Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In 2021, I heard that a lithium mine was being proposed within this sea, in a region where I had been told the wild gardens were still largely intact. Pee hee Mu’huh, also known as Thacker pass, exists in the northeast region of Northern Nevada, close to the Oregon border.
The moment the U.S. Forest Service posted its July notice of a draft decision to permit gold prospecting at Jenny Gulch here in the Black Hills, tribes, water protectors and treaty rights defenders turned out in droves to ward off the project and others like it.
Eslava and Sumano are working together to preserve the region’s chinampas, remnants of the branch and reed rafts that Mesoamerican farmers covered in nutrient-rich lake mud to grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers.
By focusing on reciprocity and the common good—both for the community and the environment—sea gardening created bountiful food without putting populations at risk of collapse.
If humanity is to deflect from the current disastrous path, we need a change of consciousness. Reading a book like Braiding Sweetgrass can illuminate the alternate path. I recommend it without reservation.
This story is on borrowed time. And it’s just a part of a story, a piece of human and living patchwork. Maybe you can borrow it, and make it part of your story too?
The different speakers in the Sacred Earth series are deeply active and involved in addressing many of these issues and thus have an important message to share regarding the way that their culture, and indigenous culture in general, play a key role in generating solutions to environmental collapse.
In the US Pacific Northwest, tribal hatcheries uphold Indigenous communities’ treaty rights to salmon, while buying time to rehabilitate lost habitat.
To increase the distance between humans and the living world which is also our life support system is bound to aggravate the separation between humans and nature with devastating results for both humans and the rest of the living world.
Viewed from the perspective of history, Treuer notes laceratingly, America’s national parks are a crime scene.
Supporting indigenous Territorialities goes beyond supporting biodiversity conservation; it is also an invitation to organize and reinscribe communal systems that have been erased and dismantled all over the world by the increasing expansion of the capitalist economy and the conservation paradigm.
Whether communities are fighting to address mining harms or standing in the way of these unwanted projects, their struggles are potent examples of the sort of reimagining and digging in for fundamental change that Arundhati Roy urged at the start of this pandemic.
