by DGR News Service | Aug 6, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
“Everything is going to burn. Our land, our animals, and our house.”
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.
By ANDREA GERMANOS
Southern Europe continues to bake and burn under intense heat Monday as scores of fires have forced evacuations and caused mass destruction across Italy, Greece, and Turkey.
“We are facing the worst heat wave since 1987,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Monday, referring to week-long soaring temperatures that year which claimed over 1,000 lives.
Greek authorities issued warnings of “dangerous” heat, and on Monday, inland parts of the country reached as high as 45° C (113 ° F). The worst of the region’s heat is expected to fall Monday and Tuesday, according to AccuWeather meteorologists, with temperatures possibly topping the continental record of 48° C (118.4° F).
“Conditions look to remain very hot for much of the week, and will continue to rival record high temperatures,” said AccuWeather meteorologist Alyssa Smithmyer.
Intense heat in the region has fueled wildfires.
From Agence France-Presse:
Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias said that there had been 1,584 fires across Greece in July compared to 953 in 2019, and that there had been 116 new blazes in just the last 24 hours.
“We are no longer talking about climate change but about a climate threat,” he told Star TV.
Wildfires have been sweeping through parts of Turkey as well. Now in their sixth day, they’ve been blamed for at least eight deaths and the hospitalization of over two dozen people.
Muzeyyan Kacar, a 56-year-old resident of the Turkish village of Kacarlar, gave a devastating account to CNN of the devastation.
“The animals are on fire,” she said. “Everything is going to burn. Our land, our animals, and our house. What else do we have anyway?”
Social media users have been sharing dramatic images of the blazes in Turkey and harrowing escapes:
The fires, as Al Jazeera reported Monday, erupted last week.
While the majority have been extinguished, responders were still tacking seven blazes in the coastal provinces of Antalya and Mugla—popular tourist areas, and in Tunceli, southeast Turkey…
The wildfires are the worst of their kind in at least a decade, with nearly 95,000 hectares (235,000 acres) burned so far this year, compared with an average of 13,516 at the same point in the years between 2008 and 2020.
The international conservationist group WWF said the heat and fires in the region must be seen by world leaders as a reason to act urgently on climate:
Italy’s fire service has also been battling hundreds of blazes, responding to over 700 in just the last 24 hours, the country’s fire authority said Monday.
Last week in Sardinia, wildfires scorched tens of thousands of acres and killed hundreds of farm animals.
The situation prompted regional governor Christian Solinas to declare a state of emergency and call it “a disaster without precedent.”
Southeast Europe’s heatwave, however, “is not at all unexpected,” climate scientist Dann Mitchell told the Associated Press, “and very likely enhanced due to human-induced climate change.”
by DGR News Service | Jul 29, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Lobbying, Movement Building & Support
Editor’s note: We agree that “This is a landmark victory for the local communities who have stood up and held firm for over a decade to protect the climate, the Salish Sea, and their own health and safety.” We don’t put much hope into the Paris Agreement or all the UN climate summits. The best hope we have is us, so communities that develop and nurture a culture of resistance are the way to go.
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.
Featured image: The Whatcom County Council on Tuesday night approved landmark policies regulating fossil fuel expansion at Cherry Point, home to two oil refineries. (Photo: RE Sources/Twitter)
By Jessica Corbett
In a move that comes as wildfires ravage the Western United States and could serve as a model for communities nationwide, the Whatcom County Council in Washington voted unanimously on Tuesday night to approve new policies aimed at halting local fossil fuel expansion.
“Whatcom County’s policy is a blueprint that any community, including refinery communities, can use to take action to stop fossil fuel expansion.”
—Matt Krogh, Stand.earth
“For too long, the fossil fuel industry has been allowed to cloak its infrastructure and expansion projects in an air of inevitability,” said Matt Krogh, director of Stand.earth’s SAFE Cities Campaign. “It has used this to diminish local communities’ concerns and then dismiss or ignore their voices. Whatcom County’s new, permanent policy is a clear signal that those days are over.”
“Local communities and their elected officials do have the power to decide what gets built near their homes, schools, and businesses,” Krogh continued. “Whatcom County’s policy is a blueprint that any community, including refinery communities, can use to take action to stop fossil fuel expansion.”
The county’s new land-use rules (pdf), approved in a 7-0 vote, apply to industrial land at Cherry Point, located north of the city of Bellingham. As KNKX reports:
The area has a deep-water port and two oil refineries. It’s zoned for industrial use. It sits adjacent to waterways that connect the Northwest to lucrative markets across the Pacific Rim. It’s also where what would have been the nation’s largest coal export facility—the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal—was canceled five years ago.
…Five years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers pulled the plug on Gateway Pacific proposal after the Lummi Tribe argued it would violate treaty fishing rights. The land at Cherry Point is adjacent to waters that are at the heart of the tribe’s usual and accustomed fishing area. And the state has designated that area an aquatic reserve.
Since that project’s demise, the council has enacted 11 six-month moratoriums. Tuesday’s vote permanently banned new refineries, shipping terminals, or coal-fired power plants at Cherry Point and imposed tougher regulations on any expansion of the area’s existing facilities.
The Bellingham Herald notes that while the five-year battle pitted the oil industry against environmentalists, “talks took a key step forward after the appointed county Planning Commission approved the Cherry Point amendments and a ‘stakeholder group’ of business and environmental interests began meeting to build a consensus over its final wording.”
“From the onset of the process five years ago, the County Council had set forth clear aims for new rules that would allow improvements of existing refineries while restricting facilities’ use for transshipment of fossil fuels,” Eddy Ury, a council candidate who led the stakeholders group for months while he was with the environmental group RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, told the newspaper.
“These dual purposes proved to be challenging to balance in lawmaking without overstepping authority,” Ury said. “The stakeholder group came together at the point where our respective interests were best served by cooperating.”
In a statement Wednesday, RE Sources executive director Shannon Wright welcomed the vote.
“This is a landmark victory for the local communities who have stood up and held firm for over a decade to protect the climate, the Salish Sea, and their own health and safety from risky and reckless fossil fuel expansion projects,” said Wright.
“There’s more to be done,” Wright added, “including addressing the pollution burden borne by local communities, in particular Lummi Nation, who live in close proximity to existing heavy industry and fossil fuel operations, and continuing to counter the threat of increased vessel traffic across the region.”
“When people ask local leaders to address their concerns, this is how it should be done.”
—Whatcom County Councillor Todd Donovan
Still, Whatcom County Councillor Todd Donovan celebrated that local residents “are now safer from threats like increased oil train traffic or more polluting projects at existing refineries.”
“When people ask local leaders to address their concerns, this is how it should be done—with input from all affected communities and industries, but without watering down the solutions that are most protective of public safety, the climate, and our waterways,” he said.
Stand.earth’s statement pointed out that the development comes as residents and activists in Tacoma, Washington are pushing for similar protections.
In a tweet about the vote in Whatcom County, the Tacoma arm of the environmental group 350.org said that it is “still waiting for Tacoma City Council to find courage to do the same here.”
The fights for local regulations on fossil fuels come as communities across the West endure the impacts of the human-created climate emergency—from deadly, record-breaking heat to ferocious fires. In Washington state alone, there are currently eight large active fires that have collectively burned 136,758 acres.
Conditions in the U.S. West, along with fires in Siberia and flooding across China and Europe, have fueled demands for bolder climate policy on a global scale. Parties to the Paris agreement—which aims to keep global temperature rise this century below 2°C, and preferably limit it to 1.5°C—are set to attend a two-week United Nations climate summit in Glasgow beginning October 31.
by DGR News Service | Jul 26, 2021 | Climate Change, Colonialism & Conquest, Education, Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: The mainstream media is not only minimizing climate change but all the horrors of corporate capitalism.
This article originally appeared in Climate&Capitalism.
By Tyler Poisson
Q: What is mainstream media?
A: Mainstream media is the set of media companies that dominate mass mediums. Also known as corporate/mass/monopoly media, mainstream media consists of cable news channels, major periodicals, film studios, and the like. The corporate press is the subset of mainstream media companies that deal in news. Mainstream media has a monopoly on the information and symbols that get disseminated widely to the public, as alternative media only reaches small audiences of niche consumers. Five companies control 90 percent of US media.
Q: What’s the problem with mainstream media?
A: Mainstream media outlets are (subsidiaries of) for-profit corporations acting in the system of capitalism. Therefore, their central objective is to maximize quarterly gain for their shareholders, the majority of which are multibillion-dollar financial institutions. Because corporations are responsible to stockowners first, capitalist accumulation comes at the expense of workers and the environment, as businesses exploit cheap labor and extract resources in the most efficient manner, no matter how ecologically devastating that may be, in an effort to increase surplus value for the owning class.
Mainstream news sources rely on advertising to generate revenue, meaning they need to sell marketing opportunities to other corporations. Because of this arrangement, mainstream media cannot sincerely critique corporate capitalism, as it would be self-sabotage to challenge the very system on which their business model depends.
Q: Mainstream sources don’t criticize capitalism, so what?
A: They propagandize it. Mainstream media’s most consequential accomplishment is the widespread inculcation of unquestioned consumer capitalism. First of all, the corporate press runs ads that instill consumer culture. Far worse, since mainstream broadcasts and publications are the only sources of information that effortlessly reach the masses, and because they perpetually contest, if not ignore, critical analysis of the system of capitalism, they end up prescribing it. The bulk of this propagandization is carried out unconsciously. Mass entertainment media inculcates the images and icons of capitalism.
Corporate newspeople, often having graduated from elite private schools, are hired at major media companies precisely for their uncriticalness towards existing power structures. Thus, mainstream commentators naturally and genuinely downplay, when they don’t ignore, news that reflects unfavorably on the economic status-quo. They do this actively (e.g., by playing “both sides”) and passively (e.g., by reporting systemic consequences as independent events). A serious critic of capitalism would never achieve a position of influence in mainstream media, indeed none have.
Sometimes unorthodox takes are published in unnoticed places, but never enough to gain much attention. Furthermore, news industry editors reserve the right to unilaterally redraft stories before they reach the public. As a result, journalists self-censor, whereby they come to exclude facts and suppress sentiments that they know their editor would disfavor or delete. Editors report to CEOs on boards of directors.
Q: Sure, but I’m free to read and watch what I want right? Why don’t people just find better sources?
A: In theory individuals can engage with whatever news sources they find to be the best. The reality is that quality, alternative publications, although numerous, are for all intents and purposes undiscoverable. Some of the richest and most powerful (media) companies in the world, such as Google, Facebook, household publishers and broadcast networks, broadly control the distribution of information. Anyone can produce anything they want, the challenge lies in finding an audience.
For-profit companies determine what you get, and even more importantly what you don’t get, when you search the web, turn on the television, and so on. This state of affairs is problematic seeing as it would be against the best interest of multibillion-dollar corporations to surface information that calls into question the system of capital growth from which they derive their power.
Furthermore, monopoly media sets the boundaries of acceptable politics in virtue of its ubiquity. Dissenting perspectives are considered “radical”, “unrealistic”, or just plain whacky in popular discourse, however rational or evidenced they might be.
Q: So everything I read in the corporate press is propaganda?
A: No! In fact, on issues that can be covered honestly in the absence of systemic analysis, mainstream news sources can be excellent. Although weak language and out of touch presuppositions abound, that which gets published is not usually problematic. What really matters are the events and opinions that are omitted and marginalized, rather than headlined.
Major news media companies appease their shareholders and advertisers every time they ignore a case of corporate exploitation. When problems brought about by capitalism become too big for mainstream sources to ignore, it’s better for business that they scapegoat foreign countries and domestic minorities. Major media corporations also wield algorithms that facilitate endless entertainment.
Q: What’s the most important thing that mainstream media mistreats?
A: Climate change, taking for granted the understanding that it is the biggest story of our time, if not the most important event in human history. The corporate press has virtually ignored climate change, at best relegating crucial reports to back pages. Examples of incommensurate climate coverage are inexhaustible. Infamously, ABC News spent more time on the Royal Baby in one week than on climate change in all of 2018, the fourth hottest year on record.
In 2019, when atmospheric CO2 levels surpassed 415 parts per million for the first time since the Pliocene Epoch 3 million years ago, no major publications reported the measure, even though Exxon Mobil predicted it decades in advance. Instead, the morning after the climacteric was recorded the front page of the New York Times worried about the economics of “Trump’s Trade War”, the plight of the jobless in “Coal Country”, and the impending “5G Apocalypse”.
Mainstream media hasn’t brought attention to the fact that land surface temperatures in Siberia now exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit annually, threatening the stability of permafrost that stores significantly more carbon than is in the atmosphere. These are not facts that people should have to seek out, given what’s at stake. Twenty percent of all human deaths are caused by fossil fuel emissions. A press that serves the public would track corporate pollution in an effort to safeguard global health. The corporate press, which serves tycoons, tracks the stock market as a measure of “economic health”.
Citizens are also uninformed about inspiring environmental developments, such as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Increasingly severe extreme weather events continue to be treated as shocking anomalies in mainstream news, which blames “Humanity” for the overt climate crimes that mass media is an accessory to.Ecocide is not in “Human Nature”. Humans have lived on Earth for hundreds of millennia. Most of us have not fatally robbed or contaminated the planet. Corporations have. Anthropogenic climate change coincides with the ascent of industrial capitalism, which major media protects by maligning Humanity.
Q: But that’s because most people don’t care about climate change and capitalism. Mass media produces content that people want to consume.
A: Vice versa. Corporate media manufactures interests. Things that are marketed and attended to the most in mass media become culturally significant in virtue of the attention they receive. In other words, popular concern is socialized via media coverage. Nevertheless, most people are concerned with climate change, in one way or another, because they experience it.
In fact, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has found that more than 3/4 of US citizens are expressly interested in news stories pertaining to climate change. No matter, a minimally decent media would inform the masses about the state of the climate.
Q: Why does mainstream media ignore climate change if it really poses such a big risk?
A: Never mind the fact that climate change is the greatest known threat to civilization, even if corporate media in theory stood to profit from frequent and honest climate coverage, they couldn’t in reality for one simple reason. Climate change is caused by the very system of capital accumulation that sustains mainstream media companies.
Corporations disharmonize nature when they plunder ecosystems for nonrenewable resources, manufacture unnecessary products, ship them across the world unsustainably, and poison the biosphere with waste. This rapacious activity is executed at incomprehensible speeds and on devastating scales. Corporate capitalism thus affects climate change more than anything else.
Worthwhile analyses of climate change cannot ignore the history of capitalism, and workable solutions must advocate for the end of corporate capitalism as we know it. Therefore, major media companies need to dodge the issue by definition. They aren’t just choosing more lucrative stories to tell. There is no choice for them to make.
Mainstream news sources genuinely could not sustain serious reporting on the issue of climate change, because if they were honest they would connect climate change to capitalism and thereby alienate major advertisers and investors, which would risk revenue, hence the ability to disseminate information to the masses In other words, any news outlet that commits itself to adequate climate coverage consequently forfeits the resources it would need to be mainstream. Under present conditions, if climate change really threatened civilization – as a matter of fact it does – mass media could not inform us. Whether or not they would is a worthless question.
Q: If climate change threatens civilization, it poses a risk to the system of capitalism. Why would the corporate press underplay climate change if it endangered future accumulation?
Due to the principle that returns on investment are better made sooner rather than later, the owning class continues to discount the changing climate to the end of ensuring short-term profit. Crucially, corporations do not merely maximize shareholder wealth. They function explicitly to make stockholders as wealthy as possible, as fast as possible, ad infinitum.
According to the impossible logic of capitalism, corporations can go on making next-quarter profits forever, even if they come at the expense of deadly future losses. Business as usual presumes infinite growth on a finite planet. As already set forth, it is not the case that mainstream media downplays climate change by way of focusing on more engaging, and therefore more profitable, subject matter. To the contrary, the climate crisis presents a unique opportunity for awesome and sensational, thus bankable, story telling.
Instead, because capitalist accumulation causes climate change, by downplaying the issue mainstream sources avoid having to call into question the process that generates profit in the first place. In a word, mass media companies do not minimize climate change because they are too busy making short-term profit, but, much more fundamentally, they do so to protect from mass disapproval the whole enterprise of short-term profit making.
Q: What do we do?
A: Consume critically. Read. Study climate science. Explore social science (start with Native American history and graduate to Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift). Peruse not-for-profit publications at their intersect like Climate and Capitalism. Make a list of independent and alternative sources that consistently apply decent moral standards, maintain respectable historical records, and publish global perspectives, especially those that confront tyranny and champion the oppressed. Watch Koyaanisqatsi. Unlearn everything.
Then act. Mostly listen, but talk too. Spreading the word goes much further than people appreciate. Also ride a bike. Garden, share, resist, do what feels right. Another world is possible. Good luck.
Tyler Poisson is a public school teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts. He wrote this pamphlet for distribution in his community. We think other activists may find it useful: Click here to download a printable version (pdf) of the pamphlet.
by DGR News Service | Jul 21, 2021 | Climate Change
Editor’s note: I’m living in Germany quite close to the flooded areas. This summer we had the longest period of very heavy rainfall I ever experienced in my life. The heavy rain just wouldn’t stop for weeks and months.
I cannot repeat it often enough: We are in a state of acute global emergency. Instead of continuing to fantasize about the “Energiewende” and switching to “clean” energy, we have to act like in a state of emergency and stop burning any fossil fuels immediately. This is just the beginning of the age of climate catastrophe and it will become much worse if we don’t act.
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.
By JULIA CONLEY
“This is your climate on fossil fuel.”
Climate scientists on Friday were stunned by the intensity of flooding in Germany and Belgium that killed at least 120 people and damaged tens of thousands of homes, with experts saying they did not expect such extreme weather to result from the human-caused climate crisis as rapidly as it has.
More than a dozen records for rainfall were set across Western Europe, including in Cologne, where officials recorded six inches of rainfall in just 24 hours on Wednesday into Thursday morning—nearly double the monthly average for July. The city’s previous record for daily rainfall was only three inches.
“This week’s event is totally untypical for that region,” Dieter Gerten, professor of global change climatology and hydrology at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian.
Aerial footage of Ahrweiler in Rhineland Palatinate showed fallen trees, abandoned cars, and indundated roads.
According to the European Severe Weather Database, Reifferscheid saw more than eight inches of rainfall in just nine hours, leading to extreme flash flooding.
“We are still waiting for a definitive toll, but it could be that this flood becomes the most catastrophic our country has ever known.”
—Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo
On Thursday night, officials reported that as many as 1,300 people were still unaccounted for, noting that the high number could be related to power supplies and cell phone networks being disrupted and some areas being difficult for rescue crews to reach.
Gerten expressed shock at the severity of the disaster.
“We seem to be not just above normal but in domains we didn’t expect in terms of spatial extent and the speed it developed,” Gerten said.
Climate scientists have warned for years that the continued extraction of fossil fuels is causing numerous changes in the climate, including extreme heat, drought, and more frequent and heavy rain—which has been linked to the warming of oceans and increased amounts of water evaporating into the air.
“With climate change we do expect all hydro-meteorological extremes to become more extreme. What we have seen in Germany is broadly consistent with this trend,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, told The Guardian.
But as the BBC reported, scientists said Friday they “failed to predict the intensity of the German floods” as well as the extreme heat which enveloped the Western United States and Canada in recent weeks, killing hundreds of people.
“The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our stable climate simply confirms that—when it comes to the climate emergency—we are in deep, deep shit,” Bill McGuire, a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, told the BBC.
The effects of the torrential downpour stretched across Western Europe, with officials in Belgium saying Friday at least 23 people were confirmed dead and at least 19 were missing, and experts in the Netherlands and Switzerland expecting more inundation on Friday.
“We are still waiting for a definitive toll, but it could be that this flood becomes the most catastrophic our country has ever known,” said Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo on Friday.
On social media, progressive organizer Doyle Canning of Oregon, where temperatures reached 116 degrees earlier this month, responded to a video of flash flooding in one German city.
“This is your climate on fossil fuel,” said Canning as she reshared the footage.
The flooding came days after the European Union unveiled a plan to transition away from fossil fuels by 2030 as part of its plan to become carbon-neutral by 2050.
Armin Laschet, the governor of one of Germany’s hardest-hit states and a candidate to replace Angela Merkel as chancellor in the September elections, said the rising death toll and damage to communities across Germany demonstrated that “we need to continue Germany’s path toward climate neutrality even faster.”
![Life and Lithium at Thacker Pass [Dispatches from Thacker Pass]](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2021/07/2729591-840x675-1.jpg)
by DGR News Service | Jul 19, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling, Movement Building & Support, Obstruction & Occupation, Toxification
This episode of Muse Ecology is a terrific podcast with interviews with members of the People of Red Mountain, local community members, campers at Thacker Pass, and other supporters of Protect Thacker Pass.
In this episode in the Water, Life, Climate, and Civilization series, we hear diverse voices from the resistance to the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass in northern Nevada, on Paiute and Shoshone ancestral lands.
Listen here: https://museecology.com/2021/07/13/23-life-and-lithium-at-thacker-pass/
For more on the Protect Thacker Pass campaign
#ProtectThackerPass #NativeLivesMatter #NativeLandsMatter
by DGR News Service | Jul 18, 2021 | Building Alternatives, Climate Change, Education, Listening to the Land
Editor’s note: We believe that the UN are an elitist organization and more part of the problem than offering vital solutions. Ecological restoration however will become much more important in the near future, and learning from indigenous peoples and their ways to connect to their landbases may be our only chance of survival.
This article originally appeared in Resilience.
By Maceo Carrillo Martinet
“Today let’s start a new decade, one in which we finally make peace with nature and secure a better future for all” declared António Gutteres, the UN Secretary General, on June 5 during the virtual opening event of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. With environmental degradation already affecting almost half of humanity, and with every major scientific body declaring the next 10 years are critical to confront the climate crises, the urgency to restore the health of our landscapes has never been greater. Having worked professionally as an ecological restoration planner in my home state of New Mexico for 13 years, I sat eagerly at the edge of my seat to learn from my global community of practice.
We learned about restoration efforts around the world that involved massive community efforts, such as the million-tree initiative in Pakistan and the ambitious project called Green Wall of Africa. Touted as the “largest human-made living “structure” on earth”, this ecofriendly wall, we are told, will contain the sand dunes of the Sahara and support local livelihoods. Although containing the Sahara desert with any wall seems questionable, or that building another wall, even the green kind, seems like the last thing us humans need to do, at least there is a clear mandate that restoration has to collaborate with and support the local indigenous communities.
Several weeks after the UN event, on June 21st, Dr. Robin Kimmerer, the well-known Potawatomi restoration ecologist, gave a deeper perspective on this mandate to work with indigenous communities during the opening plenary talk of the 9th World Conference of the Society of Ecological Restoration: “This idea of mutual healing, of cultures and land, is the practice under the really big idea of how do we enact land justice. Justice for the more-than-human beings, justice for the people who are so often dispossessed from their homelands, to return people and their practices to the land as part of that sacred moral responsibility to care for the land.” The most challenging and crucial aspect of my own restoration work is reviving these cultural practices and relationships with the land.
The mentioning of ‘culture’, however, was surprisingly absent from the televised UN event. This glaring omission, however, became ridiculously blinding during the finale world premier music video by Ty Dolla and Don Diablo called “Too Much to Ask” tailored to appeal to the #generation restoration. None of what I am about to explain was provided to the viewer. The music video contained high-quality panoramic footage taken by drone showing hundreds of Maasai people in Kenya, spread out over hundreds of acres of barren red land, constructing half-moon shaped structures called bunds, about 15-feet long with shovels, hoes and lots of sweat. Thanks to this earth-shaping community work, which saved water and fertile top-soil from being washed away after a storm, the barren land became covered with vegetation. Importantly, this community bund-making event is one of many old cultural practices across Africa to harvest rainwater, promote plant growth, and take care of the land. While there was hardly a peep about cultural practices on the land, it was all over the music video! There is a tendency to describe restoration work as a ‘new relationship’ to nature, as based on a ‘very young’ science, but actually, it is a very old human relationship to the land, a very old community-based science, albeit maybe a forgotten one.
Stimulated by the climate crises, examples of this old land-human relationship are popping up everywhere. Just beneath the cloud-piercing mountains surrounding Lima, Peru, about a hundred communities are removing 500-years worth of mud and rock that have filled in a network of stone ditches constructed during the Incan civilization and abandoned after the arrival of the Spanish. This network of ditches, known as amuna in Quechua, are designed to harvest and store rainwater underground so that water is available during dry periods. Just reviving 10 miles of the amuna, a small sample of the existing infrastructure, the nearby communities are already seeing more water flowing out of their domestic wells regardless of the changing climate. Since reviving these ancient cultural infrastructures, more crops are planted and more families are able to maintain good hygiene during the pandemic.
Along the northwest coast of North America, from Alaska to Washington State, various researchers, academics, and resource managers have teamed up with Canada’s First Nations communities to learn how to sustainably grow clams using an old ocean gardening technique. These clam gardens, which First Nation communities have been building and managing for longer than five thousand years, involves constructing rock terraces along the shoreline when the ocean is at low-tide. Not surprisingly, a slew of scientific studies have proven that clam gardens work, with one study showing the growth of several clam species improved by 151% to 300%. In a time of plummeting fisheries and shellfish production worldwide, these clam gardens stick out as a shining star, shedding light on the importance of knowing history and culture when it comes to cultivating food from the ocean. Another amazing example of cultivating food along the edge of the ocean comes from Hawaii, where applying old indigenous land management practices at the He‘eia National Estuarine Research Reserve has recently shown to not only increase food for both people and animals, but has also brought back endangered shorebirds that even the oldest of elders have never seen before.
Then there is the example of indigenous fire, which has rightfully received lots of press lately. Indigenous fire, sometime called cultural fire, are some of the oldest land management practices common to almost every ethnic group on every continent. Yet only when faced with the threat of megafires these last couple of years do forest-managing agencies finally want to listen and learn from indigenous people. Every forest on earth vulnerable to catastrophic fire can trace its start date to when colonization dispossessed the original peoples from the land. “We are fortunate here”, says Marianne Ignace who has been reviving cultural fire practices on their traditional territory of the Secwepemc Nation in British Columbia, “that some of that [cultural fire] knowledge still exists in the older generations although it has been undermined and outlawed for over a hundred years.” These cultural fires have brought back important plants not seen since indigenous culture was outlawed. All this is taking place not far from where the remains of 215 children were recently found buried next to the old Kamloops Indian Residential School. The horrors and pain of genocide, and the beauty and resilience of culture, remind us how connected it all is: restoring justice, healing, and the land.
Another example comes from my home state of New Mexico. As hotter temperatures melt the mountain snow much earlier than before, the nourishing waters are passing by the farmlands before the farmer has even planted. Consequently, Federal land agencies are in discussions right now with local farming organizations to build micro-dams or mini-reservoirs in order to capture this water in the mountains for when the farming is ready. In turns out, this same idea and concept was practiced by New Mexico’s Pueblo communities for millennium. They built water harvesting structures and ancient gardens out of local rock and earth almost everywhere water could be collected, “inviting the rain to stay” as one scholar put it. Through people power, the Pueblo communities created wetlands in the desert, and even grew water-loving crops like cotton in places that today’s experts emphatically say would be impossible.
When you put these examples of cultural revival, land restoration, and community healing together, it shows us that restoration is not so much about “finally making peace with nature”, as it is about finally making peace with our cultural past. As my mentor would say we are living in a time when “all the old is new again”.
The global call to heal the earth’s wounds is a powerful moment of cultural recognition for everyone. As Dr. Kimmerer explained, every person is indigenous to some place, and every place is the homeland to someone. Especially for indigenous communities across the continents of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, whom for generations have been denied their rightful place at the table of humanity, it is a time of reconciliation and of pride, where their cultural practices are recognized as a means to heal a wounded earth and a wounded people. As the young poet, Jordan Sanchez, said during the UN conference, “resilience, we stand on our own two feet, I’ll tell you, reimagining the future has never tasted so sweet…The promise of restoration lives within us”. It does indeed.
