Native American Solutions to Global

Native American Solutions to Global Warming The world faces a crisis of unprecedented proportions, one which threatens not only our future economic, social, and political well-being, but the very life force of the planet itself. Beyond the now well-known threat of global warming, we face a mass extinction the likes of which have not been seen for hundreds of thousands of years, one precipitated by our unceasing exploitation of the environment.

The current response to these crises while noble and well intentioned, are usually the products of a combination of ignorance and optimistic naivete. This is because the problems we face are not simply the result of bad economic choices, they are a natural outgrowth of a particular way of looking at the natural world, and indeed all of existence, which arose out of the particular cultural and historical experience of Western Europe.

It is only by understanding this orientation towards reality, that we can truly grasp not only why we got into the current situation in the first place, but also what we can do to get out of it. Given that, this essay will begin by examining the philosophical and cultural influences that paved the way for the modern exploitation of nature. It will then proceed to outline the means by which to move away from that approach and redefine our relationship to nature and reality itself.

The essay will draw upon the insights and experiences of Native Americans and other indigenous traditional cultures, to show that humanity need not see nature as a base resource to be extracted, refashioned, and consumed.

It will argue that we should adopt these insights and build them into our essential approach to nature When modern environmentalists and activists in general look at the problems facing our global ecological systems, and the oppressed and marginalized people of the world, they tend to see only greedy corporations and negligent governments as the cause.

Yet while it is true that the capitalist economic paradigm is a big driver in terms of producing environmental damage, especially the neo-classical approach which seems dominant today, the reality is that the problem began long before modern corporations were even formed. The analysis and recommendations put forth today concerning the environment and things like rising income inequality around the world, tend to focus on the symptoms rather than the real cause. A good example of this lies in the consideration of anthropogenic global warming.

Most thinkers on this subject, including its most famous advocate, Al Gore, tend to see the problem in terms of raw CO2 emissions from sources such as automobiles, coal and oil electricity generation, deforestation, and industrial agriculture. While these are indeed factors in the direct relationship between economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions leading to climate change, they are not the root issue at hand.

Unfortunately, it seems that many activists and even scientists see them as such, and thus their recommendations are based on the assumption that simply addressing these specific things will somehow solve the problem. Reducing CO2 emissions worldwide, through a variety of programs may indeed cut back on global warming and prevent its most catastrophic consequences in the next hundred years, but it will only delay the coming reckoning with the environment that our very orientation towards nature inherently produces.

If we consider things like our need to continuously expand farm land for crop production, our need to extract important minerals from the Earth, our need for fresh water, and a whole host of issues relating to the environment, it is clear that stopping global warming will only delay our eventual stripping of the Earth and the resulting global cataclysm for humanity and all life within it.

It is therefore important to understand why exactly we are doing this to the Earth, and to look at other potential ways of looking at the world that does not necessitate our continual exploitation of it. In order to get at the heart of the matter, it is necessary to examine our basic assumptions concerning our relationship to the natural world.

This must be done not only in the cursory sense, where we examine present attitudes towards the environment, but in a deep philosophical sense, looking at the first principles from which we build our entire orientation to reality. While many tend to regard the modern social, economic, and political system as being organized along capitalist the reality is that capitalism itself is influences by a far more fundamental assumption, one that originates in the 17th century.

Following the decline of the Catholic Church's temporal power after the end of the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the influence of religious restraints on the evolution of intellectual through became less pronounced (Gellner, 1992). This, combined with the scientific revolution and the influence of thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Pierre Simon Laplace, the conceptual understanding of the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature began to change radically (Hahn, 2005).

Before this time, which many have seen as the dawn of the modern age, human beings regarded themselves as being constrained by powers far beyond their control and understanding. Whether they were capricious gods or goddesses, a monotheistic God, spirits, or simply the force of existence, these powers seemingly controlled the ultimate fate and direction of human history, as well as the various natural forces that could produce either calamities or prosperity.

Furthermore, under this orientation towards reality, humanity may be privileged or blessed, but it nonetheless remains under the grip of cosmic forces beyond its control. We see this understanding expressed in tribal cultures all over the world, who retain the closest link to our earlier days as primarily hunter-gatherers. Within such cultures, a "shaman" is normally needed in order to mediate between the larger cosmic forces, and the needs and wishes of human beings.

Virtually all of the natural world, due to its immense power over life and death, is seen as having spiritual dimension, one which must be constantly placated with offerings, sacrifices, and prayers (Moro et al., 2006). Beyond that, resources consumed by human beings are seen as sacred, because of the benefits they provide without which life would not be possible.

Care is taken to use only what is needed, not only because it would threaten the ability for the tribe to survive, but also because it could offend the spirits and bring their wrath upon the community. In many ways, this resembles a kind of delicate diplomatic relationship with all of nature, one where the idea of full scale exploitation and manipulation is not contemplated (Cajete,2000). Even as most societies on Earth adopted agriculture and developed large civilizations, the fear and respect towards nature remained.

Of course, the more human beings began to understand the world around them, and the more they found ways of utilizing nature, the more they were able to loose that fear and respect. But because things like science and technology were not systematic in nature, and a belief in higher powers remained, no society seemed to be able to cross the threshold into thinking itself capable of remaking the entire world.

Yet in Western Europe, a series of interconnected events culminating with the aforementioned loss of Church authority and rise of scientific experimentation, produced a unique situation in which human beings contemplated the possibility of manipulating nature and having complete control over it.

This sentiment is echoed in the words of Francis Bacon (1627) himself: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible"(p.35) The above is from Bacon's "New Atlantis," a Utopian story about what could be possible if science was used to obtain knowledge of the inner workings of all of nature itself.

In many ways his book was highly prophetic, alluding to many of the amazing technological achievements made by mankind in the last four centuries. Yet this has come at the cost of an ever expanding "human empire" which seeks nothing less than systematic control over all of nature. As one scientific development led to another in the decades following Bacon, this possibility seemed more an more plausible, leading to a hubristic quest for even more knowledge.

Thus over the course of the following centuries, Europeans essentially became convinced of their ability to push progress beyond previously conceived limits and proceeded to do so in every way possible. This led to consequences reaching far beyond the confines of the environment, such as the exploitation and conquest of the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia.

The idea of European culture representing the pinnacle of man's knowledge and power meant that European powers had the responsibility and mandate to spread their culture all over the world, whether indigenous people wanted them too or not. We see at this point the rise in seeing other cultures as sub-human, and that such assertions could be proven through science.

Wile human beings have always exploited one another, and even looked down upon the so called "other," never before was it possible to claim as a matter of objective scientific fact, that other peoples were simply not "human" and thus could be treated as little more than farm animals. Of course looking back now, it is clear that these racialist theories were nothing more than pseudoscience, and justifications for exploitation, yet they illustrate how powerfully seductive the new science was to human beings.

Further, it can be argued that the project of modern science as illustrated by Bacon, meant not only the harnessing of nature for human ends, but also seeing other peoples as mere fauna to be similarly harnessed. In essence, the whole world was to be turned into a "New Atlantis" where everything would come under a monolithic civilization of machine like efficiency and precision, all to the benefit of Europeans.

It is important to note that "science" is not the problem here, rather the issue is the use of science as a means to power and control over as much of reality as possible. This is what the philosopher of history, Eric Voegelin has called "modernity without restraint." For Voegelin, the traditional experience of human beings constitutes the mediation and symbolization of the relationship between humanity and the rest of reality.

This is experienced as a kind of tension which must be contextualized and dealt with in order for the people to remain spiritually healthy and for dangerous things like hubris to be contained. When human beings forget about, or ignore this tension, seeing it as mere illusion, they come to believe there are no constraints to their actions.

The resulting lust for power and control, and well as the alienation which occurs due to a loss of the symbols, lead to a kind of self-destructive spiritual disease in the society itself. Over time that can lead to the collapse of the civilization if the ground of being and the tension is not rediscovered and new symbols created (Voegelin & Henningsen, 2000).

What has occurred in the modern European experience, is that the pace of scientific advancement and technological achievement has been so fast, that the tension has been ignored in favor of progress, and no adequate symbols have been created to prevent the onset of self-destructive behavior. While ideologies such as Marxism and movements such as environmentalism have emerged to try and restore some balance, these too have fallen under the spell of the material transformation of reality through knowledge and the promise of a Utopia.

Because expectations associated Utopian transformations of nature and society are not in line with real constraints, the proposals that are put forth end up having their own particular and unexpected negative consequences. In traditional societies, such as Native American tribal culture, this does not tend to occur, because human beings have learned to symbolize and contextualize their relationship with nature in such a way that a balance is created and unrealistic expectations are not entertained.

Interestingly enough, this does not imply a complete passivity when it comes to nature, after all many Native American tribes used fire to clear forests in the American Midwest in order to create suitable landscapes for herds of bison and other big game (Stewart et al., 2002).

The difference between say that, and a massive forest clearing for crops in today's society, is that the Native Americans generally took care to limit what they did to maintain an equilibrium in the ecosystem, while we tend to seek maximizing production above all else. It is rather remarkable, that these apparently unsophisticated tribes were able to accurately gauge the limits to their use of nature and stay within those boundaries.

One can imagine therefore, what could be accomplished if we combined the Native American sensibility to nature, and our modern scientific knowledge. Considering what has been presented so far, the solution to the current environmental crisis, including and especially global warming, is to reestablish our connection to the ground of being and its representation in nature, and to create new symbols to restrain our modern appetite for development and progress.

These symbols can not be artificially imposed however, no matter how clever their creators are, they need to emerge organically out of a society that seeks to rekindle its relationship with nature and to once again appreciate its limitations. Unfortunately, we are heading down a path where our limitations will soon be all too clear, as the stress we put on the planet reaches a level where the entire biosphere of the planet begins to suffer systemic shock (Andryszewski, 2008).

While our knowledge of the Earth is considerable at this point, thanks to a very reductionist approach to science, we tend to know very little about how it all works together (Newman, 2006). What we do know is that the Earth can be thought of as one large dynamic system, with various components interacting with each other to produce a homeostatic equilibrium (Steffen & Sanderson, 2005). This is ironic considering indigenous people all over the world understood this thousands of years ago, and carefully sought to minimize their disruption to that equilibrium.

So it seems that modern science is confirming the intuitions of what had appeared to be primitive animistic religion. If we assume that Native Americans and other traditional or indigenous peoples learned over the course of thousands of years to have an almost intuitive knowledge of their natural surroundings, a knowledge that let them preserve the environment and by extension themselves, then it seems prudent to see how we can do the same.

While short of a tremendously destructive global catastrophe, we are not likely to return to a traditional way of life, in the hunter-gatherer sense, it is possible to adapt our knowledge and lifestyles to live in a more relative harmony with nature. The first and perhaps most important thing we must do in order to accomplish that, is not to simply look for so called "sustainable" practices, but to redefine our relationship with nature and reality itself.

We must begin to see ourselves as an important but ultimately related element to everything around us. As self-aware rational beings, with the capacity for tremendous creativity and ingenuity, our place is unique among the other creatures of the world. Yet that uniqueness is not a license for arrogance or feelings of superiority, but rather a call to be responsible stewards of our planet and everything that lives in it.

Contrary to popular belief, Native Americans and other indigenous peoples did not live as passive elements in the wider environment, careful not to change anything. They managed, cultivated, and used the land in order to survive. They did that however under a restraint inherent to their orientation to reality, where they had to respect powers larger than themselves, and keep their desires for more land under control (Cajete, 2000). Applying this to our modern context implies no longer seeing perpetual and exponential growth and development as the ideal (Kruger, 2008).

We must not seek to turn the whole world into some immense urban area, inter-spaced with parks, but rather to use what we need, and try blend in as much as possible with the larger ecosystems of the planet. This implies creating new habitats in our current areas of concentration, while protecting existing areas from further exploitation. We can create new ways of settling parts of the world, where we do not need to slash and burn in order to carve out a prosperous and comfortable existence.

One great example of this is the concept of permaculture which is revolutionizing the way we think of agriculture. What permacultue does, is take the traditional Native American approach of seeking to maintain the equilibrium of nature, and combining it with our immense repertoire of biological scientific knowledge. This enables farmers to craft interconnected gardens in which each plant, tree, and even animal, plays an important role in producing a balanced system that can sustain itself with minimal human intervention.

We know for example, which plants emit certain fragrances that repel pests, and so we can plant those along side other crops that fix nitrogen very well and thus increase soil nutrients, thus creating a habitat that can feed many people without the need for massive fertilizer or pesticide (Bell, 2005). Another promising idea is to take waste products and turn them into fuel for airliners.

Instead of just dumping problematic material in landfills, we may be able to process it and create a sustainable source of low CO2 emitting fuel (Bomani et al. 2009). Ultimately though, such innovative steps will not be enough if our orientation towards nature is still one that sees natural resources as nothing more than raw material to be exploited. Nature as a whole needs to be seen as a dynamic system that we are a part of and fundamentally depend on for our own survival.

Everything that is used from nature, needs to be offset in some way, just as the Native Americans did in pre-Columbian times. Just as herds were allowed to replenish themselves after being hunted to the brink of annihilation, fish stocks, soil, and all of the other renewable resources need to be allowed to exist without human interference from time to time.

Some might argue that higher prices on a multitude of goods will result from such an exercise in restraint, yet the reality is that prices have for too long been determined not by reason and information as they should, but rather with a delusional assumption that resources can never be exhausted.

The truth is that food prices do need to rise if keeping fields from being over used is the only way to maintain a sustainable food supply in the long run, and the truth is that energy prices do need to rise if cutting carbon dioxide emissions is the only way to ensure our survival in the next hundred years. This brings up an interesting implication, that Native Americans in their so called "primitive" culture, were actually far more rational and pragmatic that us.