The Los Angeles wildfires present scenes of destruction that can seemingly only be described as “apocalyptic.” But it isn’t the end of the world for the tens of thousands of people who now must struggle to find housing, alongside the other tens of thousands already experiencing housing insecurity in California. In a crisis, the urgent collides with the ongoing. The wreckage raises the question: what are we going to do about it? I want to propose a moral framework for practical responses to the crisis of wildfire and displacement, rooted in Muslim narratives of beginnings and ends.
This crisis of displacement in California predates these fires. In September 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom called the extreme shortage and high cost of housing (often referred to as “the housing crisis”) “the original sin in the state of California.” This sin has led to record-high homelessness in the state year after year. Though many factors contribute to the housing crisis, wildfires play no small role. One couple from Paradise whose rental housing burned in the 2018 Camp Fire moved to Berry Creek, only to be displaced again in the 2020 North Complex Fire; after they settled in Plumas County, the 2021 Dixie Fire left them homeless. In the wake of these latest fires, property owners might have some limited recourse through insurance, but renters, people with informal living arrangements, and the already unhoused are displaced and competing for scarce, expensive housing.
Using the term “original sin” for a crisis that in fact exiled a couple from Paradise, Newsom accidentally evokes John Steinbeck’s work transposing Biblical themes onto the landscapes of California. In his novel East of Eden, Steinbeck repeatedly alludes to the story of Cain and Abel to explore moral agency within cycles of violence. One of Steinbeck’s “Cains,” Cal, is formed by conditions outside his control, but still has the opportunity to transcend the violence of those conditions by choosing differently and breaking the cycle. As wildfires only grow in frequency and impact, one might wonder how we can “choose differently.”
Cycles of displacement and environmental catastrophe bring to mind a much older sin: the dispossession, and, in Newsom’s words, “genocide,” of indigenous people. These sins are coextensive, rooted in settler notions of property ownership that privilege expansion and domination. From California to Gaza, the displacement of indigenous people continues to be accompanied by environmental destruction. But the structural nature of this kind of sin thwarts the moral confrontation imagined by Steinbeck. Capitalism and colonialism, corporations and conquest; these systems create moral crises that require intervention beyond the will of the individual. To this end, the Iranian philosopher Ali Shariarti interprets Cain and Abel not as individuals but as two different stages of human history. Where Abel represents a time of equitable and pastoral harmony with nature, Cain represents the era of private ownership—and thus of exploitation and tyranny.
This may be taken to contrast our current situation with an Edenic past to which we must return, but Cain cannot resurrect his brother. Like his parents, the biblical Cain is displaced, cursed to wander the land, unable to cultivate it. In the Qur’an, God sends a crow to show Cain (Qabil) how to bury his brother, and Cain suddenly feels regret. Cain’s Biblical consequence for murdering his brother is a limit on his agency; his Qur’anic consequence is to be reminded of his continued agency. This distinction parallels Islam’s rejection of “original sin”; humanity’s first expression of agency was when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God. Banished from Jannah (Paradise) and sent to Earth, Adam and Eve retain their agency and receive God’s forgiveness. The crisis of the Fall set the stage for morality itself: now that human beings did not have to be perfect, they could choose to be good.
Agency comes with accountability: Muslim eschatology—narratives and prophecies about how the world ends—center on Judgment Day, the Hour of final accounting in which all is destroyed and God weighs the merit of each individual’s actions. The inevitability of crisis sounds paralyzing, but in Islam, crisis is mobilizing. One hadith quotes the Prophet (PBUH) as saying: “If the Hour comes while you are planting saplings, and there is a sapling in your hand, still plant the sapling.” This can be taken as an assurance that God holds the human being accountable to niyat, or intention, more than outcome; the sapling does not need to grow for the act to have worth. God calls the human being to do right by creation not in spite of but because of its inevitable destruction; to act with care, not control.
Because the Prophet (PBUH) uses the example of planting saplings, rather than any other more obviously meritorious action (such as prayer or charity), this hadith also seems to illustrate that acts of cultivation have inherent virtue. “Cultivate” comes from the Latin colo, which literally means to take care of a field or garden, but also means to nurture, protect, honor, and even worship (the word “cult” also comes from colo). Muslim practice foregrounds the cultivation of taqwa (awareness of God) through outward acts of Shahada, or bearing witness. But because God Himself is unseen, and unseeable, witness is a struggle human beings must engage in, cultivating our relationship with God through our relationships with His creation. Banished from the Garden of Paradise, we have been given the agency to plant our saplings until our return. Muslim “ecotheology,” then, is a project of cultivating relationships of care with all creation, with the knowledge of creation’s inevitable destruction.
What if we were to take displacement as an inevitable human crisis, rather than an original sin to extirpate? California’s crisis of ongoing displacement is a structural failure of care. Property systems reflect social values, and California’s laws (like most) entrench “a subjectivity of domination” that normalizes homelessness. Currently, one family—the Emmersons, owners of the lumber giant Sierra Pacific Industries—own more than twice the amount of land that makes up Yellowstone National Park, while more than 300,000 people (including 115,593 individuals with children) relied on homelessness services in 2023. Not only do fires displace already vulnerable groups, but wildfire smoke disproportionately impacts the health of unhoused Californians. People suffer because our property systems privilege the right to exclude and the marketability of land over the right to shelter and reciprocal relationship with land. Property systems render us Cains, individuals tragically locked in cycles of violence that shape and nurture us even as we resist.
But unlike the Biblical Cain, we are not cursed, and we do not wander alone. We must cultivate relationships of mutual aid—solidarity, not charity. Through resources like Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network and informal acts of care, the wildfires have created networks of support and interdependence. Deepening relationships between organizations and between individuals will improve our ability to take care of ourselves. For example, deliberative comanagement (the practice of neighbors sharing management of individually owned resources) can improve the effectiveness of wildfire response and counter property law’s social paradigm of exclusion and autonomy. The scholar Rashmi Dyal-Chand, one proponent of deliberative comanagement, points to Sonoma County’s Citizens Organized to Prepare for Emergencies (COPE) as a primary example. COPE conducts surveys to plan neighborhood evacuation routes and gauge local fire hazards, but Dyal-Chand argues that a community organization like COPE can go much further, for example by organizing shelter plans on one another’s property or collaborating on long-term plans to manage properties in ways that decrease shared wildfire risk.
On a very practical level, relationships between neighbors must especially be cultivated because wildfire mitigation techniques rely heavily on “spillover benefits,” the impact of the techniques on neighboring lands. Because of the collective nature of the threats posed by climate change, adjustments to property norms, rights, and duties must run in the direction of weakening individual property claims. Wildfires are not constrained by rigid, individualized boundaries—why should our imaginations be? A changing climate calls attention to interconnectedness of ecosystems and social systems, of lands, waters, wildlife, and people. Interconnectedness does not foreclose the possibility of productive relationships; in her book Muslim Environmentalisms, Anna Gade writes about cultivating “ethical and environmental relationships and practices in the present moment that extend across space, time, and species” as a way of cultivating a relationship with God. This includes “even resources that are used instrumentally, with this relational use doubling as a sign of God.” Recognition of our interconnectedness calls for a shift toward a “systems-view of property,” a view of the possession and management of land that implicates the interests of neighbors, animals, plants, and more.
But, California’s crisis of displacement extends well beyond the practices of individual property owners; the dispossession of indigenous people in California is itself a cycle of displacement and ecological destruction. A Muslim framework for ethical environmental practice can find resonances with traditional ecological knowledge, which should motivate relationships of solidarity and reparation. On both views, the inevitability of destruction grounds networks of active care among human and other beings. This view was not shared by California’s settlers, who in 1850 passed the “Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” outlawing the indigenous practice of “good fire.” Settler fire suppression in California has undoubtedly made wildfires worse. Although California now allows controlled burns, the scholar Deniss J. Martinez notes that “government-led prescribed fires are primarily oriented toward fuel reduction to protect settlements and timber, a distinct shift from the objectives of indigenous fire stewardship, in which a primary goal is to regenerate fire-adapted species and ecosystems,” which rely on small semi-regular wildfires to survive.
Indigenous fire stewardship reflects how an interconnected view might call for acts of care that seem counterintuitive and even harmful from a perspective that privileges ownership, autonomy, and exclusion. Land back and other movements for indigenous sovereignty resolve the contradiction by allowing indigenous people to set the terms. As Martinez writes, “Indigenous re-framings of climate change and wildfire emphasize that deepening reciprocal relationality with human and nonhuman species is a critical pathway toward redressing past harm, and that returning lands and enacting reparations are a key part of mitigating these crises.” Like the Qur’anic Cain who learns from the crow to bury his brother, settlers must cultivate relations of care by addressing past harm. Ethical relationships between human beings can produce ethical relationships beyond human beings.
The same synthesis can develop in our response to the housing crisis. Given mass displacement, destruction from fires and rising construction costs, California’s ongoing housing shortage needs creative solutions. Nader Khalili, the Iranian-American architect, brought principles he learned from translating the works of Rumi to how he designed shelter for those without it. His style of “earth architecture” is intended to help climate refugees build safe, sustainable housing with the materials around them. Khalili’s approach keeps costs low and construction methods widely accessible. But by designing structures built entirely with local materials—“the Earth beneath our feet”—Khalili also envisions homes that maintain continuity with their environments. The ecological benefits are real: local materials fare well in their own climates, and using them bypasses the significant carbon emissions of concrete. This approach to housing also insists on interconnectedness, materially reflecting a systems-view of property. True to the spirit of helping climate refugees, Khalili’s CalEarth Institute has offered free books and classes to anybody affected by the California wildfires.
None of these solutions can undo the fires, or prevent the next one. California’s crisis of displacement and fire will continue to parch the land. Like Steinbeck’s Cain, we may find ourselves in cycles of violence beyond our control, and, like Shariarti’s Cain, we may find ourselves located in a violent era of human history. Like the Biblical Cain, we may be cursed to wander, and, like the Qur’anic Cain, we have reparations to make. But the inevitability of crisis does not trivialize moral response; it is the precondition for moral action. The hadith of the sapling illustrates a view of moral agency within humanity’s structural limitations—but it also gestures beyond. Eden, Jannah, Paradise: these are gardens. In the act of cultivation, our relationships create something heavenly. The ethical life is less a matter of getting into heaven and more a matter of how much heaven you leave behind. When the Hour approaches, it will be right to leave behind a garden.
Yaseen Hashmi is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. He is currently pursuing his J.D. at Georgetown Law Center, where he is a staff editor on the Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law & Policy.