Chief Seattle's response to President Franklin Pierce desire to buy the tribes land in 1855.
How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and the experience of my people... If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, a place where one can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: Our God is also your God. The earth is precious to Him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.
Chief Seattle speaks out of an awareness that is only beginning to dawn on western civilization. Hear his words again:
This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
This is not the rule by which we run our society and I hope we are now beginning to see the error of our ways.
Our vice-president, Albert Gore, ran for president in 1988 stressing the importance of the ecological threat to our well being. Neither the popular media, nor the American people, were tuned in to his concerns. The always urgent human dilemmas, joblessness, poverty, crime, economic growth, racism, and international tensions occupied people's minds. Today the tide is gradually turning as ecological issues become more and more a daily concern for the people of the world. It becomes a front burner issue when a waste disposal site or a pipeline is scheduled for construction in one's backyard. It becomes a front burner issue when a generation of children on the banks of the Mississippi downstream from 30 percent of our nation's chemical factories get sick.
As species disappear, as land is made uninhabitable by deforestation and erosion, as well water becomes tainted with toxic waste, more and more people are realizing that we do have an environmental crisis. The increase in population coupled with unwise agricultural techniques, disruptive mineral extraction and refinement practices and unsafe manufacturing and waste management methods have put many people today and future generations tomorrow at risk. The progressive depletion of our soils and fish stocks, the environmental devastation of strip mining, oil and chemical spills, and coping with more and more garbage of every sort which must return, somehow into the ecosystem without poisoning it seems to be getting worse at a geometric rate.
I suspect you have read as much if not more about the ecological end times environmentalist prophets are preaching. The villains range from the brutish hordes breeding like rabbits, the oppression of governments that care more about the income from production than the welfare of their people, to greedy multinational corporations blessed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank raping the land for a fast buck. The high birth rates in Southeast Asia, the environmental devastation in Eastern Europe, and the Japanese corporation's deforestation of the South Sea islands tell the story only too well.
The challenge when facing such an overwhelming problem is to find some sort realistic source of hope to keep us engaged with the problem rather than throwing up our hands in despair. Al Gore put it very well in his book, Earth in the Balance:
The way we experience the world is governed by a kind of inner ecology that relates perception, emotions, thinking and choices to forces outside ourselves. We interpret our experience through multiple lenses that focus - and distort - the information we receive through our senses. But this [inner] ecology now threatens to fall badly out of balance because the cumulative impact of the changes brought by the scientific and technological revolution are potentially devastating to our sense of who we are and what our purpose in life might be. Indeed, it may now be necessary to foster a new "environmentalism of the spirit." How do we, for example, conserve hope and minimize the quantity of corrosive fear we spill into our lives? How do we recycle the sense of wonder machines, lost in the levers and cogs, lonesome for the love of life, hungry for the thrill of directly experiencing the vivid intensity of the ever-changing moment?[1]
It is not easy to find hope in the current climate of public opinion. There are some pretty negative views of the meaning and purpose of humanity circulating these days. The Deep Ecologists, for example, view our species as a disease attacking the planet, not so different from AIDS. We overwhelm the earth's defensive mechanisms as we slowly consume it. Global warming due to the consumption of the world's fossil fuels is like a planetary fever. The Deep Ecologists see humans as an alien pathogen. The Earth First!, an environmental terrorist organization, leader Mike Roselle said "You hear about the death of nature and its true, but nature will be able to reconstitute itself once the top of the food chain is lopped off." He doesn't sound like a humanist does he? The meaning of our role in the natural world is a primary concern of my generation and many are sympathizing with this kind of thinking - one of the components of today's nihilistic mood.
Yet there are more human affirming views of those who are seeking a way metaphorically get a grip on the crisis and seek solutions. I found appealing Al Gores ideas that we are a species of materialism addicts. As we have distanced ourselves from natural world, we have created a hole in our hearts. To ease the pain of the separation, we take to consuming the bounty of the earth seeking to use pleasure to distract ourselves. Rather than address our progressive alienation from nature we, hack off a piece and chew it up hoping the pleasure of a full stomach will fill an inner sense of emptiness. More destruction, more pain, more consumption follow each other in a swirling currents that pull us down the drain sucking the life out of us.
To break out of the cycle of materialistic manic-depression, one must see that a lasting satisfaction, happiness and peace cannot arise from the consumption of the material world. Far from a demonizing of the material world, what is required is an affirmation of the intrinsic value of the material world. The decision to turn toward a harmonious relationship with the earth is a decision to become a steward of the earth. This is the Biblical message in Genesis passage: "God took Adam and put him in the garden of Eden to serve it and keep it." We belong here just as much as all the plants, the birds, the snakes and the bears. But we must find our place.
To find our place, we must look into our history to understand how we got here and to see the vital forces that express themselves through us. The process of evolution has force, direction and intention. The best glimpse of the working of the spirit of life may be found here.
Consider the intriguing view that human development is compelled rather than discovered. The study of hunter-gatherer cultures has revealed interesting insights into the richness and stability of their lives. The hunter-gather diet typically has a wide assortment of nutritious food often abundant with protein and calories. The !Kung live in the Kalahari desert, one of the least hospitable environments on earth. Yet US anthropologist Richard Lee found that they had a typical daily intake of 2140 calories (8% above our recommended daily allowance)...Protein intake was 93 grams (50% above our RDA). The quality of their diet is much better than the typical agricultural community which relies on a small selection of cultivated foods. The !Kung eat only about 75 of the 300 edible plants in their desert range. Unlike most agricultural communities, the !Kung do not experience lean seasons when food is scarce. They eat well all year round. And they don't work very hard at it either, managing on about a 15 hour work week. Compare this with the dawn till dusk agricultural labor required to plant, harvest, thresh, grind and cook the food. The !kung culture is resistant to seasonal changes such as flood and draught. They adjust the foods they gather and eat while the agricultural community starves when the locusts come.[2]
Given this comparison, why would anyone leave the hunter gatherer lifestyle by choice? The archeological record suggests our ancestors didn't until they had hunted and gathered to the point of depleting an area of food and were unable to locate to a new place. Archeologists think the hunter-gatherers discovered the technology for cultivation long before actually being forced to rely on it.
I can imagine the hunter-gatherers of a community wringing their hands that their world was coming to an end as all the game vanished and the land had been denuded of food and fuel. When they realized that they could grow their own food and domesticate animals, I'm sure they rejoiced and praised the Goddess of the hearth. They must have rejoiced because using these techniques they were able to extract more food from the same amount of land. The price they had to pay was in human energy. Thus a population size too big for hunter-gathering, now could expand to provide the labor to plant and reap.
Civilization faced another such crisis just before the industrial revolution. Wood as a source of fuel was getting scarce in Europe during the mid seventeenth century crippling the manufacturers of the time. Only when local wood was in short supply did the transportation of coal from further away replace it for glass making, brewing, smelting of lead, tin and copper. As the demand for coal rose, the mines sank deeper below the water table. Traditional horse driven drainage pumps failed to do the job, a challenge that helped spur the development of the steam engine. 'Technological innovation was more effect than cause,' writes economic historian Samuel Lilley. 'The development of the steam engine came . . . hesitantly and reluctantly, as and when it proved no longer possible to cope with expanding needs by traditional means.'
The human pattern of waking up in a crisis and rushing after solutions seems like the standard operating procedure. The "If it isn't broken, don't fix it." philosophy has the value of economizing in the short run but often sets up bigger problems to solve in the long run. Many of our environmental problems are of the sort that not tinkering with them now will create unresolvable problems in the future.
The hopeful side of all this is that historically, the technologies have been available once the crisis was recognized and ready to be utilized. Since the early seventies, an explosion of new green technology has appeared which holds great promise for solving many of our problems. We have seen great advances in solar and wind technology, power storage and transmission, cleaner chemical processes, organic farming practices which replenish the soil and protect plants from pests, and many new methods of energy conservation, to name just a few.
With each change in technology, with each survival pressure, our relationship with the planet changes. For primitive agricultural peoples, nature was an overwhelming force which must be appeased to protect the harvest from harm. For the industrialists, nature was an inert lump of clay to be exploited in the glorification of one's nation, one's religion or one's self. Today, we are seeing the evolution of a new kind of human concern: a love of and commitment to nature. Think of those courageous Greenpeace volunteers putting their lives on the line to save whales and dolphins from being hunted or killed in fishing nets. People chain themselves to old growth redwoods to prevent them from being cut down. People are choosing to live lightly on the earth, consuming less, eating wholesome foods, producing less garbage, and advocating for environmental respect and harmony.
This view sees us as a valuable partner with nature loving our planet as a home for all life, not putting a premium on human life. We should be caring partners with the planet rather than reckless rulers concerned only with our own well being. Just as we strive to support human diversity, so we should seek the increasing diversity of all life.
And the love of the biosphere can create a new vision of what is heroic. This is especially important for the males of our species who seek new meaning if we are to stop conquering the earth. The kind of heroism I speak of is expressed in this story of the siege of Leningrad during the winter of 1942, as retold by Al Gore in his book. For 900 horrifying days, the citizens endured artillery fire and aerial bombardment during which over half a million people to starve to death. At Leningrad's Vavilov Institute, a botanical and agricultural research center, thirty one scientists remained to guard the unique collection of plants and seeds gathered meticulously from their places of genetic origin all over the world. The diversity of these seeds were the genetic pool which supported and protected their crops from future generations of pests and blights. The scientists patiently kept planting and harvesting their many seeds to keep them fresh all during the siege. They took turns standing watch over their seeds all night to protect them from hungry rats. By the end of the siege, fourteen of the scientists had died of starvation rather than consume their precious specimens. The institutes rice specialist was found dead at his desk surrounded by bags of rice. He is reported to have said shortly before his death, "When all the world is in the flames of war, we will keep this collection for the future of all people."
This is the spirit that will be required to see us past the turmoil as we reach the limits of the earth's ability to feed us and satisfy our material desires. And when the troubles come, when nation will fight nation for food and water, many will die. But we are a resourceful species. We survived the ice ages and got smarter and smarter for the effort. Perhaps we are on the threshold of another step of evolution in our species which will select for skill in creative relationship and service over skill in destruction.
All of us deserve a sustainable world lush green, full of trees, plants and animals growing in diversity. I believe we can and now are choosing to move toward a harmonious balance with our environment. It may take several generations and a lot of suffering and sacrifice. Yet the knowledge that no lasting happiness can be extracted and refined from the earth, can turn us toward the real source of happiness which is found within. Humanity finding inner peace and satisfaction will go a long way toward making peace with our natural home. The UUA resolution on Environmental Justice passed at the 1993 General Assembly which we will discuss this afternoon is one step along the path, I think, in the right direction.
Copyright (c) 1995 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.