From: Peshewegunzh <wjh12.harvard.edu!beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!mthvax.cs.miami.edu!mamia!peshe>
Subject: Re: Environment and native issues
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 06:16:00 GMT

Original-Sender: Peshewegunzh <mthvax.cs.miami.edu!mamia!peshe>

Alan McGowen <hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm> observed:

> Actually my main point was one that should be familiar from US history. You
> can give all the paper protection and sovereignty 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.

Sovereignty guaranteed by a conqueror means nothing unless it is defended
by forces other than those of the conqueror.

> 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.

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 the spiritual, from which all else proceeds, is ignored and debased,
those doing so become ignorant and corrupted, and their actions become
ever more destructive to others and themselves, despite great powers of
technology. This is because the hierarchy of things has been violated, as if
a small child succeeded in an alchemy of obtaining the body of a large
strong man. Power without commensurate spiritual development is a
violation of the order of things, a cheat of both the material and
the spiritual. It is immoral and irresponsible.

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.

This is an axiom because beasts cannot be other than true to themselves,
whereas man is alienated from himself, and is aware of his
violations, despite protestations that his guilt has no basis. Yet
being dysfunctional, he cannot correct his behavior, but makes
up reasons for remaining alienated. This is really a form of slavery,
because he is prevented from becoming free, trapped by his own false
view of his own nature, through the denial of his unique spirituality.

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.


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Peshewegunzh

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