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Broadcasting Green: Grassroots Environmentalism on Muslim Women's Radio

In 1967, Lynn White published a wide-ranging essay in Science arguing that the 
causes of the world’s ecological crises are, at their roots, spiritual. He wrote that 
Abrahamic thought has always been profoundly anthropocentric, beginning 
with the creation account in Genesis in which God gives humanity full dominion 
over the earth and over animals. According to White, Western Christianity and 
related traditions, such as Islam, have seen nature as instrumental to human 
needs. These branches of thought have therefore justified the exploitation of 
nature. White concluded that ‘[s]ince the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, 
the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not’. 
Using St. Francis of Assisi as a model, White called for a re-envisioning of the 
modern human relationship with nature that reached to the depth of the soul. 
Though perhaps not quite what White had in mind, a religious reshaping of 
environmental ethics is at work in the West within some of its Muslim communities. 
In this paper I will investigate the particular case of the Muslim Community 
Radio (MCR, 87.8 FM) environmental broadcasting campaign in the 
East End of London during Autumn 2007. The radio campaign is an instance 
of a small but significant set of Muslim environmental collective action campaigns 
emerging in Britain. I focus the paper on the women’s radio programming 
during the MCR radio campaign. I argue that the women’s radio 
broadcasts were intended to ‘sacralize’ environmentalism in the minds of the 
female Muslim listening audience, imbuing environmental ethics with religious 
meaning. Though the primary overt discourse in the campaign was this sacralized 
environmentalism, I will also point out two underlying discourses: 1) The 
assertion that Islam is modern and compatible with selected western values and 
2) the call for Muslim women to take up a carefully gender-structured community 
activism. Therefore, the radio campaign was in reality three simultaneous 
campaigns: for environmental activism, for the justification of Islam in modern 
Britain, and, in a more veiled form, for women’s empowerment. These interconnected 
layers of meaning reveal something of the complexity of concerns within 
Muslim communities in Britain. As I will argue in the conclusion, the case also 
contributes to our general understanding of religious influences on environmental 
behaviours and of the agentic role of women in sacralization processes in 
the modern West (Aune, Sharma and Vincett, 2008).