By Dave Wheelock
I find an article on the Gulf oil spill crisis by Naomi Klein in the July 12 edition of The Nation magazine most intriguing, if not for its content then for the fact it made its way into the mass media in the first place. Like other weekly opinion publications either right or left of center, The Nation does not enjoy a massive circulation, just 175,000 in 2008. Still the magazine has regularly collected and distributed the perspectives of accomplished and respected writers since 1865, and is a key player in the national political consciousness.
Entitled A Hole in the World, Klein’s piece points to a view of the world normally treated as taboo in the standard reading fare of Government Versus Free Enterprise. “This Gulf Coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s about this: our culture’s dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.”
Klein’s route of argument is to remind Euro-American readers of their heritage of not so long ago. (Take note, all ye enamored of traditional values.) “Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers.” In these societies, the earth was most often considered a maternal being, mother to all things.
Klein notes the role of the Scientific Revolution of the 1600s in changing the paradigm of those who would later thrust their beliefs upon the rest of the world. “In 1623 Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum that nature is to be ‘put in restraint, molded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man.’ ”
By “art and the hand of man” Bacon was referring to science & technology, the new gods of self-proclaimed civilized peoples. And of course, gods tells it like it is. But don’t take my word for it; listen to some present-day adherents. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski: “It’s better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way.” Ex-governor Sarah Palin: “My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death. Let’s drill, baby, drill; not stall, baby, stall.” A plaque on British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward’s desk: “If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?” President Barack Obama: “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”
In the face of what must now be seen as grossly misplaced confidence about the workings of the natural world, Klein asserts as “the most surprising twist in the Gulf Coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine.”
If Naomi Klein is correct, the wisdom expressed in the words of a Northern Plains tribal elder may finally fall on listening ears. Excerpts from Neither Wolf nor Dog, by Kent Nerburn:
“Your religion didn’t come from the land. It could be carried around with you. You couldn’t understand what it meant to us to have our religion in the land. Your religion was in a cup and a piece of bread . . . You couldn’t understand that what was sacred for us was where we were, because that is where the sacred things had happened and where the spirits talked to us.
“For your people, the land was not alive. It was something that was like a stage, where you could build things and make things happen. You understood the dirt and the trees and the water as important things, but not as brothers and sisters. They existed to help you humans live.
“The worst thing is that you never even listened to us. You came into our land and took it away and didn’t even listen to us when we tried to explain.
“And here is what I wonder. If she sent diseases and harsh winters when she was angry with us - and we were good to her - what will she send when she speaks back to you?”
Cultural perspectives too long considered obsolete by the technological juggernaut offer an escape from all manner of manmade disasters now expanding across our planet. Misplaced faith in technology and arrogant disregard for the Earth’s unpredictability needs to be replaced with the sense of humility and respect necessary to live harmoniously with her ways. The taboo against serious consideration of traditional lifeways which have withstood the test of time must be put to rest, so we can begin to relearn principles that may yet deliver us from our own toxic fruit.
Dave Wheelock, a member of the Oneida Nation, is a collegiate sports administrator and coach. His history degree is from the University of New Mexico. Reach him at davewheelock@ yahoo.com. Mr. Wheelock's views do not necessarily represent those of the Mountain Mail.
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