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Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community

Reza Tehrani Fellow
· 5 replies · 274 views
Animals & environmentAmericanIslamicPersianSufismAldo LeopoldSeyyed Hossein Nasr#khalifa#land-ethic#sacred-nature#stewardship
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I'm an architect in Shiraz, and I spend a lot of time in the old gardens here. A Persian garden is a strange object: entirely human-made, geometric, irrigated by channels that took enormous labour, and yet everyone who walks in feels that it is a picture of something given, not imposed.

I've been reading two environmental thinkers who seem to me to pull in different directions.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr argued, from Man and Nature (1968) onwards, that the ecological crisis is at root spiritual: modern science and culture stripped nature of its sacred character, and treated it as mere matter for use. His alternative draws on the Qur'anic idea of the human being as khalifa, God's vicegerent or trustee on earth, accountable for the creation placed in his care.

Aldo Leopold, in "The Land Ethic", says something that sounds similar but isn't. He wants the role of Homo sapiens to change from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.

A trustee is above what he holds in trust, even if he answers for it. A citizen is one member among others. The garden seems to me to belong to the first picture: humans arranging and caring for nature. The wilderness belongs to the second.

Which is the better basis for an environmental ethic? Or is the difference smaller than it looks?

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5 replies

  1. Imam Bilal Hussain

    Fellow

    The trustee model is often misunderstood as permission. In the Islamic sources the earth is described as a trust that the heavens and mountains refused to bear and humanity took on, and the emphasis falls on accountability, not ownership. The Prophet's teaching that whoever plants a tree from which a bird or a person eats is rewarded is closer to your gardeners than to any developer. So I'd say the khalifa is above nature only in responsibility, not in worth.

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  2. Anand Pillai

    Fellow

    As someone shaped by Jain neighbours, I'd push past both pictures. The Jain view gives souls to an enormous range of beings, including the tiniest. The goal isn't to manage them well or to be one citizen among them; it's to harm them as little as possible. That's neither stewardship nor citizenship. It's restraint. In my work on wetlands, the most effective thing we do is often to stop doing something.

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  3. Nur Aisyah Rahman

    Fellow

    From Kuala Lumpur: here "khalifa" is sometimes used by developers to justify exactly what Nasr criticises, as if being trustee meant being entitled to transform. That isn't Nasr's fault, but it's a risk of the model. Leopold's citizen can't easily be bent that way. Perhaps the best ethic needs both: Nasr's sense that nature is sacred, and Leopold's humility about our place in it.

  4. Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Fellow

    Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato si' (2015) tried something like Nur's combination: it rejects the reading of "dominion" as licence and speaks of the earth as a common home, with humans responsible for "tilling and keeping" the garden. The Christian tradition had to unlearn a bad interpretation of its own text, as Lynn White accused it of in his famous 1967 essay. Islam seems to face a similar task with khalifa.

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  5. Reza Tehrani

    Fellow

    Thank you. I think the garden can be read both ways, and perhaps that's why it moves people. The channels are human work, but they follow the slope of the land; nothing in a good garden fights the water. That may be what a trustee looks like when he has also learned to be a citizen. Anand's restraint is the piece I hadn't considered. Some of the best gardens are mostly what wasn't built.

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