By Joe Morrison, The Guardian blog
Many of those commenting on the current bushfire crisis in Australia argue about fuel reduction, hazard reduction, use of aerial incendiaries, drip torches, ancient Indigenous techniques and western forms of fire management. But to me, these fires suggest we urgently need a new dialogue and paradigm for living in a rapidly changing world.
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
Susan Eger was more adventurous than your average UCLA anthropology student in 1975 – even for a psychedelic-savvy follower of Carlos Castañeda. But a chance meeting with a fellow adventurer would set her life course in ways she could never have imagined. Nearly half a century later, with three grown indigenous children, a Mexican nonprofit that’s become a living institution and a Nobel nomination to contend with, Susana Valadez, as she is now known, is on fire with the certainty of one who is living her destiny.
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
“You know, what’s really wonderful about this is that it’s not just about regenerative agriculture, It’s about regenerating the human story; it’s about regenerating the way that we look at health, food, economics, human relationships — even our own history.”
By Alexis Rider, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog
In the basic conception of the Anthropocene, there are two actors: mankind and the environment. This sweeping and seemingly compelling divide at once highlights the separation of the two categories and collapses it: if humans are geologic force, we can no longer imagine ourselves outside of nature.
By Viki Cramer, Ensia
Combining traditional knowledge with modern science and technology could reduce loss of property and human life from out-of-control blazes.
By Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
We argue for the Creaturely based not just on time but more importantly on the greater creativity and efficiency of nature’s ecosystems, compared with the limited vision and mixed record of human cleverness.
By Leah Penniman, YES! magazine
The truth is that for thousands of years Black people have had a sacred relationship with soil that far surpasses our 246 years of enslavement and 75 years of sharecropping in the United States.
By George Nicholas, The Conversation
Science is a multicultural enterprise that benefits from and indeed requires competing views. Indigenous observations, perspectives and values enrich, not threaten, our collective knowledge of the world.
By Ellis Quinn, Eyes on the Arctic
A successful Saami-led, salmon rewilding project on the Näätämö river in Arctic Finland illustrates the success of partnership between Indigenous knowledge and western science on environmental questions, say the authors of a recent paper, but outdated perceptions and prejudices means these kinds of partnerships elsewhere still too often fail.
By Vivien Sansour, Oxford Real Farming Conference
In 2014, I founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. The Library and associated El Beir Arts and Seeds symbolize this core belief: that agriculture is truly comprised of both “agri” (traditional farming practices) + “culture” (the associated lifestyle/livelihood traditions essential to a community’s identity).