The Environment, The World System & The Muslim Scholar

Abstract

The causal link between the environmental crisis and scholarly activitiesmay seem untenable at first glance. After all, what could scholars do, onemay ask, to improve the environment? Common sense suggests that this isthe domain of environmental science and engineering, not the task ofhumanities and social sciences; scholars ought not to be occupied with howmany species are disappearing, as that seems to be the domain of biologists.If pollution is getting out of control, it must be due to the irresponsibility ofpolicy makers whose inefficiency may seem to be the cause of it.If the humanities and social science scholars venture out of theirspecializations, they will find that they have everything to do with therapidly deteriorating environment. By seeing the world holistically, theycan identify the impending environmental crisis and help save theenvironment by studying the causal factors of its destruction. Conversely,they should bear in mind that their absence from this field will leaddirectly to its further deterioration. A better future lies in the activities ofthose scholars whose efforts can help create an environment conducive tosustaining the quality of life, not with the scholars who are preoccupiedwith choosing routes to economic and political modernity that will yieldmaximum economic growth and material wealth.Shifting from economics to political science, one finds that ‘security’,a notion central to the field, has acquired a different meaning. It is notmilitary security or internal security of one or several states alone thatdefines the field, but environmental security, which is common to thewhole planet. Deforestation exists because there is a market for timber,which is not due to the needy people who want to build a shack to live in,but due to the profit seekers whose activities have become devoid of ethics.Market is supposedly apolitical but it is also unethical. The populationexplosion, which is a direct result of certain distinct developments in the.field of modem medicine, is at the core of environmental destruction. Ittook 130 years for the world population to grow from one to two billion butit will take just a decade to climb from five billion to six billion! The debate ...