Part One: Conflict between Indigenous Societies and Civilization

Readings:

Key Dilemma of Part One: Can the fundamental worldview conflict between indigenous and civilized people be resolved, and is such a resolution necessary for global sustainability?

Review of List of Navigation Strategies for Seemingly Intractable Conflicts, Differences, and Dilemmas:

Questions:

1. What is the fundamental worldview conflict?

The fundamental worldview conflict is between, on the one side, indigenous people’s commitment to live in harmony with nature; and on the other side, civilization’s commitment to use nature for human purposes, even when it is scientifically shown that such a commitment, as currently practiced, is unsustainable, and will lead us to the only human-caused species extinction, including massive human death and misery.

There are many modes of denial that keep people unconcerned about the impending climate emergency. Some people believe that humans were made in God’s image, and therefore, God will protect us from extinction. Some people believe that human technology can be developed to adequately address any climate crisis

Simply, indigenous people perfected ways to live in harmony with nature, but indigenous culture and practices have been marginalized to the degree that modern civilization has generally lost track of those sustainable values and processes.

We might say that modern civilization has a set of innovative beliefs and practices, but the main weakness of our knowledge and cultural practices is that it is not likely to be sustainable because of our overriding hostility to, or disregard of, nature and our seeming lack of commitment to repair all of the damage we have done to natural ecosystems. For five to seven millions of years, indigenous people have lived in harmony with nature, now humans have forced nature to live under the subjugation of humanity. How sustainable is this?

In my opinion, the conflict between the worldviews of indigenous and civilized people must be engaged and navigated for the wisdom that can be rediscovered. I’m not saying that every indigenous belief and practice is geared to solve all of our modern problems, though I believe that many aspects of their wisdom can help us return to a greater harmony with nature, a greater sense of our identity as human beings, and a reconstruction of the kind of fully diverse communities that we need to ground our future security and morality. For me, indigenous people are the true “human beings,” and modern civilized people are “prodigal beings.”

For conflict resolvers, the question is how can we resolve the conflict between indigenous wisdom and the beliefs and practices of modern civilization?

2. How is the fundamental worldview conflict ignored by biases of the religious, scientific, and capitalist reductionism of modern civilization? In other words do popular forms of religious, scientific, and capitalist thinking tend to ignore this conflict and simplify the solution?

As mentioned above, there are widespread religious beliefs that people are created in the image of God, and therefore, God will not allow us to destroy ourselves and God’s creation. Similarly, there is a widespread belief that technology can solve any climate or greenhouse gas imbalance. Furthermore, a large amount of people believe that reports of impending ecological disaster are fake news. They believe the environmentalists invent dire statistics to get research grants and to pad their salaries. Unfortunately, there is another group of people, who are committed to exploiting natural resources for profit, and are not concerned with (or in denial about) the consequences of this destruction.

These four all-too-common beliefs are reductionist, in that they reduce the complexity of climate change and runaway greenhouse gases to a simple problem that either God or technology can fix—or that it is merely fake news in the interest of environmentalist power, status, and money. Or fake news from people who are jealous of the powerful economic entities that can exploit natural resources for huge profits. In fact, the view of nature as a human resource is a complex problem that have been developing since the dawn of the industrial age.

3. Can we gain environmental wisdom from this country’s constitutional designers and the wisdom of Classical thinkers?

Joseph J. Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, has recently written a book, entitled American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. In this book, he creates a dialogue between the views of four of our constitutional founders and our contemporary concerns of racism, economic inequality, constitutional law, and foreign policy. Just as the designers of our Constitution referred back to the wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans, Ellis attempts to draw wisdom from our founders on the issues that have created the current, seemingly unbridgeable, political divide.

Oddly, Ellis did not choose our environmental crisis as one of the four topics he chose to write about. Is there no wisdom on this topic from our countries founders? Is there no wisdom on this topic handed down from the Classical antiquity? Ellis may have had a number of reasons for not including this topic in his book, though my preliminary research suggests that one of those reasons may have been that our founders, as well as the Classical thinkers, did not have much to offer in the way of environmental wisdom; rather, just the opposite, they either encouraged climate change or were seemingly without insight in preventing environmental catastrophe.

Industrial pollution began in the Classical period. Evidence of this pollution is available within Greenland ice. “Thousands of years ago, during the height of the ancient Greek and Roman empires, lead emissions from sources such as mining and smelting of lead-silver ores in Europe drifted with the winds over the ocean to Greenland—a distance of more than 2800 miles—and settled onto the ice. Year after year, as fallen snow added layers to the ice sheet, lead emissions were captured along with dust and other airborne particles, and became part of the ice-core record that scientists use today to learn about conditions in the past… Most of the lead emissions from this time period are believed to have been linked to the production of silver, which was a key component of currency. (Desert Research Institute, May 14, 2018)

So, both the wealth generated by the industrial revolution and the use of amoral and abstract economic currency as a mode of value, demonstrate that, as written in The Holy Bible, King James Version, 1 Timothy 6:10, “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” This transformation of value from nature to money can be understood as a profound environmental mistake, made at the rise of civilization. It was also a moral mistake by assuming that amoral money has some kind of overriding value. Traditional indigenous people historically and today realize this mistake, and seek to live in harmony with nature and commit themselves to community, rather than wealth.

Furthermore, the Greeks and Romans began a campaign of environmental degradation for profitable business interests. However, the ancient Greeks had a glimmer of realization that human stewardship was failing to maintain sustainable natural ecosystems. “Plato described Attica (the Region around Athens), saying: ‘What now remains, compared to what then existed, is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left’…”

“The Romans, in contrast, took a strictly utilitarian view of their environment. The land was there to be exploited by Homo Sapiens. The trend toward deforestation started in Greece and spread—during the Roman Empire—from the hiss of Galilee in Palestine and the Taurus Mountains of Turkey in the east, to the mountains in Spain in the west. Various features of the Roman agricultural economy greatly encouraged this process…and their society had no counterbalancing conservation ethic.”

“Both the Egyptians and Greeks were determined hunters. They forced many larger animals (such as the lions in upper Egypt and in Greece) to extinction. But the Roman Empire had a far greater destructive impact on the fauna of the ancient world than did its predecessors. Not only were animals hunted for skins, feathers, and ivory, but multitudes were captured for use in ‘games’.” (Anne and Paul Ehrlich, May/June 1980, Mother Earth News)

At the beginning of colonization, Europeans thought that British America was inferior because it had colder weather at the same latitudes that were warmer in Europe. The experience of colder weather on the Atlantic coast drove many early settlers back to Europe, “and in fact, the majority of 17^th century colonies in North America were abandoned.” In response to this concern, “Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers responded with patriotic zeal that their settlement was actually causing the climate to warm…in contrast to today’s common association of the U.S. with climate change skepticism, it was a very different story in the 18^th century.” (Raphael Calel, The Public Domain Review, 2014/02/19, “The Founding Fathers v. The Climate Change Skeptics.”

4. What happened to the wisdom of Native Americans?

Where are the voices of Native Americans in Ellis’s dialogue about the crucial issues of contemporary times? Native peoples represent a millennia worth of experience and wisdom maintaining (and sometimes self-correcting) their harmonious relationship with nature. As we now face an industrial-revolution-caused sixth earth-extinction, we must take seriously the recent report (CNN, October 30, 2018), entitled “This is the ‘last generation’ that can save nature, WWF says.”

5. How serious is this environmental crisis?

There are a number of measures that demonstrate the catastrophic human-made extinction that is now in progress. One of them is articulated below:

CNN summarizes the World Wildlife Fund report, as follows:

Global wildlife populations have fallen by 60% in just over four decades, as accelerating pollution, deforestation, climate change and other manmade factors have created a “mind-blowing” crisis, the World Wildlife Fund has warned in a damning new report.

The total numbers of more than 4,000 mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian species declined rapidly between 1970 and 2014, the Living Planet Report 2018 says.

Current rates of species extinction are now up to 1,000 times higher than before human involvement in animal ecosystems became a factor.

The proportion of the planet’s land that is free from human impact is projected to drop from a quarter to a tenth by 2050, as habitat removal, hunting, pollution, disease, and climate change continue to spread, the organization added.

The group has called for an international treaty, modeled on the Paris climate agreement, to be drafted to protect wildlife and reverse human impacts on nature.

It warned that current efforts to protect the natural world are not keeping up with the speed of manmade destruction.

The crisis is “unprecedented in its speed, in its scale and because it is single-handed,” said Marco Lambertini, the WWF’s director general. “It’s mind–blowing. … We’re talking about 40 years. It’s not even a blink of an eye compared to the history of life on Earth.”

“Now that we have the power to control and even damage nature, we continue to (use) it as if we were the hunters and gatherers of 20,000 years ago, with the technology of the 21st century,” he added. “We’re still taking nature for granted, and it has to stop.”

WWF UK Chief Executive Tanya Steele added in a statement, “We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it.”

The report also found that 90% of seabirds have plastics in their stomachs, compared with 5% in 1960, while about half of the world’s shallow-water corals have been lost in the past three decades.

Animal life dropped the most rapidly in tropical areas of Latin America and the Caribbean, with an 89% fall in populations since 1970, while species that rely on freshwater habitats, like frogs and river fish, declined in population by 83%.

This report is horrifying. And it leaves the crisis up to modern nations to solve it. Where is the wisdom of the indigenous peoples of the planet? Why are they not participating in the dialogue?

6. How different is the indigenous worldview from modern civilization?

Below is a summary of major worldview differences between natives and moderns. Parts of this list are from Brian Yazzie Burkhart and Kent Nerburn. After each individual belief, I respond with the point of view that is often embraced by mainstream Western-dominated cultures. I setting up this conflict, I am trying to emphasize how deeply Native American thought supports harmony with nature, and how Western thought is skeptical about Native beliefs. How do we resolve this conflict?

a. “Do not begrudge the white man his presence on this land. Though he doesn’t know it yet, he has come here to learn from us.” (A Shoshone Elder)

This is in contrast to the colonist view that natives did not deserve to belong in this land.

b. We live in eternal time (past, present, future), and infinite space (here and everywhere), not in an incremental moment or an incremental space.

Civilization constructs time as an abstraction, where the present moment is the only thing that exists, and we can only know the expanse of space that we can physically measure.

c. Occurrences in time and space are fluid (subject to interpretation and contextualization), not solid (fixed as immobile facts).

Civilized science believes that occurrences in time and space are independent of our interpretation and contextualization.

d. Spirit permeates all of creation; consciousness flows through everything, everywhere.

Modern science is skeptical about terms like ‘spirit’ and ‘consciousness’, if they cannot be empirically measured. If there is a realm of spirit or consciousness that cannot be measured, then it is beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

e. The community of human beings and all that is natural are sacred.

Again, modern science is skeptical about terms like ‘sacred’, if they cannot be empirically measured. And again, if there is a realm of spirit or consciousness that cannot be measured, it is beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

f. Giving is the greatest value, not acquisition, domination, status, power, and wealth.

One can easily suppose that modern civilization is obsessed with acquisition, domination, status, power, and wealth. However, generosity is also a highly valued character trait.

g. Limits, humility, and forgiveness are also central values.

Here again, modern civilization may not place the highest value on limits, humility, and forgiveness, though these values are a part of the principles of most civilizations.

h. All of our relations, with each other and the natural world, are our constant priority.

This imperative is exactly what the civilized world needs to adopt to head off the most disastrous aspects of the sixth extinction; an extinction process that has already begun. In order to do this, we need to think about every aspect of our life and ask ourselves if we are living in harmony with the natural world or not. Clearly, we must give up our obsession and addiction to acquisition, domination, status, power, and wealth.

i. Our first responsibility is to each other, not ourselves. Without each other, none of us can survive.

In contrast to this view, modern civilization believes that our first responsibility is to maximize our self-interest. Even some mediation processes work from the assumption that people need to maximize their self-interest. Natives believe that the community or tribe comes first, that we should serve the group and within a healthy community, each person will flourish.

j. Family is all those you hold close to your heart.

This more inclusive sense of family includes all the members of one’s community, for whom one has a bond, and is a much deeper commitment than modern civilization has within biological or marital families, and often excludes alienated family members, neighbors and erstwhile friends.

k. Children and elders are held sacred because they are closest to the Creator.

In contrast, some of the lowest paid workers are childcare and assisted living employees, demonstrating how little modern civilization regards our children and elders.

l. Life and death are ultimately part of the Great Mystery.

From our scientific, empirical evidence-based thinking, life is just an unusual, evolutionary accident, and death is the return of the living to the eternal death of lifeless matter. Religions try to overrule this view by supposing some supernatural realm with non-natural laws. Natives do not claim to have proof of a “happy hunting ground” after death, but they have mystical experiences of connection with the spirits, and merely suggest that we consider the cycle of life and death in all of nature, including humans, as a mystery.

m. There are things that we should not try to know.

Civilization has progressed by pulling apart nature to determine the dynamics of natural processes, and using that knowledge to create non-natural processes and products. The over-production of non-natural objects through non-natural processes represents one of the kinds of knowledge that we should not attempt to undertake because it undermines our ecosystems to the degree that our planet’s natural diversity is destroyed, along with many species that are vital to sustainable life on earth.

n. No person pushes their way of believing upon another.

This is an indigenous affirmation of diversity of beliefs. In this era of identity group supremacy, where people are excluded from groups when they do not believe the same thing, we seem to be firmly in the grasp of groupthink. Indigenous people are urged to find their own individual guiding spirit, thus providing the tribe or village with multiple perspectives on the group’s course forward. Single perspectives are not as flexible, when a group’s future is ties to socially enforced, dogmatic perspectives.

o. All people need to feel needed by being given roles appropriate to their talents.

In modern civilization, many social and economic roles are made to seem superfluous, especially when automation and off-shoring jobs has made many roles extinct. Parenthood, itself, has become superfluous as the demands in the workplace become more complex and stressful.

p. Learning is a lifelong process.

Modern societies place learning at the beginning years, when people are too young to work, and therefore, have no idea what parts of their educational experience will be useful and important for their future life. Therefore, education seems like an abstraction for young people who do not work, and young people old enough to work often employed in lower skill jobs that likely do not match their post-education career goals. If modern society created opportunities for young people to engage in age-appropriate work, their education could be designed to help them succeed at each level of work for which they qualify. This process of education could be life-long, as people’s work capabilities and desires evolve.

q. Indigenous culture is not a conquered or vanquished culture; rather, it is our elder culture with unique gifts to offer us as the original children of this land.

Modern civilization has created a fiction where native peoples are simply the relics of a lost and forgotten past. Considering the often-intentional genocide of native peoples all over the planet, it is not a surprise that such a fiction has had widespread traction. In my opinion, we lose the wisdom of indigenous people at our— and our planet’s—peril.

r. People can communicate with animals, plants, rocks, earth, fire, water, clouds, and the unseen, as well as the Universe at large.

Modern science has no way to make sense of this claim because science has developed with the assumption that there is impossible for humans to communicate with other non-human beings or natural entities, including the Universe at large. However, indigenous people have evolved in a deep and intimate connection with the natural world, where such communication occurs through this powerful connection.

s. There are no coincidences, nor random events; all unusual events have some degree of meaningfulness.

Again, modern science has developed a model of the natural world that is filled with random coincidences that are completely meaningless, unless people wish to project meaning onto them in superstitious and magical ways. In this way, a great divide exists between modern and indigenous people. The only bridge between these two belief systems are the supposed mystical experiences that people can have after at least three days of exposure to the wilderness. After three days, hiking through the wilderness can transform from being a person in a somewhat alien landscape to a person finding oneself walking through ones’ greater mind, where levels of meaning arise from seeming “coincidences and random events.”

t. Meaningfulness, value, and morality arise constantly in the intersection between us and all that is around us.

Following the insights from the wilderness, mystical experience, explained, above, one can find that meaning, value, and morality is not a simple human projection onto a material world that is essentially meaningless, valueless, and amoral. This revelatory experience also illuminates the notion that our world and universe is intrinsically moral.

u. How we behave gives shape to the world.

Following the insights of the prior two indigenous beliefs, a world that is intrinsically moral is deeply affected by our moral, amoral, or immoral choices. We participate in making the world meaningful or meaningless.

v. The universe is moral. Facts, truth, meaning, even our existence are normative.

In the Western philosophical tradition, the universe is some overarching metaphysical object or subject. Following that view, the central debate seems to focus on what kind of object or subject it is–material or nonmaterial. The notion that the universe is axiological (value-laden) does not deny it’s metaphysical status, but transforms the central question of existence to whether the universe is intrinsically moral (moral –in-itself, or only instrumentally moral (only moral in its use as positive or negative toward humans).

w. We must maintain our connectedness, maintain our relations. We find our understanding through them, not abstracted from them.

Western notions of individualism are based on abstracting individual human beings from communities and the world. Native thought finds this kind of abstraction immoral, as the moral realm depends on continuous connection to others and the world. If one’s identity is abstracted from others and the world, one becomes self-serving and morality becomes a potential obstacle blocking one’s achievement of individual goals.

x. Our relations, connections, and knowledge change; we must continue to cultivate them.

This belief flows the more fluid not of knowledge, that requires continuous observation of the changing world around us, nature, and people, alike. The Western view is that there are fundamental properties in the world that are constant, and the consequences of these properties can be predicted.

y. There is a constant conversation between all of the elements of nature. Humans are part of the conversation, but they do not control it, nor dominate it.

Native thought emphasizes this notion of ongoing conversation amongst fellow humans, and the various natural elements and species around us. This conversation illuminates possibilities and paths to take, going forward. On this view, control and domination are not necessary, and are immorally harsh ways of interacting with others and nature.

Western thought has difficulty with the idea that we humans can have a conversation with nature, just as Western thought has difficulty embracing, or even understanding, many—if not most—of the Native beliefs listed above. How can we resolve this difference? What kind of conversation can Western thinkers have with Native thinkers?

7. In our mainstream culture, how strong is the imperative to seek harmony with nature?

In my observation, there is a wide continuum of thought within mainstream and counter-narrative thought. On the one end, there are people who believe it is not up to us to live in harmony with nature; rather it is up to us to force nature to live in harmony with us. Others, at this end of the continuum, believe that the previous view is the same as God’s intent from Creation—when God decreed that humans have dominion over nature. Also, at this end of the continuum, are those who believe that problems like global warming, species extinction, and runaway greenhouse gases, have technological solutions. Sadly, there are those who want to exploit natural resources for maximum monetary profit, without concern for the environmental consequences. All of these beliefs do not require any imperative to seek harmony with nature; rather our religious and scientific resources should aim at forcing nature to live in harmony with us.

At the other end of the continuum are those indigenous people, environmentalists, and counter-cultural people, who are strongly committed to living in harmony with nature, and advocating cultural, political, moral, and legal methods of persuading broader support for this view.