The Triple Bottom Line Blog

In a world where fast-growing giants like India and China are rapidly catching up to the West in terms of their consumption--and the burden they place on the environment--we sometimes assume that creating sustainable approaches to growth will involve impositions on the developing world.

This assumption helps produce friction around environmentalism between the world's haves and have-nots. The fear is that newly-enlightened Western thinkers will "change the rules" and prevent the countries of the global South from claiming their fair share of consumption--all in the name of sustainability.

But maybe there's an alternative. Maybe the peoples of the developing world will devise their own environmental solutions, based on ideas about respect for nature, our dependence on the planet, and the unity of life that are deeply embedded in traditional religions and cultures.

That's the possibility suggested by this NPR piece about business leaders in the Middle East who see sustainability as naturally linked to Islam and the traditional Arab way of life. Here's a quote from one of the Kuwaiti business people interviewed by NPR:

Think about it. This [the Middle East] is one of the hottest inhabited regions in the world and yet people lived here not only in days before electricity, but in days when people were dirt poor, I mean literally had nothing . . . . There's still memory, individual memory of what it was like in the time before oil. There's still that link to a not-so-distant past.

Doesn't it make sense that peoples in the Middle East are more likely to draw inspiration for their own approach to sustainability from Islam than from Western environmentalists?--just as the peoples of India are more likely to be inspired by Hinduism, and those of China by Buddhism and Confucianism.

I'm no expert on any of these great non-Western faiths, but everything I know about them suggests that they are at least very compatible with the core concepts and ethical requirements of sustainability--at least as much as Christianity and Judaism, and arguably more.

As the global impact of this century's environmental challenges becomes more and more apparent, the need for a global sustainability movement becomes more and more clear. And while such a movement will require international cooperation and some universal standards--tomorrow's improved versions of Kyoto, if you will--it will also require roots in dozens of local cultures.

As a planetary people, we'll need many forms of sustainability, driven by leaders who speak not just in the accents of New York and Portland and Stockholm and Berlin but also those of Abu Dhabi and Mumbai and Kinshasa and Beijing.

Labels: globalization, Islam, Personal Musings, sustainability