This story was produced with support from the Round Earth Media program of the International Women’s Media Foundation.
People join the climate justice movement for different reasons. Some want to stop pipelines from running through their ancestral lands. Others want to halt the construction of prisons in their communities. It was living under Israeli occupation that ushered Layalee Beirat into environmental advocacy.
While she is from the U.S., Beirat is a native of Palestine and spent six years there, spanning middle school and high school. Beirat said life in the West Bank taught her a “different perspective of life.” Before moving to Palestine, she lived in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where she again resides.
“I knew that there needed to be different strategies to living to achieve ‘freedom’ of occupation and always saw great value in green actions during my youth upbringing,” Beirat told Prism.
While living in Palestine, Beirat began a recycling project in high school. Her goal was to help the environment, but as part of her effort, she also decreased the cost of supplies for local businesses and created job opportunities for residents. The experience stuck with her.
She had another turning point in 2021, shortly after graduating from the University of Illinois in Chicago. One day while attending mosque in the Stony Island region located on the South Side of Chicago, she met Caroline Williams, the founder of the Chicago Muslims Green Team (CMGT), a local organization that works to establish eco-friendly initiatives around the city–including greener mosques. A “green” mosque requires mosque leaders to adopt energy conservation practices.
Beirat said it was “destiny” that brought the two women together. The mosque in South Side Chicago was not one she usually attended, and Williams happened to be there to promote CMGT’s Tree Ambassador Program. The initiative teaches residents how to request free trees from the city to plant in their neighborhoods.
Beirat said she was intrigued by Williams’ work and “impressed by her grit,” which made her want to join the organization and help grow the business. And she did. Beirat is now the CEO of CMGT, a role she took on in 2023 after first volunteering in 2022. Under Beirat’s leadership, the organization focuses more on the push for greener masajid, the Arabic word for mosques.
“We focus on masajid because they showcase the model of Islam and are the home for the community,” said Beirat, who turned 28 this year. “If we can impact a masjid, then we can impact the greater community.”
From Standing Rock, the Line 3 camps in northern Minnesota, and all along the route for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, climate activism has made plenty of headlines in recent years—and it’s an issue that’s particularly important to young people. According to Pew Research, when compared with older generations, Millennials and Gen Z are more actively addressing issues related to the environment. A report by Deloitte found that more than any other group, Gen Z is adopting more sustainable lifestyle options, including lowering their carbon footprint.
Environmental justice, a movement created by Black people in North Carolina in response to the environmental racism their communities experienced, continues to gain traction across the U.S. Grassroots groups led by people of color are organizing to demand that the government address climate injustice in real and tangible ways. While mass demonstrations and activism certainly play an essential role, CMGT is taking a different approach: using Islam to guide its approach and achieve its broader goals.
Islam at the core
According to Beirat, environmentalism has an “interfaith connection.” In Chicago, CMGT is regularly invited to speak at local churches. The group also collaborates with community groups and faith-based organizations, including Faith in Place, an interfaith group focused on environmentalism.
“This just shows that caring for the environment can bring out the innate nature of being human,” Beirat said.
Across movements for social justice, there is a tradition among communities of color in which faith serves as an entry point for justice work.
Take, for example, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, who followed in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, Jr. to relaunch the Poor People’s Campaign. The movement calls for a moral agenda and a moral budget to address the five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, systemic poverty, the war economy and militarism, ecological devastation, and the false moral narrative of Christian nationalism. The reverend’s son, William Barber III, now works across the environmental justice movement, often correlating “climate activism to a longstanding tradition in Black America – faith,” the Charlotte Post reported. At a 2021 gathering in Charlotte, North Carolina, the younger Barber discussed “biblical admonition as inspiration to take better care of the planet.”
While support for CMGT’s work comes from non-Muslim communities across Chicago, “Islam is actually the core initiative of CMGT,” Beirat told Prism. The organization was deeply inspired by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin’s “Green Deen,” a book detailing Muslims’ responsibilities to environmentalism.
Beirat was especially struck by a particular ayah, or verse, from the Quran that Abdul-Matin mentions in his book: “Corruption has appeared on the land and in the sea because of what the hands of humans have wrought.”
“This ayah scares me because the majority of people on Earth today are living without questioning the waste and consumption each day,” Beirat said, noting that the point is not to make people feel overwhelmed or stressed by their previous actions. Rather, it’s about making them aware that “they can do better for themselves and the environment.”
Imam Saffet Catovic, who has focused on interfaith environmental justice for years, is the director of operations for the faith-based social justice organization Justice for All. Catovic, who has previously arranged for CMGT to present on panels for the Islamic Society of North America’s Green Initiatives Committee, told Prism that CMGT “exemplifies how Islamic faith and eco-teachings can address the climate crisis.”
“CMGT is part of a growing movement of local grassroots initiatives and undertakings in the USA and Canada that uses Islamic eco-teachings to tackle climate change,” Catovic explained.
Like CGMT, the group Wisconsin Green Muslims (WGM) uses Islam as a compass in their environmental efforts. The organization is “a state-wide grassroots environmental justice group,” explained Huda Alkaff, the organization’s founder and director since 2005. “The intention is to educate everyone about the Islamic environmental teachings and to apply these teachings in daily life and to contribute to collaborations and coalitions toward a just, healthy, peaceful, and sustainable future.”
Alkaff explained that for its work, WGM also relies on the holy Quran and hadith, or sayings and traditions from the Prophet Muhammad.
“In Islam, there are clear teachings and signs about the important, beautiful, and intricate balance of creation,” Alkaff told Prism. “God repeatedly tells us to maintain that balance and not to upset the order in creation.”
WGM also emphasizes interfaith collaboration through its programs Wisconsin Faith and Solar and Faithful Rainwater Harvesting, or FaRaH, which means joy in Arabic.
Rooted in community
In Chicago, the small corner of the planet where CMGT operates, the community is in desperate need of ecological care. Chicago’s South Side has an astonishing history of environmental racism. The root causes began more than 100 years ago when city officials segregated Black, immigrant, and other minority communities into neighborhoods that lacked quality housing, education, healthcare, and employment opportunities. The jobs available to these residents required them to spend long hours in toxic environments with inadequate protection. Today, Black people in Chicago are three times more likely than white residents to die from pollution, the primary contributor to asthma and heart disease.
Choices made over a century ago continue to perpetuate environmental racism in Chicago. A 2020 report produced by the city found that Black and Latinx families are more likely than white residents to live in neighborhoods that are near industrial pollution.
Chicago’s South Side, home to a significant portion of the City’s Black population, also has one of the highest cancer rates in the area. According to the University of Chicago Medicine, cancer is the second leading cause of death in Chicago’s South Side, “with cancer death rates nearly twice the average.”
To address these environmental injustices, Black-led organizations like People for Community Recovery (PCR) and the Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETF) have sprouted up in Chicago’s South Side.
SETF’s primary focus is addressing the long-standing effects of industrial pollution in the area, including the steel factories that were once within walking distance to many local South Side residents. Similarly, PCR Executive Director Cheryl Johnson began advocating for environmental justice because of the environmental conditions that shaped her childhood. Johnson lost her father to lung cancer when he was just 41, spurring her mother to begin investigating the cause of frequent cancer deaths in the area. This work eventually led to the formation of PCR.
Like other environmental justice organizations in the area, CMGT started in 2018 and is deeply rooted in the community. First called Sisters of Islam, the group began with a small group of local Muslims meeting for potlucks, cleanups, hiking, and kayaking. Beirat said this was an early way to “meet people that are into what we do.” The group has moved far beyond these early efforts, reaching important milestones like meeting with the city commissioner to help establish environmental policy in Chicago.
“Now I feel like we’ve grown to the point where we’re [going to the] commissioner’s office to help explain to them what we see in the community and what kind of changes and what we want to see,” Beirat said. “And they hear us.”
CMGT’s green mosques initiative is another example of its harder-hitting work. The organization is currently working on turning two local mosques green: Masjid Al-Farooq in Stony Island and the Chicago Islamic Center on West 63rd Street.
In order to recognize a mosque as one of Chicago’s Green Masjids, CMGT uses an official checklist developed with the community that includes things like housing water fountains for reusable water bottles, banning styrofoam products, installing solar panels, and investing in recycling bins. The nonprofit officially recognizes mosques that meet these and other qualifications. CMGT will also start assisting mosques in these efforts for its upcoming Ramadan campaign when the group plans to add an additional six locations to its list of Green Masjids.
But CMGT still sees fun activities as part of its mission. The organization engages mosques by hosting beach, park, and forest cleanups, tabling events, and outdoor recreational activities. To comply with the organization’s Green Masjid certification status, mosques must also attend two of these events each year.
The plants, the birds, the mountains, the sea, and everything in between
In recent years, the environmental justice efforts of local groups have led to important developments. The SETF, PCR, and the Coalition to Ban Petcoke filed a lawsuit in 2018 when the city allowed for the construction of a scrap metal processing plant in South Side Chicago. The plant was previously located in a predominantly white neighborhood. Last year, organizations in Chicago’s predominantly Latino Southeast Side pushed former Mayor Lori Lightfoot to sign a policy with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that requires the city to consider the health effects of industrial and commercial projects before approval. (It’s also worth noting that in 2022, Lightfoot and the city were accused of environmental racism by HUD.)
New Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has promised to prioritize environmental issues by responding more quickly to environmental complaints, creating more efficient pollution monitoring, and investing in local climate-oriented groups and organizations, among other initiatives. Last year when Chicago was hit with record-breaking summer rainfall, the new mayor sued oil companies for their responsibility in the climate crisis. Johnson also introduced gas ban legislation in newly constructed buildings, requiring the installation of electric stoves and the replacement of the aged heating systems found in Chicago’s older buildings.
Reporting from The Guardian linked gas stoves to high rates of asthma, with about 50,000 cases of pediatric asthma reported in the U.S. each year. But Johnson’s efforts to address the issue have largely stalled out. City officials have vocally opposed the mayor’s Clean and Affordable Buildings Ordinance, citing too many job losses due to the ban.
The pollutants officials and locals are trying to address have real-life consequences for low-income communities of color in Chicago. Life expectancy in Chicago’s wealthiest areas is nearly 30 years higher than in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
CMGT acknowledges that despite ongoing efforts from locals, decades of segregation and environmental racism cannot be fixed overnight. But this doesn’t discourage environmental groups, who continue to find ingenious ways—both big and small—to fight climate injustice.
Beirat told Prism she recently visited a community garden in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago and was surprised to learn volunteers ran the outdoor space without an electricity or water source. “The staff there water crops with prefilled water buckets,” Beirat explained. “I call this the ‘humble garden’ because, despite its limitations, it still offers rich food.”
One of CMGT’s community-focused programs is its Tree Ambassador program in partnership with the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH). According to Raed Mansour, the agency’s director of environmental innovation, CMGT has worked with CDPH since 2023 and is part of a larger working group with other local environmental organizations.
As part of the program, CDPH provides funding to participating organizations to lead tree-planting outreach in eligible local neighborhoods. Eligibility is based on criteria developed by the Chicago Region Tree Initiative and CDPH and prioritizes people of color in low-income communities.
The organization’s tree-planting efforts remind Beirat of something CMGT’s former executive director told her when she first joined the group—a belief that continues to shape CMGT’s environmental justice work in Chicago.
“We are ‘rahmatoon lil-alameen,’ meaning we are a mercy to all of creation,” Beirat said. “This means the plants, the birds, the mountains, the sea, and everything in between.”
