Welcome to the Mizanocene: Toward an Islamic Philosophical Countermodel to the Anthropocene from Indonesia's Environmental Fatwas and Eco-Pesantren Praxis

Abstract

The Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and the Chthulucene now compete to name the epoch of ecological crisis, yet each was theorized from within a broadly secular, Euro-American environmental humanities. This article asks what an Islamic philosophical vocabulary, read inductively from Indonesian primary documents rather than imported deductively as illustration, contributes to that debate. Using directed qualitative content analysis of five Indonesian Ulema Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI) environmental fatwas issued between 2011 and 2023, triangulated with a netnographic reading of four independently documented eco-pesantren (Islamic boarding school) cases, the study traces how the Qur'anic triad of khalifah (vicegerency), amanah (trust), and mizan (cosmic balance), together with the diagnostic category of fasad fi al-ard (corruption on earth), organizes both formal religious rulings and everyday institutional practice. The analysis identifies a “scale-jump” in the fatwa corpus, from a site-specific mining ruling (2011) to a planetary climate-control ruling (2023), and a textual-practice gap in which one eco-pesantren's techno-economic integration of ecology and livelihood outpaces the vocabulary available in existing fiqh. From these findings the article theorizes the Mizanocene: an epoch defined not by an undifferentiated human species-agency (as in the Anthropocene) nor solely by a historical mode of accumulation (as in the Capitalocene), but by the breach of a God-given equilibrium by vicegerents who forgot their trust