Looking after water, air and soil

This lesson asks you to understand why sustainability matters in the way people live with nature, and to name some results of using resources carefully or carelessly. The museum links one author's reading of how people should treat their environment; your class brings examples from its own area. ¹

Think about the water, soil, plants and animals that people depend on. Say what could happen if they were used up, and what people could do to keep them.

Muhyi al-Din Afifi Ahmad writes about the water, air and soil that people live among. He holds that the pollution of water, air and soil threatens the safety of persons and societies, and that international conference resolutions went unimplemented ². He presents Islam as taking care that people make good use of their natural environment and coexist with it in a way that preserves its constituents ³. These are the author's views, not the museum's. They are in the record on environmental protection in Islam.

The author says that polluted water, air and soil threaten the safety of people. Choose the water or the soil near your school or home: how could people harm it, and why would that matter to the others who share it?

• Environmental protection in Islam: what this author says about the pollution of water, air and soil.
• Hima: land kept for grazing by those for whom it was reserved.
• Shirb, water rights: how the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia treats turns at shared water.

Read Environmental protection in Islam. Write down the three kinds of pollution the author names, then add one action your class could take to look after its own water or soil.