talking incessantly about the inconvenient truth about climate change. But the United States is a place that has the convenient buffer of two oceans, and a highly mechanized agricultural industry that cushions most Americans from the impact of the environment on the food and textiles produced right here. In Pakistan, where three-quarters of the economy is directly or indirectly related to agriculture, people living close to the land can feel the minute shifts in climate that can make the difference between bumper crops and devastation.
The environmental crisis is an entangled mess of many different factors. As a historian, I am committed to multifactorial causal explanations for why things happen. But it is difficult to deny that the extractive economic reality of the modern world, grounded in an ethic of taking from the environment to maximize our personal pleasure and leisure, is at least partly to blame. This model of living places the individual first, and sees a hard boundary between the individual person and the world that they live in. Maximizing quantity rather than quality of life is the lever that takes a very human instinct—simply to enjoy life—to an unsustainable level.
I bring in religion here because it offers guidance towards a way to live properly. What ought one do? How should one do it? These questions are inherently tied to the question of the self and its relationship to the world.
In the Islamic tradition, humanity is created with an ambiguous relationship to reality. The Qur’ān says, “(Remember) when your Lord said to the angels, ‘I am going to create a deputy on the earth!’ The angels said, ‘Will You create there one who will spread disorder on the earth and cause bloodshed, while we proclaim Your purity, along with your praise, and sanctify Your name?’ He said, ‘Certainly, I know what you know not.’”1
This, in fact, is the key separation between human beings and other beings in Creation: their ability to choose against what God commands. The angels’ understanding of humanity at first glance seems to foreshadow exactly the problems that we are dealing with: environmental destruction paired with a supreme indifference to the value of other living beings. At the same time, one might detect in the angels’ protests a hint of disdain. Why would the Creator make a creature so ungrateful when He already has perfect attendants who adore their Creator and couldn’t dream of spurning the commands given them?
The Qur’ān elaborates: “Indeed, We [God] offered the trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they all declined to bear it, being fearful of it. But humanity assumed it, for they are truly wrongful to themselves and ignorant of consequences.”2 The ‘trust’ that humanity assumes consists of the obligations that come with the ability to choose. The natural world itself declined such a burden, because it recognized the danger of not being able to give these responsibilities their due. Humans were arrogant enough to assume such responsibility. The angels too are not responsible for their actions. They have neither rights nor obligations. They simply are and they do as they are commanded.
Humans, by dint of this burden of choice, are prone to mis-stepping. This fundamental right — the ability to choose — comes with obligations. The air we breathe is a right, but it comes with the obligation of keeping it clean. Our rights to the fruits of the earth are similar. Whatever institutions we build, they also have to reckon with making these rights accord with the obligation of taking care of the space that we take up. As we encroach ever further into the habitats of other beings, this question weighs heavily on humanity. What do we owe the other beings on this planet? Are the systems and institutions we have built accounting for the obligations we have to others? Not only other humans, but all beings that we share this earth with.
The quintessential villain in the Qur’ān is Iblīs, or Satan, who is not an angel, but rather a djinn, fashioned from a smokeless fire in comparison to the black clay that shaped Adam. Once expelled from the conference of angels for refusing to bow in his arrogance to the newly created Adam, Iblīs swears revenge: “He said, ‘My Lord, since You made me go astray, I swear that I shall beautify for them (the evils) on the earth, and shall lead all of them astray.’”3 The beauty of the natural world becomes obscured when we step outside our relationship to it and ignore our obligations to the earth. Things that look beautiful to us, the new clothes, the new gadgets, hide the oppressive conditions in which they were made.
I am sympathetic to those who point out that there are obvious asymmetries in those who cause the most harm to others as well as the earth. Consumer culture, corporate greed, and colonial relationships are all relevant if we are interested in apportioning blame. But if we are simply interested in doing good, Gandhi said, arguing against colonial rule in India, that “We must have the liberty to do evil before we learn to do good.” This mirrors the Qur’ānic narrative of Adam, for what does it mean to do good if we don’t have the possibility of choice? As the historian Faisal Devji puts it, Gandhi's nonviolence showed in its “practices of withdrawal, renunciation, and sacrifice that the apparent positivity of violence was itself founded upon the negative reality of nonviolence, whose invisible work of sustaining social life was turned into the basis and target of violence.”4 This perspective on non-violence that sustains us redefines our relation to the earth as well. In choosing to build a relationship to the planet that is based on rights and obligations of the earth as well as those who live on it, we attempt to rectify a great violence that has laid bare the invisible relationships that we harm through our wanton disregard for others, whether humans or non-humans.
The dangers of human hubris are clear. Pope Francis said it explicitly when he said, “If we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs.” This takes us back to the Qur’ānic verse that names humanity as “deputy on earth.” If deputizing humanity makes us masters, consumers, or exploiters, then we have done an exemplary job already. But, if instead, our obligations are in the role of caretaker, of gardener, of friend, then we must approach from the perspective of repairing non-violent relationships with the earth and its beings.
Such abstract language can sometimes confuse action, and take us away from doing practical things that integrate our personal ethics with the systems within which we live our lives. For me, I have tried to make choices that do not buy into our larger consumer culture, and I think about waste as an ethic of consumption. If I buy food, I will try to buy just enough so it does not go to waste. If I buy clothes, I will want them to be sustainable in some way. Personally, I have stopped buying new clothes altogether and have taken to thrift shops and secondhand stores for my fashion. While there are fans of vintage fashion who choose to dress in old styles because of the aesthetics of their outerwear, my choice is because I do not want to buy new clothes and put the money that I earn towards buttressing the cycles of waste that the fast fashion industry wishes to accelerate for profit.
On a daily basis, this acceleration of consumption and waste has, I believe, effects on the soul. The more I see the materiality of this world as disposable, there is a danger that I take non-human animals, plants, and other humans as disposable as well. Our food, our clothes, our utensils, and our gadgets should not be disposable. We should care about them, just as we care about the people and animals and plants in our lives. These things are not somehow separate, and to take the meaningfulness of material and the nonmaterial seriously necessitates an ethic that values the environment within which we live as much as we value our own lives.
Fundamentally, there is no hard demarcation between me and my environment. There is an old idiom that sounds silly when you say it: you are what you eat. But it is true that whatever we consume in this world makes us who we are. Whether aesthetically with the clothes we wear, emotionally with the kinds of people we surround ourselves with, or ethically, in the decisions we make— every day, we make big and small decisions about what kind of person we want to be in a world of infinite choice.
We invite you to reflect on the piece you've read using the questions below.
Leaders from across Massachusetts' religious and ethical traditions on how their faith connects with climate.
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Lenny Somervell and Rabbi Laura Bellows draw on Jewish mourning practice and the wisdom of the High Holidays to explore how grief, when we let ourselves feel it, can become the ground for collective action.
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Margaret Bullitt-Jonas explores how love and longing — rooted in her Christian faith and the impending arrival of her first grandchild — call her to protect the Earth for generations to come.
