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Decolonizing the Western Worldview: Interview with Cherokee activist/scholar, Randy Woodley

by KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME

Over the last few months, I have been writing more and more often about the need of people in Western civilization to pay attention to indigenous wisdom and knowledge. In that spirit, my first post of 2020 is an edited transcript of a phone interview I did with Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, a Cherokee activist/scholar, in December 2017.
Woodley has authored several books including “An Introduction to Postcolonial Theologies,” “The Harmony Tree: A Story of Healing and Community” and “Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision.” When I met him in Portland in 2013 he was farming outside Newberg, Oregon, and employed as a Distinguished Professor of Faith and Culture at George Fox University/Portland Seminary. Currently, Woodley and his family are working to establish Eloheh, an Indigenous Center For Earth Justice, in eastern Oregon.
This is an abridged version of the full interview, which is included as a chapter in my book, “The Failures of Farming & the Necessity of Wildtending.”

Kollbri terre Sonnenblume: The book that I’m working on starts from Jared Diamond’s thesis that agriculture could be called a wrong turn for the human race. But looking at the Americas, you can see that there were cultures that did not get into agriculture, so there’s still examples there, not only of ways of doing things but ways of thinking about the world and ways of relating to the world that have been lost to Western Civilization for many many centuries.
Randy Woodley: Let me start off by saying that though I really like his book Collapse, with his more famous book I disagree with a minor point. His understanding of why civilizations take over other civilizations and mine are different. His is that when the technology is there to advance over other civilizations, that’s what’s going to happen. What I would say is that there’s a particular Western worldview—and I’m not an expert on any other worldview except the Western worldview as it relates to the Native American worldview—there’s something endemic in the Western worldview that says that you have to use your power over others. So we differ about that because hundreds and hundreds of cases on Turtle Island where people had the ability to take over others but didn’t. Now there’s some where they did as well. But I don’t think that there is a causality, if you will. So he sees the world through that lens and I differ with that.
KtS: I agree with you. I think that that viewpoint is kind of cynical. There’s a tendency for some Western writers and thinkers to take the attributes of the West and cast them as being human nature in general.

RW: Exactly. That’s the whole point, to universalize Western religion and the Western worldview so that it wipes out anything local, right? Did you ever read “God is Red” by Vine Deloria, Jr.?
KtS: No. I like what I’ve read from him but I haven’t seen that one yet.

RW: He talks about [how] the Western worldview substitutes time as the universal for place. I’ve developed this a little bit more so I get confused about what I’ve added and what was his, but basically he says that time becomes universal over local beliefs and understanding, etc. So Western people operate by time and indigenous people operate by place.
You can just take that template as a universal and apply it to education, economics, religion, whatever, in the West. They have basically tried to replace locality and geography, really. We’re talking about local social history, which is about what has happened on the land for millennia before anybody arrived with a different philosophy. That’s the key to my understanding of that universality that Diamond uses and other people use and it’s embedded in Western worldviews. They’re not able to see local place as reality. They only see universal time-space. That sets us looking at the world from two different realities.
KtS: I have not heard of this distinction before and it’s really fascinating to me.
RW: Yeah, it’s really important to understand. You know I’ve been in religion most of my life and working in and out of it, with it, and I’ve come to see this as absolute truth but it’s true in the sciences, it’s true in education, it’s definitely true in economics. And you couple that with a Utopian vision, whether it’s “making America great again” or The Republic or the Garden of Eden, or the purest Islam—whatever that Utopian vision is—you couple that with this universality and basically you have a cause to take over the world, right? Justify whatever you do if the end vision is strong enough.
KtS: Can you name an example in any of these areas to help me grok this one?
RW: Yeah, well let’s look at economics. You have the vision of Socialism and the vision of Capitalism and they’re not really incompatible but because the West sees a binary choice for everything, you have Socialism vs. Capitalism. You get two sets of nations trying to propagate their vision for economics because they think that is the Utopian end-all—the best thing for the world. The same is true of religion. So Christianity is based on a Utopian vision, usually in the future, of getting back to the Garden of Eden. Either [you] believe that the kingdom on earth will make that happen or it’s the kingdom of the future to come, which is the more prominent Roman Catholic and major Protestant view. You gotta get everybody into Heaven because that’s the perfect place.
So when the missionaries came to America, it didn’t matter what was going on here. It didn’t matter what the beliefs were. They already had this Utopian vision that superseded anything else that they saw here. In fact they would just find reasons to discount Native culture—“Well, they’re of the devil” and all these kinds of things. So [their] job was to make this religion across this whole land. And that’s what basically happened. They just went around and claimed everything in the name of Christ. So they justified the genocide, justified the assimilation, justified all the other policies that are still going on today.
Education is the same. We teach the same thing. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a high school in Newberg, Oregon, or a high school in Miami, Florida, or a high school in Bangor, Maine. This factory-style education system has been created that says this is how you educate people. It makes no difference [what was] on the land there before, what the land and the environment are saying. It’s all about laying this other template on top of that and saying that all doesn’t matter… No plants, no things that happened on the land, the ceremonies that were held, [and] the appreciation, whether it was for Salmon culture or Acorn culture or Pinenut culture or Buffalo culture. It’s just as if none of that mattered. What is natural and was put there for our health and understanding didn’t matter. We had to replace it with something different.
KtS: Because at the time that the Westerners invaded the Americas, they had no cultural memory of how to live off of the land and to be cultivating what’s there—to be wildtending as some people would now say. They had no memory because they had turned away from it, well, something like 8000 years before or longer.
RW: Yeah. So the Native people also commented that they [the Whites] were like children. They felt sorry for them so they helped them to learn how to grow stuff, to learn how to fish. You’ve probably read Charles Mann’s books 1491 and 1493?
KtS: I’ve read 1491, yeah.
RW: 1493 you’d probably like even more because he talks about what was going on in Europe at the time. Basically, all the streams were fished out, and all the bays. All the rivers were polluted. The cities were awful in terms of sewage and dead meat and bones and things that would just be left on the streets. And disease. Most of the hardwoods were already harvested for building forts and castles and churches and so one of the first things they would send back with these ships here were virgin oak trees from the east. They had basically expended the world that they were living in.
Now, it took 500 years, but the same thing has happened here because the philosophy hasn’t changed. And so, you know, our slow response is basically the same as no response. So the lesson didn’t get learned.
They learned first how to survive from the Native people but then they started resurrecting their old patterns of growing things like wheat, and then of course that’s when you need to have cheap labor. The Indians were 90% dead from being enslaved and diseased and so that’s when the West African slave trade opened up. It’s one bad thing after another in terms of the Western mindset.
KtS: Yeah, clearly. And it’s this mindset that I’ve been trying to grapple with and figure out why—why is it that Westerners are so different?
RW: We create cultures from our worldview and we also create our worldview from our cultures. When you grow with the land you learn how to make an even exchange. But when you come into a new place with another worldview from a another land and another culture, it’s a little harder unless you’re open to understanding what’s really happening here, what reality is in this place.
KtS: That one’s interesting, in part because there’s differences in how. For example, looking at Western Culture how it currently is, especially here in the United States, if you look at the meat industry—if you look at animal agriculture—it’s an incredibly brutal thing, with killing hundreds of animals per hour. It’s really just a horror show what’s going on in these places where the animals are confined and so many are slaughtered. And I certainly wouldn’t be the first to say that eating that kind of food is bad for you as an individual… It seems like Westerners are able to treat the land the way that they do, treat animals the way they do, treat plants the way they do, is because they’re not viewing them as living creatures, in some way.
RW: Right. That has to do with a couple things. So, in my view of Western society, the philosophical error that undergirds everything, almost everything, is dualism. And that really comes from the Greeks as far as we can tell, and then passed on to the Romans and then passed on to the Brits and other parts of Western Europe and then passed on to the United States. It takes on a whole ‘nother energy when it goes throughout the Enlightenment period and all that in Europe.
There’s both physical and moral dualism. Let’s talk about the physical: Plato, Socrates, and the Utopian vision are all about a spiritual or a mind perfection. The physical becomes less important. You have this Utopian vision of this place that you’re supposed to reach, this plane of thinking. This is why Socrates killed himself; because he couldn’t realize this on earth. It carries into religion—the idea that this world is not my home—I have this better place.
In higher education I see it all the time, too. What is physical doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you think, right? So it becomes a thinking person’s reality. We pay people who think generally higher wages than those who do physical labor. With theology, for example, we have people with PhDs that are are higher than what we call “practical” theologians. Those are the people who actually do the work of pastoring, those sorts of things. It creates hierarchy.
We have this separation from the physical, making it a little less than the mental or the spiritual. Now we have an excuse to pay less attention to the physical. So for example in Christianity, saying that human beings are higher than everything else, they’re more important than anything else. With the human beings, they are the ones who rule everything else. Everything else matters not nearly as much. Then you can take and break that down farther and say, okay, well, Americans are better than anyone else. Or you can say racism. White people are better, smarter and deserve more than everyone else, so everyone else can be treated not quite as well. We do that with the animal world, the plant world—
KtS:—male over female—

RW:—oh yeah absolutely, we do it with males over females, We do it with plants: some are weeds. This fits into what I call extrinsic categorization. You have these false categories. Some animals are varmints and some are animals. And some animals are pets. This worldview lays this hierarchical, dualistic template on everything. The lack of understanding of the sacredness of life in everything, I think, stems from this. You have people like Descartes in Europe, and Francis Bacon who really saw the mind as superior and the body and nature as inferior, and that melded with both philosophy and religion.
I have friends who are animal activists. There’s always a caveat: “Well you treat your animals well.” We’re vegetarians now [he and his wife] but when we weren’t, when we’d go out to hunt, we were told if an animal doesn’t give itself to you, then you can’t kill it. You have to pray beforehand, do a little ceremony and then wait and watch for an animal to give itself to you. Then you put tobacco down and say a prayer and you thank that animal for giving its life. That even happened when we were farming with our goats and sheep and things like that. We went through whole ceremonies and things to make sure that we thanked the animal, we thanked the earth, we thanked the creator, but most of all to remind ourselves that we’re taking a life here. We do the same thing when we take a plant or a tree. I’ve gone out looking for tepee poles and we put tobacco down first.
In our Native prayer we’re asking that tree, we’re asking that animal, for forgiveness and saying, “This is something I have to do to feed my family. I apologize. Thank you for giving your life.” We recognize that the spirit is in everything. and life is in everything and so we don’t have a right to just go and haphazardly take it. We have to use wisdom. We have to use ceremony to remind ourselves and to teach our children as well.
KtS: I think that to most Western people, the idea of being able to recognize when an animal is presenting itself, or of asking a plant and being able to hear the answer—that is incomprehensible to most Westerners.
RW: Yeah. And I think part of that comes from what I’ve been talking about. Part of it also comes from the idea of individualism and competition as opposed to cooperativeness, right?
KtS: Right.
RW: So it’s like I killed this animal and I can put its head on the wall because I took it. I climbed the mountain so I conquered the mountain. Which is absolute silliness, right? [laughs] The mountain is still there and you’re lucky you made it up alive. But it’s the idea that there we are number one, triumphing over nature and there’s a hostile relationship. And it’s the idea that we’re in competition, right? With other human beings or whatever. It’s like, I did and you didn’t. It stems from this Western worldview that’s influenced by the dualism, the hierarchy, the competitiveness.
KtS: Have you ever read Theodore Roszak?
RW: No.
KtS: He coined the term “counterculture.” He wrote in the ’60s and ’70s. He has a book called “Where the Wasteland Ends.” Fascinating book. I think you’d probably really enjoy it. One of his things is how the Western religions—the monotheistic religions, starting with Judaism, and going to Christianity and then to Protestantism (I don’t think he really talks about Islam in there)—how they served to make separation between people and nature. And he goes further and says that those religions took the divine out of nature, and out of the world, and put it up in the sky, literally.
RW: Yeah.
KtS: I guess I would see this as being partly why people—why Westerners—are able to do things they do—or that we do: these religions. Which have their roots in agriculture too.
RW: Yes and [in the indigenous worldview] there is no dichotomy. The Great Mystery is both in everything and outside everything. It’s where people get mixed up. They try to put the creator or Great Mystery or force or universe or however you want to look at it as outside and then everything is about achieving that Utopianism. But the Great Mystery resides in everything and outside of everything as well, independent.
KtS: So then when we are able to communicate with animals or plants we are interacting with, or communicating with, the Great Mystery?
RW: Yes. Although I wouldn’t say what some religions will say: that they’re God then. I would say that no, God is present in them just like God is present in me. The problem is that we’re all affected to one degree or another by this Western worldview which is a handicap to understanding what the possibilities are. And secondly we’re never on the land long enough to understand how the relationship worked.
But most of us are so mobile, me included, that we don’t have the “cred” I guess you’d say—the credibility—to communicate in the way we should with the plants and animals. We’re in such an instant society; we want things to happen when we want them to happen. So it’s very rare to be able to have that privilege to be able to communicate with the trees, with the plants, with the animals, the way that we are actually created to do. To be in relationship with, nor relationship over.
KtS:Where to go from here? Is there even any place to go from here? Like, what does one do in the world at this point? I’ve met some different people in the back-to-the-land movement or rewilders and some are consciously imitating different bits and pieces of Native American lifestyle.
RW: What I believe sustains our people and makes community possible and made this relationship possible are the values that developed over time. For me it seems frustrating if people are trying to adapt Native things without Native values.
I have to understand things like my relationship to everything else. I have to understand that consensus gives dignity so everybody has a voice; it’s not hierarchical. I have to understand that spirituality is a very tangible thing. I have to understand that humor is necessary and sacred. I have to understand that work should be done where there’s work and when there’s not, I shouldn’t have to work. All these are Native values that sustained our people, and I’m speaking in a pan-Indian way.
For my dissertation I interviewed people from 45 different tribes across the United States and Canada and all these values are present in their “harmony” worldviews, their idea of “the harmony way.” Those are the types of values that you need for living with the land and with each other if you’re gonna do this.
KtS: Where did Westerners got so far off the path? Like, we can trace it back: “Oh, look at how the religions took the divine and removed it from the world,” or “Look at how agriculture was all about wiping out what was there and planting something else there and taking over.” But then why was it that humans were able to live for two or three hundred thousand years without doing this and then suddenly started doing this in the Middle East and then it took over. What happened?
RW: I don’t know the ultimate answer to this but I can at least trace it to the Greek idea of dualism, right? And the higher mind philosophy, and all this. I can trace the influence in America from that. If you think about when both the Enlightenment and the Reformation occurred, what happened in Europe right before that was the Renaissance. The Renaissance was the glorification of the Greeks and the Romans. You just need to look at Washington, DC, and the buildings there to see the influence, you know, but it was also in the minds of Franklin and Jefferson and all these other founders. I can only look at it and say, here’s how it happened that it influenced Americans, but I can’t say this is why humanity does this, or why that branch of humanity. That’s one of those ultimate questions that I don’t know will ever be answered.
I know the things I can see in the Greek culture that created the Western worldview: the physical dualism, the moral dualism, the religious intolerance, the individualism, the extrinsic categories, the hierarchy, the competitiveness, the Utopianism, all the anthropocentric “humans are over nature,” the triumphalism, the patriarchy. All of those things can be traced through those movements.
So that means that if we can trace them, we can undo them. And the way I think they can get undone is by adopting a more indigenous worldview, which is that people live with the land, right? Everybody’s’ indigenous from somewhere, sometime, so now we have to decolonize, begin to separate those things in our minds. We’ve been given a worldview that’s not really based on reality. And it takes a more indigenous worldview—whether it’s indigenous Native American or indigenous Australian or indigenous European, or whatever it is—a more indigenous worldview to correct that Western worldview that has taken us away from the reality of living as part of the earth.
Later that day, Randy added by email:
I’ve been thinking about your “why” question concerning humanity. So far, I can only say that the farther a culture gets from its earthiness, the more the mind starts to dwell on human accomplishments instead of cooperating with and learning from creation. This creates shortsightedness that imperils everything. Also, Greece and Rome and England and America all have been very young civilizations. I think perhaps their brief age shows the immaturity of thinking. When civilizations are older, like many Indigenous civilizations, they have more time to learn, perhaps they come to understand that war, competition, capitalism, individualism, etc., all eventually lead to instability and are simply bad for everyone, including the ecosystems, and this type thinking should be avoided as much as possible.
Unlike Augustine, the famous Christian theologian so revered among Christians, I do not believe people are born corrupted or sinful and are such “by nature.” I believe we are all born with choices to make. We have some good and some bad influence and we largely, (not exclusively) decide which way we want to go, hopefully learning from our mistakes along the way.

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More articles by:KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer living on the West Coast of the U.S.A. More of Kollibri’s writing and photos can be found at Macska Moksha Press.



https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/03/decolonizing-the-western-worldview-interview-with-cherokee-activist-scholar-randy-woodley/




The Need for a Greater Vision: Recognizing Reality

By Norton Smith, originally published by Resilience.org

November 19, 2019



Ed. note: This piece is Part 1 of a 3-part series. You can find Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

Question Beliefs

We live in a culture that is embedded in unquestioned beliefs passing as truth. These beliefs are the source of our current crisis. We attempt to solve the problems of degradation of our environment and climate disruption, but we do not look at these core beliefs. We hold on to the idea that capitalism is the only right way to organize an economy, that democracy is essential to our freedom, that freedom itself is a core ingredient to our happiness. We believe corporate slogans such as “Progress is our most important product” (General Electric), and subscribe to the belief that technology will solve whatever problems we have, even the ones caused by technology.

Grasp the Scope of the Crisis

Most of us are unable to back away far enough to grasp the whole picture. We are like a tourist with a flashlight trying to get a view of a huge mural that covers a block-long wall. The news media can only focus our attention on a tiny fraction of the image at any one time. We read daily reports of record temperatures in the arctic, of ice sheets melting in the Antarctic, of floods, forest fires all over the world, political gridlock, and recession fears. We are deluged with information. Most of us have been touched directly by at least one aspect of the crisis. Today I am breathing the smoke of fires in British Columbia and Alaska hundreds of miles away. These are direct experiences, yet there are still those who deny that climate change is real or that it is a problem. And worse yet we do not have the political will or mechanism to respond. Many scientists clam we are beyond the tipping point. They say the damage done to the ecosystem is so great that further decline is assured, even if we drastically reduce our impact in the next 5 years.

We are confronting a confluence of issues – environmental degradation, climate disruption, political tension and economic instability – that create an unprecedented risk to future generations. Climate disruption is getting all the headlines, but talk to a fisherman anywhere on the coast and he will point to depleted fish stocks making it impossible to earn a living fishing. Some of that is due to climate, but over fishing, water pollution and destruction of spawning grounds also play major roles. Agricultural runoff is creating large dead zones at the mouths of rivers, areas that used to be some of the most productive.

Insect populations are plummeting with some reports of 75% loss in the last 50 years1.Insects are the base of the food chain for many creatures. If they die off then we will all go. The cause is not simple but insecticides on farm land and habitat destruction are major factors.

Fresh water is another resource in critical decline. We have been pumping water from aquifers at rates that far exceed the rate of recharge. Worldwide, 40% of our food grown on irrigated land.2 Without irrigation we will face severe food shortages. In addition, much of the remaining irrigated land is dependent on snowpack that feeds reservoirs in the mountains. As the climate warms there is less snow and it melts sooner, reducing the amount of stored water available.

If we listen to the economic news we cannot help but be aware of the rapid increase in the US national debt. Politicians seem incapable of holding the debt in check, especially the Trump administration that established policies and tax cuts that have dramatically increased the debt at a time when the economy is doing relatively well and we should be reducing the debt. Despite the ignorance of some lawmakers, debt cannot continue to rise indefinitely. Many countries have tried that. In the end it leads to hyper inflation, and in extreme cases, a collapse of the government.

A more subtle and less talked about issue is that of resource depletion. True, Malthus warned the world of this 200 years ago during a time when energy resources in the form of wood were being depleted.Then we discovered coal, then oil, and the industrial revolution sparked a new level of development and environmental destruction on a level Malthus could never have foreseen. The issue is that while technology has kept the price of raw materials from increasing dramatically, metals like copper, and energy sources like oil and gas are finite. The deeper we have to mine or drill and the more complex the extraction process, the smaller the final product derived from the energy expended to get the material. When oil was first discovered it took roughly one barrel of oil’s worth of energy to extract 100 barrels. Now that one barrel might get us 10 barrels. The costs are multiplied throughout the system. In other words if it now takes 3 times as much energy to mine a ton of copper as it did 50 years ago, because the high quality and easily extracted ore are gone, and that energy is derived from oil which itself requires 10 times more energy to extract, then the two factors multiply the real cost of the copper. In our example it now “costs” the equivalent of 30 times more oil to produce a ton of copper. Again, we run into limits.

I am proposing that the solution is a radical redesign of our civilization based on a more sustainable model. To do that we need to examine the core beliefs of our society to see which ones are compatible with a new vision and which ones need to be abandoned. This requires that we face our fear of change, grieve for the losses, clear our nervous systems of intergenerational trauma that blinds us to seeing the reality of our time and open our hearts to living in connection. This cannot come about by any rational decision by a governing body. Those in power have a vested interest in keeping the current system alive as long as possible. Call it a form of corruption, but it is also simply a matter of self preservation. We can, however, make changes on a personal and local level. We can have working models established on a small scale that can replace systems on a national level as they fail. We either cling to the existing paradigm as it implodes, or we can place our attention and focus our energy on creating new systems that support life in harmony on the planet.

Look Below the Symptoms

A partial list of these beliefs was mentioned already – that our prosperity depends on capitalism, democracy, and progress through technology. Let’s go deeper to see how these structures of society evolved, and how they affect us today. The core belief that underlies our current civilization is the idea that we are separate from nature and superior to other creatures and even other races of human beings. It leads to a distrust of nature which shows up even in the fables we tell our children, which are filled with images of the dark and dangerous forest and the merciless ocean depths.

Another belief is that security consists of having enough food or money stored away to last through hard times. In itself the belief is true, but it becomes dysfunctional in a world of finite resources when each person is focused on maximizing their own resources without consideration for the whole. To justify our actions we convince ourselves that there are no limits, we can have it all and, through technology, everyone can be raised up to the lifestyle we enjoy in the USA.

We are embedded in the psychology of capitalism, and we live in a world shrouded in fear. The combination is lethal. Fear leads to contraction and thinking only of one’s own survival. Capitalism promotes the value of gathering resources for our own use and enjoyment. When capitalism is combined with the Puritan work ethic, it allows us to justify income inequality because of the unspoken belief that if we have more than our neighbor it is because we worked harder or smarter and therefore deserve the rewards. We may feel no obligation to share our good fortune because those who are less well off obviously did not work hard enough. The result is a society that is fundamentally adversarial, pitting the wealthy against the poor, those in power against those who would like to be in control.

That leads to us versus them thinking that pervades our culture and shows up on all levels, particularly in public arenas like politics. The two party system has devolved into two conflicting ideologies that feel irreconcilable. Each party has become more isolated and rigid in their doctrine to the point that many people only listen to information that supports their point of view or their party’s view. Where is the middle ground that allows for a cooperative solution? Problems that require dramatic solutions like climate disruption cannot be effectively addressed.

Capitalism has been the driving force behind the industrial age. It has brought us technology that was unimaginable 200 years ago. The problem is that it is fundamentally incompatible with a sustainable world. The core precepts – private ownership of goods and land, a competitive market for labor and materials, emphasis on capital accumulation – lead to a society that is made up of a few wealthy “owners” and a large number of “workers”. The system is dependent on keeping the wages paid to labor low enough that the owners can produce products that are competitive in the market place. When labor unions were strong there was a balance of power, but the advent of free trade and multinational corporations has robbed labor unions of their bargaining power because of the availability of cheap labor in the developing world. The result is an ever increasing disparity of wealth between the owners and the workers, and an ever increasing number of workers at the lowest level of the economy. Until the last 10 years, this has been partly disguised by an overall improvement in living standards through technology, but when one compares the hours worked in 1950 to support a family, when one person’s income was adequate, compared to the present when both adults of the family have to work, it’s clear that the average working family has to work harder simply to pay for the necessities of life. Free time to enjoy life has evaporated. We do not account for that in the statistics of progress like GDP.

To facilitate the transactions of a capitalistic economy we invented money and a banking system to manage the creation of money. In our system, money is created by the banks in an equal amount to the loans they make. In other words the creation of money is dependent on the creation of debt. Debt, however, once created, tends to grow faster than the money supply because of the effect of compounding interest. Debt will tend to accumulate with those members of society that are unable to pay it off, and capital will accumulate to those who have wealth already and are free from debt. At first it works well, but as debt accumulates to the workers, they have less money to buy the goods produced by the owners and the economy goes into recession. Debt is reduced through bankruptcies and foreclosures. Capital is reduced by the downsizing and failure of businesses. Eventually a new cycle begins. Historically, the cycle often becomes extreme and outcome is revolution as the tension between the wealthy and the poor becomes intolerable.

Capitalism is a natural outgrowth of our survival instinct in disconnected world. If we do not feel supported by our fellow humans, by the natural world, and by a greater presence, then there is a level of insecurity that we continually try to appease by building protective shells around us. In modern times this translates into ownership of land, house, and enough money and other resources to allow us to feel secure. Unfortunately in the rush to acquire these items we have sold our soul to the banks which in effect own our homes and often our cars. We end up feeling even less secure because we now have even more to lose if the economy turns down and we lose our job. We crave a sense of control over our lives, but we can no longer hunt for our food or harvest it directly from the earth so even to eat we are dependent on a complex web of corporate-run systems of transportation and production that we do not control or even understand.

Healing the Wound Of Separation

In order to live in harmony with each other and with the earth we need to heal the core wound of separation from a close community, separation from the earth and the natural world, and separation from the spiritual ground from which all of this manifested world arises. Without resolving all three levels of separation we will continue to live in fear and grief, maybe depression. It is that core sense of not enough that drives the Euro-American addiction to doing, to trying to get somewhere or get something that we think will cure that sense of not enough. We invent better technology, more powerful machines to get us there faster, but the result is that we find out ever sooner that the goal we had set is not going to satisfy the sense of lack. We may accumulate more wealth at the expense of the community around us and defend that wealth with all our strength, but it does not bring us the security we seek.

In order to heal, let us acknowledge the true state of our own life and of the world. Let us fully feel the grief of the separation and fully feel the rage that lies hidden. We may have a sense of being betrayed by the society that we were taught to trust as a child. We accepted the promise of perpetual progress and came to expect that we should have a better life than our parents.

On a global level, can we feel the pain and destruction this has caused to the earth? Can we acknowledge and feel the horrors of genocide against the native population of this country and other colonized places in the world? Can we feel the full impact of enslaving millions of African natives to work our fields? The grief is immense. We have kept it suppressed for centuries, but it must be felt. Let us clear the intergenerational trauma so we can come into our hearts and truly feel the connection with the earth and with each other.

Only then, free from clinging to a failing system, in the hope of preserving the status quo, can we reconnect with source and make the leap to a new way of living. We do not have to invent better ways of living on this planet. There are models of aboriginal societies that have lived here for more than 10,000 years without destroying their environment or collapsing from internal dysfunction. They have evolved sophisticated systems of government and economic systems that allowed the wealth that was accumulated to be redistributed to those in need. They held their land in common for the benefit of the whole tribe. We have much to learn from their societies.
1. In 2017, scientists reported a decline of more than 75 percent in insect biomass across 63 nature areas in Germany between 1989 and 2016. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-insect-populations-decline-scientists-are-trying-to-understand-why/
2 .http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/infographics/Irrigated_eng.pdf



The Need for a Greater Vision: Finding a New Model

By Norton Smith, originally published by Resilience.org

November 20, 2019



Key Questions

In Part One I made the point that our current situation is unprecedented. Civilizations have come and gone, but this is the first time that the threat to our civilization is occurring on a global level, and the first time the challenges of environmental destruction, economic instability and political failure have all coalesced at the same moment. The nature of the current crisis demands extreme action, not a watered down politically acceptable compromise. It may seem impossible at present, but as the situation unfolds there will be opportunities to make fundamental changes to how we think, to how we live and govern ourselves.
To prepare for that time, we need a vision of what would bring us the happiness and security we crave. We have become conditioned by the ongoing barrage of negative news and the inability of the federal government to take meaningful action on climate disruption. We lower our expectations to a minimal level, to a token reduction in CO2 or a tweak of the health care system. Our leaders need a larger vision than the next election, and the rest of us need to be inspired by their vision so that we can buy into it and become active in working toward it. We need a vision that we can hold on to, that has great promise, even if it cannot be implemented tomorrow or even in our lifetime. In our hearts how do we want to live? What do we want for our children? Where can we look for guidance?

There are groups of people that have lived in harmony with the land they occupy for over 10,000 years, who have developed advanced cultures that met the needs of their people and gave them a satisfying life. Amazingly, these indigenous peoples survived the last 300 years of colonization and white man’s diseases. They survived a genocide perpetrated by direct murder and by forcing the children to attend boarding schools where they had to give up their language and culture. In most cases, the populations were reduced by over 90%, yet they managed to maintain a connection to their cultures and are now experiencing a strong resurgence.

I will focus here on the aboriginal people of the Northwestern American Continent, in part because they developed great wealth but did not use that to control or manipulate the system to gain power or advantage over their fellow tribal members.

Key questions we should ask are: How did they govern themselves? What kept them from exploiting their land, over-hunting or over-harvesting their food resources? What kept them for turning on each other in survival mode when their lives were threatened? These are central questions for our time, more important than how we improve technology to sequester carbon, or extract more resources from the earth. We have dedicated the last 500 years to the latter path and while it has created a comfortable lifestyle for those that can afford it, it has not led to greater happiness, freedom, a sense of security or peace. In fact I would argue that those qualities of life are exactly what we have bargained away in our adoption of the capitalistic values that place wealth and possessions at the top of the list of life goals.

Changing Our Frame Of Reference

We must start from a fundamentally different world view. Anything else, any attempt to arrive at the goal by tweaking the edges of the current ideology, philosophy, or political economic systems will not work. To do so is like trying to turn a bicycle into a boat by putting bigger tires on it. We need to admit that we have been the caterpillar and need to build a cocoon and take the time to metamorphose into the butterfly. We have been conditioned to think of the human race as superior and separate from nature. Our Christian religion supports that position saying that God gave us dominion over the earth. It has led to a sense of separation from the natural world. Our mythology is full of stories that condition us to be afraid of the “dark primeval‎‎ forest” and of the “creatures of the ocean depths” and of the ocean itself.

The first paradigm shift is to live as an equal with all living beings. There is no ranking; there is no dominion over any part of the natural world. We are a part of the whole living organism, just as the bacteria that live in our gut are part of our system. We depend on them to aid our digestion as they depend on us for food supply. We can learn to celebrate that relationship of give and take, to honor it and enhance it by making appropriate gifts of gratitude. When we do that we no longer look on the natural world as alien or threatening, but as a nourishing mother.
A key word here is respect. Respect for all life, even the parts that in our culture we do not view as being aware, like the plant kingdom, as well as those forms that we do not even acknowledge as being alive, such as the earth itself and the rocks and the rivers. We think it is crazy to talk to trees. At the same time we wonder how the aboriginal tribes learned to use plant medicines that require complex combinations to achieve the desired result. We assume they are like us and had to go though thousands of random experiments and mixtures till they stumbled on one that worked. The aboriginals had a much easier way. They asked the plant.

The other key word is spirit. We lose a whole world of wisdom and joy when we choose to ignore our spiritual nature and live as if we are only physical matter. The aboriginal cultures think of the world as primarily spirit, that we are created from spiritual beings, and in order to maintain our health and strength we need to maintain that connection. It requires a different kind of work and focus. Traditionally, a native youth was required to go on a vision quest to connect with his spirit guide, who would be his companion for life. Without that guidance he was considered only half alive. It was not a question of belief as is required in our religions, or a question of taking the word of the priest on faith. The traditional connection with spirit was tangible, demonstrable and irrefutable.

The indigenous awareness of spirit is reinforced in daily life. Before cutting a tree or killing a deer, a prayer is offered, asking permission to take the life of the plant or animal. A ceremony may be offered, or some other gift. There is a constant awareness that everything has a spirit, even the rocks, so all of it is treated with respect. This relationship with the unseen world is reinforced often with ceremonies, dances and rituals that depict the origin of life from spirit being and the spirit beings that interact with us daily. When I asked “how is this taught to your children?” the answer was “There is no program, no formal teaching. It is absorbed because that is the way we live.” To make that paradigm shift will not be easy for us because it is not modeled in our culture. It must be relearned.
There are many people, outdoor schools and books that can help. The awareness is growing and filtering into the larger public awareness.
If we live from the core value that we are spirit beings, then there is a sense of humility that arises in looking out at the world. If nothing is separate, then we naturally live with a sense of gratitude for the continuous gift of life. The combination of humility with a strong identification with the people close to you establishes a ground from which tribal members can look at each situation, each decision from the point of view of what would serve the whole community.

In an aboriginal culture, the capitalistic paradigm does not make sense. There is no benefit in gathering wealth at the expense of the rest of the tribe.
Our tendency as part of the Euro/American culture is to look for the technological fix. You may be asking, “What was their governing structure? How did they manage resources?” A native person would remind you that you must embody the mindset and spiritual essence of the culture before the technology will be of any benefit.

Growing Leaders with Integrity, Establishing Trust

That said, to create real change in the mechanics of civilization takes leadership with a vision and a long term global view, someone who can rise above the short term election cycle and the need to get the financial support of corporate institutions. Can such a leader come to power in our democracy? There are some truly dedicated members of congress who have the best interest of the country in mind, but they are paralyzed by the current system that requires them to raise and spend large sums of money to finance their campaigns to stay in office. On the local level, there is a better chance that a leader with integrity can get elected and stay in office.

Leadership in native communities had a different underlying principal since the leader had no coercive power to hold the members to his decisions, no authority to force the collection of taxes, no conscription for an army. He or she had to have negotiating skills and respect to find a common action that all would follow. As a result, leaders evolved by consensus over time rather than campaigning for election.

Some tribes, the Haida and Tlingit in the Northwest for instance, had a hereditary system. The future leader was educated from birth for the role, receiving training in all forms of leadership skills and negotiation skills as well as a thorough understanding of the history, so he would understand why decisions had been made and see the value of them. Even after his training, leadership was not guaranteed. As he was growing up, if he did not fulfill the requirements or seemed in some way unfit, he would be replaced by another, often his younger brother. As an adult he had to earn the respect of the community. If he abused his position he could be removed. This decision was usually made by the older women in the clan, for their role was always to preserve the cohesiveness of the tribe.

Other tribes had differing methods for choosing leaders, but in most there was oversight of the process by the women of the tribe. In the Algonquin tribes there was a formal council of grandmothers whose role was to approve of potential leaders based on their knowledge of the person and his motivation and otherwise fitness for leadership. They also had the power to remove a leader who was abusing his position for his own gain.

Leadership with wisdom and integrity is primary, and the other half of the equation is a citizenry willing to trust and support that leader. On a national level we are long way from that. Again it comes down to fear. We actually have little basis to trust that the current national government has our best interest in mind. In a study at Princeton University which looked at the percentage of legislation passed by congress in relation to the popular support for the legislation, popular support had zero influence on the likelihood of legislation passing.1 In order to trust a leader, each person must have the gut sense that his point of view is heard and matters. It is unlikely that that will happen as long as there is such polarity in government that we cannot even agree that climate disruption is real, or that we live on a planet with limited resources, or that debt matters.

What is required to move beyond survival fear so that we can form a cohesive society? First of all we need a level of security, a trusted source of support that will be there unfailingly. In aboriginal societies, the sense of community and respect for all members led to a practice of insuring that those unable to hunt, the elders, the injured, and the children were fed first when a hunter returned with food. Always the elders were offered the first share, for they were the keepers of the wisdom on which the continuity and survival of the clan depended.
The Northwestern tribes were blessed with an abundance of food, so there was rarely a survival situation, but tribes in other locations that were not so fortunate still honored the elders with the first food from a kill or harvest.
We try to accomplish the same end with social security and unemployment benefits, but many fall through the cracks in the system and there are many caveats. None of the social welfare programs inspires the same sense of trust as a local practice among a known community in part because all of them are based on meeting certain conditions and often are temporary. The end result is a higher level of stress and a sense that the government, rather than being an ally, is an adversary attempting to limit or remove the benefits to the individual recipient.

Raising children

Sharing of food is just one pillar of a strong sense of community. We need to go deeper and look at the process of building that community starting with the raising of children. Illarion Merculieff, an elder of the Unangun People of the Bearing Sea, describes his upbringing as a process of encouragement to follow his own curiosity. He was not given formal instruction. He was never punished for doing something wrong, only praised for what he did well. He felt welcome in every house in the village. The only requirement was that he spend an equal amount of time with women, men, elders and his own age group. He learned by watching and experimenting. The role of the adults was to keep him from getting hurt.2

The result was a young man fully alive, curious and confident of his ability to deal with the world. His sense of himself as part of a community and supported by it was unshakable even as he was sent to the mainland to a boarding school that attempted to “kill the Indian” in him so he would be assimilated into the white culture.

The shift from focus on the material things of life to emotional and spiritual aspects as a source of happiness and well being is crucial. A support for that shift that is underappreciated is the custom of matrilineal inheritances as practiced in many North American tribes. Children came to live with the mother and her brother. The father was busy with his sister’s children. The ramifications of this are profound. The blood bond between sister and brother is permanent. If the mother and the father have issues as couples do today, those disagreements and possible divorce do not have the same impact on the child since they do not involve a split up of the primary caregivers. The child does not fear a breakup of the family and is nourished by the extended family of the mother. If modern psychological theory on child rearing is applied to this sense of a stable nourishing home-life, it could be predicted that the children would have a naturally high level of self esteem and would not need to prove their worth by striving for power or wealth. We may not choose to adopt a matrilineal society, but we can return to a life connected to the community and the extended family.

Connection to the community did not require the loss of individuality. Every individual was treated with respect. The role of the coyote, the trickster, was acknowledged and respected. Strength and endurance was honored. There were many practices to insure that each individual had a sense of their own resourcefulness. One was the tradition of bathing in the river or ocean every day winter or summer to build resilience. They understood that the health of the community and its ability to adapt to new situations was dependent on the creativity and strength of the individual and with each person’s willingness to cooperate for the good of the whole.

Healing Into Our True Selves

The paradigm shift from focus on the individual to a focus on the larger community of people and of the planetary ecosystem requires a shift to a heart centered perspective. Most of us are trapped in the memories of past trauma, or our fears of what might happen in the future. To be free to live in the present requires inner work. Illarian Merculieff describes how this is done. “There are layers upon layers of things that have caused trauma in our lives that are covering our real true self that is in our heart. To get there you have to start feeling all these things that are keeping you away … guilt, shame, remorse, anger and jealousy, all the things that come from the past – and fear that is a projection from the future. Face them, feel them and let them go. The place of power is in the “now”. The Great Spirit is only found in the silence between ones thoughts.”3

https://www.upworthy.com/20-years-of-data-reveals-that-congress-doesnt-care-what-you-think

Merculieff, Ilarion, Wisdom Keeper: One Man’s Journey to Honor the Untold History of the Unangan People, North Atlantic Books, 2016.

Interview with Illarian Merculieff, Port Townsend Washington, May 2019






The Need for a Greater Vision: Growing a Cohesive Community

By Norton Smith, originally published by Resilience.org

November 21, 2019



Ed. note: You can find Part 1 of this series on Resilience.org here, and Part 2 here.
In the first section we discussed the need for a radical change in our cultural beliefs, and in the way we live on the planet. In the second section we focused on the need for leadership in making any significant transition. In this section we will look at the ways native communities organized their government to insure the ongoing support of the tribe.
In order to insure fair representation and that all voices are heard, some tribes appoint representatives for the aspects of their world that have no voice, such as future generations, ancestors, water, fish, and animals. Jeannette Armstrong of the Okanagan Nation talks about security as the result of every voice being heard. She understands that to make decisions by vote of the majority is basically an adversarial approach. “From our point of view the minority voice is the most important voice to consider. The minority voice expresses the things that are going wrong, the things that we’re not looking after, the things that we’re not doing, the things we’re not being responsible toward, the things we’re being aggressive about or trying to overlook by sweeping under the carpet or shoving out the door.” She goes on to describe the results of every person feeling heard, “People in the community change. Something happens inside where the material things don’t have a lot of meaning, where material wealth and the securing of it or being fearful and being frightened about not having “things” to sustain you, disappears. They start to lose their power.”4

The irony of our democratic system is that leaders win elections through a process that amounts to buying votes by making campaign promises either to pass particular legislation or bring new business or welfare to the constituents. The perversion is that they promise actions that they cannot make good on when they are elected. As a result politicians almost universally lose the respect of their constituents after the election “give away”. In the United States, the Bureau of Indian Affairs mandates that the tribes be governed by a tribal council elected by popular vote. I talked to community leader in one tribe who said that their elections were fraught with the same issues as our national elections, candidates buying votes and abusing their office for their own personal gain. From that I conclude that the fault lies in the elections system itself, not with the gullibility of the voters.

Expanding Aboriginal Government to a Larger Population

How could this be applied to a larger body of citizens? Without getting in the mechanical details which is the way we Eurocentric people tend to think, we need to come from a fundamentally different paradigm. In the aboriginal cultures, there was no authority that had coercive power, the power to tax, to raise an army, to force people to work on a public project. The system was set up on the basis that people wanted to cooperate and needed a format to come to consensus on the best course of action.

A system that functions on that basis must be founded on a local level in groups that are small enough so that personal relationships and trust can form. These leaders would be chosen in local elections. Local leaders would gather to choose regional or state leaders from among their ranks and regional leaders choose national leaders in a similar way, maintaining the chain of personal connection and trust. For direct public input there would be a state and national referendum process to choose a minority of representatives and vote on specific measures.

Even on the local level, election reform is essential. Ilarion Merculieff tells a story about a tribal election in the NW territories of Canada. The campaigning had become bitter and contentious and was destroying the cohesiveness of the village. The elders stepped in and made the rule that each candidate in their speech could only talk about the opponent, and could only say positive things about them. The result was a profound healing, and one candidate backed down saying that he thought that in reality the other one would do a better job. An extreme case perhaps, but the point is clear that some standard of behavior needs to be established so the debate is civil, informative, and relevant. Campaigning as it is often done today on a national level, with its chest pounding exhortations that my way is the right way and the other guy is a jerk does not lead to trust in the leadership, or the ability of the leaders to work together for the common good.

Can we establish a system to vet candidates as in the tribes? Why not institute a licensing system? A license is required to drive almost any vehicle, but none to drive the ship of state. To get a license to enter politics would require a course of study, call it a masters degree in leadership. To get the license the final step is coming before a review board composed of elders, psychologists and retired politicians with a balance of genders, at least 40% men and 40% women. The board would make their decision based on the competence of the candidate, and also on his or her psychological fitness to serve the whole without succumbing to the temptation to use the office for their own gain.

In conclusion, the system based on the desire to cooperate for the common good must have checks in place to correct itself if any part of it devolves into an adversarial process. Disagreements will occur and should be welcomed, but the means of resolving them should not be adversarial. Immense damage to the system is done by the post election process of disassembling what a previous administration did just because it was done by an opposing party, not because of its own merits or flaws, and of removing talented leaders with valuable experience because they are of the wrong party. The us versus them mentality leads to a situation of government versus the people, of one party versus the other with no room for compromise and little forward progress.

Decisions by Consensus

Decisions on a tribal level were by consensus out of necessity. It would not work in a small community to have 49% of the community disgruntled over the actions of the majority. On a larger scale it is difficult to achieve consensus since it is a process of working within a contained group of people and being willing to expand ones’ vision to include the whole group and how each option on the table will affect the whole.

Is there a system that can work with a larger population? One example of an alternative is found in the constitution of the Haida Nation. There is an elected Council of the Haida Nation (CHN) and a council of Hereditary Chiefs. Decisions by the CHN require a 2/3 majority. The Hereditary Chiefs have the function of approving or rejecting decisions by the CHN that involve international agreements as well as serving as an advisory board to the council. They also must approve of proposals brought before the CHN. The system retains the access to wisdom of the elders who are not subject to popular election while incorporating a democratic elections process. Requiring a 2/3 majority insures that there is significant support for an action, not a bare majority leaving 49% of the people unrepresented.

The Economy

Capitalism is incompatible with a sustainable society. We have a flawed financial system that is destined to go through cycles of boom and bust until it finally collapses under the debt load. The essence of capitalism is the right of private ownership. Other counties have tried other “ isms”, communism, Marxism socialism, but none of them seems any better. What do we know of the aboriginal cultures?

Capitalism creates separation. The primary directive is to accumulate resources symbolized by money through good business management and hard work. There is little acknowledgement that the poor are a direct outcome of a system that focuses on building wealth in a competitive environment, which by its nature depends on the creation of a large population of poor and middle class workers to support the few wealthy “owners”.

There is no incentive to share wealth with the community, other than personal satisfaction from being generous. We still have that value. But most sharing takes place through taxation which creates an adversarial relationship with the taxing authority.

Private ownership of land in conjunction with the belief that we have “dominion over the Earth” leads to the degradation of the land and the commons because it is likely to be sold to the highest bidder or developed for the highest economic gain. In native cultures the concept of owning the land made no sense. Land was sacred. It was a gift to all.
Perhaps the greatest dangers to our civilization are the parts of the environment that are not even under the jurisdiction of a country such as the ocean past the territorial limits, and the air we breathe.
We have done a poor job of managing the commons of every scale. To make the system really work again implies a paradigm shift. Just as in the case of the aboriginal tribal member thinking in terms what would support the community we, both as individuals and as a collective “nation states”, need to think in global terms. It will not work to tackle the problem only on the national scale. One country can plant trees while another with a much larger forest cuts them down for short term profit or political gain.

The Northwest coastal tribes probably had the greatest individual wealth of any North American tribe, and wealth was aspired to, but there the similarity with modern culture ends. Wealth was not the goal in itself. The honor came in how much a person could give away. Wealth served the whole community, not just the individual. Because of the principal of reciprocity, giving away wealth also created bonds with those who were on the receiving end, even if they could not repay the gift in kind, there was a sense of loyalty which held the community together.

The Potlatch was a business meeting, a spiritual revival and a social welfare program. In one function, the guests were invited to witness the business transaction taking place, be it an agreement between tribes, the raising of a pole, or a wedding. Since there were no written records having the event witnessed cemented the agreement in multiple eyes. Following the business there was dancing and ceremony to honor the role of spirit in bringing the meeting to a successful conclusion and reminding those present of the essential role of their spirit relatives. The final phase was the giveaway. Often the gifts were essential supplies such as blankets, eulachon oil, or skins. The gifts were both as payment for being the witness and as a way of affirming the status of the holder of the potlatch in the community. The Potlatch cemented relationships within the community and with the spiritual ground of being, nourishing the participants on multiple levels.

Aboriginals did not have a global impact, but they did form alliances and have treaties among neighboring tribes over territories resource management. Agreement was possible because they understood that it would benefit the whole to conserve their environment and the animals they depended on. Maintaining the commons was not an issue to be tackled in isolation, it was an outgrowth of the basic desire to live well together by insuring that everyone was taken care of.

Without that ethic it is hard to imagine a global agreement on preserving the commons taking place. True, we have made those agreements in the past most notably on the ozone depletion, but capitalist ethic supported by carbon fuels are woven so deeply into our society that resistance to change has stalled any meaningful action, and likely will continue until the system fails.

Tweaking the edges of capitalism will not work. However, there are valuable parts of the capitalist system. The free market – if we actually had one – is an efficient way to allocate resources. The market economy is not intrinsically linked to the capitalist value system. All aboriginal tribes traded freely with other tribes, sometimes half a continent away. There are many flaws in the current system. Some stem from private ownership which is reflected in the excess of wealth in a few hands, and in the stockholder-owned corporation which owes its allegiance to the stockholder and not the community. This results in having no long term incentive to preserve resources, to treat workers fairly, or to create products that are sustainable or recyclable.

Are there examples in our own culture that are worth developing? One hopeful shift is the growth of not-for-profit businesses. These include co-ops, government-owned businesses and foundation-owned businesses. They are not necessarily set up as tax exempt non-profit corporations, but because they are owned by the employees or the customers, they do not owe allegiance to stockholders. In the end that saves money and allows them to focus on serving their customers’ needs which gives them a competitive advantage.

Another is the public banking movement gaining momentum in California. A publicly owned bank would have the advantage that decisions on who to lend money to and the interest rate involved could be regulated based on the value of the enterprise to society and not strictly on the level of security the borrower can provide. If there was a national public banking system, the federal government could use public works projects to create money and control the money supply rather than depending on private banks to do it. If done judiciously, the government could run with far less debt creation than currently because capital expenses such as roads would be paid for by creating the money rather than selling treasury bonds or raising taxes. However, until we create a government that can control spending, a public banking system will only lead to inflation.

The greatest damage to the environment and to society comes from the multinational corporations that are mandated to focus on profits for their stockholders. To tame them we can adopt principles from the Algonquin: every voice must be heard, and the minority voice is the most important. Based on those concepts, corporate board of directors would include a balance of men and women, representatives for the workers, the residents of affected neighborhoods, consumers, and the planet, in addition to shareholders. Each class of representatives would have veto power over actions that directly affect their interests. Workers could block moving a manufacturing plant to China, neighborhood representatives could block a fracking operation that threatened their water supply, the earth representatives could block a plan that would export pollution to a third world country or damage the commons in some other way.

Ultimately, to be sustainable, the economy needs to be downsized and localized. According to the Global Footprint Network, The USA is exceeding the bio-capacity to support our consumption by 122%. Merely transitioning from carbon based fuel to solar and wind power will not solve this, for it does not address all the other factors, such as the extraction of metals, minerals or water for manufacturing and agriculture. It does not account for the loss of topsoil or biodiversity. None of these assets are being replaced by the natural system in a time frame of the rise and fall of civilizations. While better recycling programs can help, common sense dictates that we need to reduce our consumption. What we need to give up will depend on how soon we make the change, but we will need to let go of some of our material goods. From the perspective of our material culture this looks like a sacrifice, but the rewards of living in a supportive community, connected with what it truly means to be human on this earth far outweigh the loss of gadgets. To live from our heart, connected to all life and to the earth itself, requires a level of humility few westerners have experienced. It is from that sense of humility that the wisdom of how to live in harmony will arise.

In summary, if we are willing to do our personal work to live from the heart and return to living in connection with the earth and each other, we can create models of a more sustainable society that meet our real needs better than the current system. With the support of a community we trust and a clear view of our potential, we can experience the growing crisis as an opportunity to make the needed changes rather than sink into despair or live in fear of the future.

Original Instructions:Indigenous Teachings For a Sustainable World. Ed by Melissa K. Nelson, Bear & Co, 2008

http://data.footprintnetwork.org/?_ga=2.242021698.1950006330.1571497516-1179314747.1571497516#/