January 22, 2021
Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and Associate Dean for Research & Education, Anna M. Gade has received rave reviews for her recent book, Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations (Columbia University Press, 2019). Hailed as an “instant classic” by Omid Safi and a “much-needed addition to environmental thinking” by Anna Tsing, the book has received wide attention and praise in the US and overseas over the past year. The book makes a major intervention in Environmental Humanities with its provocative claim that the environment is an ethical idea. Not only does Muslim Environmentalisms render a complete treatment of religious, political, and scientific approaches to the environment, past and present, but it also engages cutting-edge topics in global Environmental Studies such as the Rights of Nature, decolonizing approaches, and environmental justice. In 2020, Gade led multiple international discussions about the book and Islam and the environment across Indonesia, the setting of Gade’s decades of original fieldwork on which the book draws, at Gadjah Mada University and Universitas National, as well as the national Indonesian Endowment for Education (LPDP). There was a panel dedicated to a scholarly conversation about the book at the most recent meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 2020, and Gade has recently been invited to appear at universities such as Emory University, New York University, Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley, Yale University, and the University of Edinburgh to discuss the book and offer thoughts on future directions of the field of Environmental Humanities. You may read about the book in a multi-scholar Roundtable discussion online of the Immanent Frame (Social Science Council) that features Muslim Environmentalisms, and hear two podcast interviews about it on New Books Network and the Religious Studies Project.