From: Alan McGowen <beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>
Subject: Re: Environment and native issues
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 00:56:08 GMT

Original-Sender: Alan McGowen <hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>

I (Alan McGowen) wrote:

  Actually my main point was one that should be familiar from US history. You
  can give all the paper protection [...] you like to a people, but
  if their ecosystem is ruined, so are they: the principle is the same whether
  it is the buffalo that are shot and the prairies replaced with farms, or the
  rivers that are polluted and the rainforest dessicated through fragmentation
  from logging.
  It doesn't even matter whether it is done out of deliberate
  malice or just short-sightedness and stupidity: once you knock out the
  underlying ecosystem what is left are dispossessed people, ready to enter the
  "mainstream" economy on the bottom economic rung. A few more causalties of
  the war on nature.

Peshewegunzh replied:

> As long as people (any people) are in revolt against the Great Spirit, they
> will be engaged in warfare against the creation too, and therefore, finally,
> against themselves.
> [...]
>
> When materialists think man no more than a beast, then they make man
> dysfunctional, and ironically acting worse than any beast, since he is out
> of his assigned place, rebelling against his own nature.
> [...]
>
> One cannot be alienated from oneself and reconciled to nature at the same
> time. Without an understanding of spiritual things, there can be no
> understanding at all, and finally, no grasp of reality. That is why European
> society and culture in this era now appear so fragmented and bizarre, and
> so helpless to solve problems.
>
> Even when Indian societies in the past were mistaken in their spiritual
> paths, they tended by their very closeness and dependence upon nature
> to realize their own status as part of that creation, and that because
> of man's unique spiritual consciousness, the restraint needed to be
> practiced in the respectful use of the property of another. In this they
> were closer to truth than the modern technological societies which really
> have alienated themselves from nature so well that they can pretend to be
> sovereign. However, by so doing, they have divorced themselves from
> objective reality, and therefore, we can expect their actions to be
> patternless and entropian, since their desires will be captured by
> their own subjective and changing fantasies and delusions.
>
> Peshewegunzh
>

While I agree with much of the above, I think that the only spirituality
which is feasible for western humanity at this point is one which
must emerge from a deepened understanding of nature through science. I gather
however that Peshewegunzh thinks this a false path, based on a materialist
denial of creation.

But spiritualities that come equipped with all the answers in advance can
have problems when they turn out to be wrong in the details. Not so long ago,
western people all believed that the world was a product of a creator. They
were also quite sure that the creation was fairly recent and that species were
fixed in nature once created. They were wrong about this; the Earth is more
than 4 billion years old and the history of life is about that long. Some of
these "creationists" still hold out against the teaching of evolution to
children, using arguments not unlike Peshewegunzh's about the harmful moral
effects of materialism. Apparantly it does not occur to them that moral
harm can also sometimes come from obstinate refusal to face facts.

Perhaps Peshewegunzh has no particular quarrel with evolution, but sees it
as an expression of the creativity of the Great Spirit. Yet there can be
pitfalls with this approach as well. Evolution is not a "progressive"
process "culminating" in humans. There was almost certainly nothing inevitable
about humans, and if the evolutionary history of the earth had been even
slightly different from what it was, there would be no humans at all on it
today. Considerations such as these have to be taken into account together
with the idea that humans are spiritually unique. The history of life in
no way suggests that we were the purpose of the whole thing. As Julian Huxley
is supposed to have said when a bishop asked him what his study of biology
had taught him about the Creator: "He has an inordinate fondness for Beetles."
Huxley knew of some 300,000 species of beetles, but there may in fact be
more than ten million species of them, each as improbable a product of
evolution as H. Sapiens. The Great Spirit seems to have very different
priorities from ours.

However, I'm convinced that Peshewegunzh is quite correct in his diagnosis
of western humanity's main spiritual disorder as a confusion about "place"
-- specificaly, an inability to accept a place in the scheme of things and
live in it. In ecological terms, western humanity has no niche, and attempts
to expand into all other niches as a result. It is only through this
destructive, cancerous growth that he finds his identity, which is really
the lack of an identity -- a lack of place, or niche.

I also think that a sacred appreciation of nature and the proper human
place within it is a requirement for a sane life. The proper use of the
uniquely human adaptation for symbolic intelligence -- our "unique spiritual
position -- is to enhance nature rather than to destroy it: Amazonian
rainforest peoples understand this, and they act to *increase* biological
diversity in their vicinity, for example. They are an asset to the forest
ecosystem. Many North American indigenous groups apparantly acted similarly,
and understood this activity to be a crucial part of their spiritual function.

Western humanity seems to think that its spiritual function is to replace
nature with artifacts, a view that Thomas Berry (in _The Dream of The Earth_)
calls a "twisted sense of the sacred." According to this view, those who
depend upon nature, rather than on artifacts, are "uncivilized" and should be
raised up above their "bestial" state. Hence the missionary zeal for
eradicating indigenous cultures, whether in the name of God and the Bible
or in the name of Technology and Progress.

------------
Alan McGowen


After writing this, one of the moderators expressed concern that my post
could be the opening salvo of a religious flame war.  I wrote back in part:


        ... if doctrines of the religious right are masquerading as a
        desire to protect native Americans from untoward "European"
        alliances with things like environmentalism, it should certainly
        be open for discussion in this forum as to whether that may not
        itself be such an untoward alliance. At the very least it should
        be possible for the question to come out if those are really the
        forces that are at play. After all, the religious right is opposed
        to environmentalism for reasons which have nothing at all to do
        with the protection of indigenous rights.

        While I agree that religious issues will not be resolved, and
        "creationists" will not be convinced that evolution is a fact by
        any amount of evidence, the importance of the questions about
        linkage between environmental protection and indigenous rights
        are far too great to allow them to remain captive to a single,
        *undebated*, political agenda...

        It is no accident that biologists who address environmental issues
        emphasize an evolutionary understanding of human relationships with
        nature. It is clear that a very large part of our problem is a lack
        of appreciation of the fact that humans are part of the natural
        systems of the earth. We are products of the same process of natural
        selection and coevolution which have generated the rest of the
        natural world. I respect traditions which hold that the world is
        sacred and that humans have special responsibilities within it,
        but this is not the traditional western religious view of the earth:
        -- made for man's dominion. It seems to me very legitimate to wonder
        whether that traditional western religious view is not involved in
        opposition to linkage between environment and indigenous rights,
        particularly so when the opposition is of such a divisive nature
        ("don't listen to those environmentalists -- they'll try to
        Europeanize you, they don't understand you", etc.) Divide and
        conquer is the oldest tactic of the far right.

Alan McGowen