By Bill Tripp, The Guardian blog
As wildfires rage across California, it saddens me that Indigenous peoples’ millennia-long practice of cultural burning has been ignored in favor of fire suppression.
By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Local Futures
Just as Indigenous wisdom is rooted in a myriad of complex and reciprocal interactions with the community, the land and water, the animals and plants, localizing makes visible the threads of interdependence that hold the living world together.
By Josina Calliste, Landworkers Alliance
We need all the support we can get to build this movement locally. In the spirit of “a high tide raises all ships”, racial justice in the progressive farming movement will benefit everyone.
By Jade Delisle, Briarpatch
Protecting and restoring Indigenous Peoples’ lands is the fastest and most readily available way to sequester carbon and mitigate the impacts of climate change, a result of the optimally efficient relationships between fungi, plants, animals, and people in a given bioregion, which Indigenous cultures have coded into their knowledge systems over millennia of human-environmental interactions.
By Grace Iara Souza, London School of Economics and Social Policy
The wilful jeopardising of indigenous peoples’ lives is particularly grave when you consider that the death of each elder represents the “burning of a library“.
By Naveena Sadasivam, Grist
As other North American tribes have begun to experience the effects of climate change over the past decade, they too have started to adopt climate resilience and adaptation plans. According to a database maintained by the University of Oregon, at least 50 tribes across the U.S. have assessed climate risks and developed plans to tackle them.
By Dougald Hine, Bella Caledonia
To cross this threshold is to become vulnerable: one way or another, you can be changed by what you come to know, and that change may come in the form of loss. Perhaps the loss of who you thought you were, the stories you liked to tell about yourself.
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.