Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We live in fire country as taught through fire lore, this is how I understand what is happening across country. These times are hard for us first peoples, so often we are ignored.
The enduring success of these ancient methods remind us that we could reimagine our entire food system to feed ten billion people while rejuvenating wildlife and locking carbon away. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we should look to what worked in the past and adapt it for the future.
If we then ask which sections of society are concerned about the environment, the answer is largely people in the least developed societies; the indigenous populations – or the remnants of them; tribal societies and first nations in Canada.
I invite you to see with new eyes. Ultimately Guha’s definition of environmentalism is not wrong. It just doesn’t fit mine and many others’ reality of what environmentalism is: holistic; long rooted in time and space; for something and not only against; alive and based in the land, lives, work and bodies of those around me, African in and of their environments.
Stories have always had an important place in human history. According to Yuval Noah Harari, author of the book Sapiens, ‘Any large scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination’.
Hundreds of water protectors gathered in a solar-powered 200-foot geodesic dome nestled on the plains amid tipis and waited three hours to join a traditional Lakota dinner on Thanksgiving.
‘We don’t want the knowledge to be cut away from the land. We don’t want to cut the connection of the product and the knowledge from the land,’ says Uday.
Back in July, participants from Sweden and Denmark gathered for the annual Circle Way camp hosted by Manitonquat, a Native American who bases his teachings on traditional tribal ways.
Reducing waste and eating foods that have less of an impact on the environment is this years’ World Environment Day theme. We can all learn lessons from communities living in the Andes.
For billions of people nature and the eco-system have become “out of sight and out of mind”.
