Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
Combining traditional knowledge with modern science and technology could reduce loss of property and human life from out-of-control blazes.
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.
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.
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.
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between Indigenous knowledge and western science on environmental questions, say the authors of a recent paper, but outdated perceptions and prejudices means these kinds of partnerships elsewhere still too often fail.
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).
The picture often painted for us is that we need corporate seeds to feed the world: they are alleged to be more efficient, productive and predictable. Locally developed farmer varieties are painted as backwards, less-productive and disease-ridden. But those of us with our feet on the ground know that this is not the reality in Africa.
Calls for strict science-based decision making on complex issues like GMOs and geoengineering can shortchange consideration of ethics and social impacts.
