Tajuddin Ingram isn’t new to the climate scene. In fact, his interest in the field began when he was just a kid, watching a documentary in his father’s law firm. The documentary predicted almost every single climate event to the current day, from heat waves to the flooding of New York. Being interested in science and technology wasn’t quite the norm in his family, many of whom are attorneys or English teachers. Now, Tajuddin Ingram is a Project Manager for Sustainability at FedEx Corporation, much different from an English teacher.
After graduating from the University of Maryland focusing on environmental science, his career has primarily been within the government sphere. Ingram was a policy advisor in Resiliency and Sustainability for the State of New York, focused on transitioning the state’s real estate and transportation assets to meet the governor’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. Before that, he worked in the project management unit of New York City’s mayor’s office, focusing on infrastructure and sustainability-related projects.
Ingram’s identity as Muslim fuels and feeds off of his work, but it’s not often that he comes across people like him in his work – not just Muslim, but people of colour, in general. In his previous position at the state level, working in the governmental end, he was, from what he remembers, one of three non-white people within the entire policy space in the state of New York. “This…space has been very much dominated by a particularly educated group of people, which is not bad in any sense, but it definitely can lend towards a feeling of being kind of an outsider, and a lot of code switching… there are others that are at least some-what interested in this field, but they’re definitely far and few between.”
Ingram underscores his identity as a Muslim fuels his work. He notes that addressing the climate crisis and being Muslim aren’t inherently independent of each other, and that ultimately it depends on one’s own moral principles. In fact, caring about and pushing against the climate crisis should be something well-aligned with Islamic values. “As a Muslim, my moral guidelines are…tied towards a moral principle that is outside of the self and outside of the individual.” Whereas, individualism, he believes, feeds a narrative that contradicts a potential ‘solution’ to the climate crisis. “For us, especially in America, it’s kind of contradictory since we are a nation ‘of pick yourself up by your bootstraps.’ It’s all about focusing on yourself.”
Another symptom of individualism is the rise of climate depression and climate anxiety with people feeling overwhelmed, and even individually responsible, for climate change, especially as the world has enacted deadlines from which we cannot return once exceeded. But as a Muslim, Ingram pushes for perseverance above those feelings. “As much as I understand people’s anxieties when it comes to what’s happening, we people have been through, in my opinion, much worse historically,” He says.
“We don’t just sit around and wait for other people to solve our problems,” Ingrams says adamantly. “We’re not cowards; we continue fighting, pushing, and continuing to do what we need to do… For me, Islam is not only a comfort, but it’s also a driving force.” Here he mentions the hadith:
Anas ibn Malik reported that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, “If the Final Hour comes while you have a shoot of a plant in your hands and it is possible to plant it before the Hour comes, you should plant it.“
{Sahih (Al-Albani), Book 27}
When it comes to a full-fledged solution to the climate crisis, Ingram doesn’t carry an antidote in his pocket. His beliefs do, however, stem from the idea that Islam in itself provides constant solutions. “When you come from being a student going to university, you have a very idealistic idea on how to solve things— just use this technology or use this principle, just push for this sort of thing,” Ingram says. “But when you start really understanding the intricacies of how policy, government and law work, you start understanding how complicated it is. In reality, the deeper you go into it, the more reality kind of strikes in that the climate crisis is not as much about a technological problem or an ideas problem. It’s more of an ideological and philosophical failure.”
As Muslims, the principles followed adhere to a climate-conscious mindset and moderation in consumption. Contrastingly, governments are built on principles of scaling at such alarming rates that are contradictory to our beliefs. “Individualism is the driving force of many of our ideologies and governments,” Ingram presses. “When you start really thinking about a lot of our problems in the world right now, especially in the developed world, it is basically the fault of these beliefs that essentially prioritize our immediate… individual wants rather than the collective goods. As Muslims, we’re not supposed to be thinking that way.”
Read More: Reclaiming Zuhd: Embracing Minimalism in a Wasteful World
Taj notes that urging corporations to take actions that might reduce their profits or individuals to sacrifice their wants results in immediate pushback. He notes this at play in the backtracking of the congestion pricing policy in Manhattan, a push to tackle the city’s traffic congestion by charging drivers for driving within one of the most dense areas of New York. It was shelved indefinitely after consideration, despite the concept being proven to work in other cities.
“A lot of people like their cars. They like their freedom. They like to go wherever they want to go, whenever they want to go, however, they want to go in a nice individualized transportation sphere, which in many ways is understandable, but in a lot of ways, not everyone can do that.” The money made from the project was intended to go towards reviving New York’s crumbling subway and bus infrastructure and systems.
Ingram believes, “the public and private sphere are not going to solve this, that has become a moral sort of problem, and that the systems that we operate in effectively remove any ability to solve it because, in itself, people continue to focus on their own wants and needs.”—again, a general contradiction to core Islamic principles.
Instead, he believed we essentially need “a bottom-up approach, a movement, an idea. An approach of people individually deciding to reduce their consumption. To essentially reduce the overall importance of their materialistic ideas and implement that on their own, meaning that it’s not done by the government who is telling them what to do. It’s something that they collectively, and mutually decide on what to do. Which once again requires a moral framework.”
“Because this world is temporary and the afterlife is eternal…Islam and the Islamic frameworks of collective responsibility… is that solution.” Ingram says, pushing that Islam is the ultimate solution to addressing the climate crisis.
