The humidity of Central Java has a specific, relentless character. It is thick, fragrant with decay and rebirth. On the afternoon I arrived at Bumi Langit Farm, it gave me a tight, welcoming hug that took my breath away. Ahead of me, Tantra, a young man whose grace suggests he has long since made peace with the gravity of the earth, walked barefoot. He did not look back to see if I was stumbling or fighting the swarms of tiny flies. He was busy pointing out the “polycultures” that lay in the core of permaculture design —a chaotic, deliberate tangle of fruit trees, nitrogen-fixing shrubs, and medicinal herbs that looked, to my untrained eye, like a wilderness left to its own devices.
My discomfort with the unknown merged with my curiosity, fascination, confusion and eagerness to know more about what was going on around me, to decipher the languages of the non-human worlds above my head, beneath my feet, and between the two. I wondered whether my time on the farm in Indonesia too would make a similar impact on me as Zaytuna College’s Permaculture Design Course (PDC) had on many others.
This might be the quiet revolution of “Tawhidic Design” – an attempt to marry the modern science of permaculture — a system of sustainable agriculture developed in the seventies — with the ancient pulse of Islam. It is a movement that suggests the ecological crisis is not merely a failure of policy or technology, but a failure of the soul. To heal the planet, these practitioners argue, we must first remember our fitrah — our primordial, essential nature — and our role as khalifah, or stewards of a sacred trust.
The Architecture of Islamic Environmentalism
In the sterile halls of academia, environmentalism is often a matter of management: carbon credits, plastic bans, the cold calculus of parts-per-million. But at Bumi Langit, or in the “green” Sufi retreats of Northern California, the environment is not an “it.” It is a collection of ayat — divine signs. To understand nature, one must first understand Tawhid, the Islamic concept of Divine Oneness.
Iskandar Waworuntu, the founder of Bumi Langit and Tantra’s father, did not start as a farmer. He grew up in the high-octane world of the Balinese restaurant industry and travelled quite a bit. His journey to Islam was intellectual, a long study of English-language texts that eventually led him to the soil of Imo Giri. He has “Islamicised” the knowledge of permaculture, treating the three pillars of the craft — Earth care, people care, and fair share, not as secular ethics, but as a fulfillment of Quranic law.
In a fascinating Indonesian documentary entitled Semesta (Universe), faith-based environmental ethics and nature conservation are presented through the lenses of seven grassroots community leaders from seven different provinces, one of whom is Iskandar Waworuntu. The documentary notably marries Islamic spirituality and knowledge with environmentalism. The echoes of “Earth care, people care, and fair share” are heard throughout the documentary.
The imam of a tiny village in Aceh, Yusuf advises his congregation to exercise patience in their frequent encounters with elephants stomping through the village and eating the crops – because their habitat has been ruined by deforestation. By quoting ayaat (verses) from the Quran, the imam accepts collective responsibility for what the elephants are doing, and asks for forgiveness in a prayer session with men. As the embodiment of “earth care and fair share,” Imam Yusuf stands firm in refusal when some believers suggest killing the elephants. The documentary reminds viewers that environmentalism is not a modern scientific initiative, but a practice that has been deeply ingrained in the spiritual and cultural heritage of the Indonesian archipelago (click here for more on Javanese Islamic history).
When we walked past the Bumi Langit’s waste filtration system, a series of tanks that transform human “surplus” into life-giving liquid, I braced myself for the stench. There was none. “The system is waste-free and cyclical,” Tantra explained, gesturing to the deep dark liquid that would soon feed the crops. Here, a compost heap is more than rot; it is an embodiment of mīzān, the cosmic balance. To waste is to sin against the architecture of the universe.
Colonial Impact on Indonesian Agricultural Economy
The urgency of this reclamation movement in Indonesia is rooted in a bitter history. For four centuries, the archipelago was a laboratory for colonial exploitation. In 1830, the Dutch colonial government imposed the cultuurstelsel, or “forced cultivation system,” that turned a land of subsistence variety into a factory of monocultures: coffee, sugar, and indigo for the profit of distant shareholders. What was framed as protection for “unprepared” peasants became, in practice, a brutal extraction economy that left behind unsustainable monoculture, deforestation, eroded soil, land degradation, and a form of bondage in everything but name. While Independence in 1945 did not undo this damage overnight, land reforms were rolled back after the political upheavals of the mid-1960s, and it would take decades, and a reawakening from farmers like Iskandar Waworuntu to begin reclaiming the land on their own terms. “It has been a bumpy road,” says Tantra.
Restoring Tawhid in Environmentalism
Against this backdrop, “Muslim Environmentalisms” (the plural is intentional by Anna M. Gade, 2019) reframes this history as a form of decolonisation. Gade argues that Muslim environmentalisms draw on both global discourses (conservation, development, Islamic revival) and local knowledge, and that this blending has the potential to produce hybrid movements and solidarities across cultures and countries. I benefited immensely from her methodology which centers local voices, material archives, and historical background as part of a decolonising practice during my visits to Indonesia. I witnessed it firsthand: the Quran in practice, environmental ethics emerging from lived religion rather than doctrine. It’s the same dynamic Semesta captures, local religious authorities reworking the theological texts through action and practice rather than simply quoting them.
By rejecting the industrial models of the Global North and returning to indigenous, faith-based practices, communities are performing a quiet act of resistance that is the potential staging ground for an environmental revolution (for sufis, an act of healing).
Kebun Hanif and Pedesaan Farm are the two permaculture sites on Java Island which were inspired by Pak Iskandar’s initiative. They organise international retreats where the crossroads of Islam and ecology are explored by prominent names in the field and they accept volunteers year round while offering training and PDC. Kebun Hanif Farm offers several forms of accommodation for anyone who is interested in experiencing firsthand how an Islamic living and permaculture can merge with youth’s energy.
The act of returning to faith-based practices and eco-resistance is not limited to the farmlands, either. In the city of Yogyakarta, resistance and healing takes the form of the Kali Code Waste Bank. The Code River was once a slum, a place of discarded stuff and stagnant hope. Today, a collective of volunteer housewives who describe their work in the language of Islam are active in the cleaning process. “It’s like rolling out a long prayer mat,” one resident, Mrs. Kus described to me.1 For these women, picking up trash is ikhlas – sincerity, a voluntary service. They are not doing it for a government grant but as an investment in the afterlife. The riverbank has become a sacred space, and the management of plastic a form of shadaqah, or charity.
Across Indonesia, there are many pesantrens, Islamic boarding schools. Pesantren Ekologi Ath Thaariq (founded in 2008), with a primarily female staff, combines environmental education rooted in Sufism in the form of seed‑saving, agroecology training, herbal processing, eco‑study tours and contemplative nature practice. Pesantren Al Kautsar and Pesantren Hijau initiatives implement waste separation, composting, tree planting and organic gardens with local partners whereas Baitul Maal Hidayatullah’s Pesantren Iklim pilots climate curricula, recycling and resilience activities.
These boarding schools are evidence of the resurgence of green-Sufism through environmental education within the broader Islamic educational landscape. With hands-on ecological farming skills, learning about soil health, composting, stewardship, ethics, and community service at an early age, the impact of pesantrens is likely to be transformative and long-lasting.
From Java to the Bay
Six thousand miles away, in the fog-draped hills of Berkeley, California, the same philosophy is taking root at Zaytuna College. Here, the “Islamisation of Knowledge” (a term coined by Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas) takes a literal form. Students enrolled in the PDC are taught by instructors like Rhamis Kent, a man whom I describe as a “wandering dervish” of the movement who travels the world to teach PDC. “I thought I came to learn about gardening,” a classmate in the PDC programme told me after we were handed our certificates. “But I found myself on a spiritual journey.”
At Fitrah Farm in Pescadero, the aesthetic changes —luxury glamping tents replace the traditional Javanese joglo— but the core remains identical. Here, American Muslims, many the children of migrants, struggle with a different kind of disconnection. In a culture of relentless consumption and digital noise, the farm offers a “theocentric” ecology. Farm-to-table food on the day when our class was hosted was vegan, delicious, and fulfilling for the stomach and the soul. Bees were buzzing around the bright-colored wild flowers and lavender blooms of rosemary bushes.
The Relational Path
These disparate practitioners collectively reject what Anna Gade calls the “universalised and abstract Islam.” They are not only interested in a religion of books but also in a “lived” religion that breathes through the soil. The conclusion of this “Tawhidic” experiment is humble yet profound: technical knowledge is not enough. You can give a community a manual on composting, and it may sit on a shelf. But if you frame that compost as a testament to the Oneness of God, you create a shift in consciousness that no NGO can replicate.
As I left Bumi Langit, the tiny frogs and geckos were beginning their evening chorus in the communal showers. It was Ramadan, and the pace of the farm had slowed to a meditative crawl. There is a specific kind of peace that comes from knowing that your presence on the earth — your waste, your work, your hunger — is part of a calibrated harmony. Rooted in concepts like tawhid and khalifah, these farmers, trainers, and activists are proving that the path to ecological survival may not be paved with new inventions or technology, but with the rediscovery of an old, inseparable bond between the self and the planet. They are not just repairing the world; they are remembering it.
Footnotes
- H. F. Anam (2024). Sajadah panjang itu bermula dari sampah. CRCS UGM. https://crcs.ugm.ac.id/sajadah-panjang-itu-bermula-dari-sampah/. ↩︎
