Category Archives: Affinity

Opinions about a new attitude to nature i.e. the idea that all of life on the planet is connected

Train Dreams

Affinity, Movies, Philosophy/Ideas

 

There is another film that won my whole-hearted support this year.  It has not been in the news, but it should have been. It was not flashy, but it was truly meditative. It makes you think. I know not many people are interested in that these days, but I am.

There is a very interesting statement at the beginning of the film:

“There were once passageways to the old world, strange trails, hidden paths. You’d turn a corner and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with great mystery, the foundation of all things. And even though that old world is gone now, even though it’s been rolled up like a scroll and put somewhere, you can still feel the echo of it.”

 

There was a pair of old worn boots nailed into a tree with moss growing over them. Then you look up at an old tree, you can see it slowly falling down. That is the old world and it’s falling down.

 

Robert Grainier, the protagonist, who lived more than 80 years. He went west from Idaho to a place near the ocean, but never bothered to see the ocean. He didn’t need to see it. Why would he? He had lost his parents but he never how or why. No one ever told him. His connections were gone. One of his first memories is seeing the mass deportation of 100 or more Chinese families from town. Why was that necessary? No one has a good answer for that, just like none will have an answer for the current mass deportations either.  The narrator, who seems like the voice of God in this film, says, “Grainer was baffled by the casualness of the violence.” So am I. I know many people like it. I remember when I watched the 2020 Republican National Convention when people cheered with glee as Trump promised to bring about “mass deportation.” They loved it.

 

Graineir’s life was meaningless, until he fell in love with Gladys. Until then his life had little meaning. Suddenly it had some.  She told him, “She told him, “Right now I could just about understand everything there is.” Now that is meaning! The meaning of life. “All of a sudden, life made sense to Grainier, as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around and headed down stream.”

 

He got a job working for a railway crew and wished he’d never done that. He saw a young Chinese man inexplicably pulled from his crew and tossed off a bridge into a deep ravine to his death. No one knew what he had done to deserve that.

 

The men built a bridge across a river and were told they had done something amazing.  But 10 years later a new and better bridge was built 10 miles away that rendered their bridge obsolete.  Amazing doesn’t last long. The old bridge was abandoned. Like old things often are.

 

As soon as Robert started to know he was back at home, it was logging season and time to leave again. “His work was populated with itinerant men. Most without homes, without families. They moved from job to job, state to state, as the work dictated.” Unconnected. Not rooted to the ground like old trees. “He once worked alongside a man for 2 months without saying a single word.” Trees talk more than that.  Someone asked the man if he had ever been to California and he just asked, “Is there no place where a man can get some peace?” And then he got up and moved. Those were the only words he ever heard the man speak.  Now that man was alienated. He had no connection with other men other than the work.  Words were no connection for him. He liked being unconnected.

 

One man lived in a hole in a big tree. Another faller, Apostle Frank, worked with Robert and kept talking continuously of God. And he spoke about the Bible as if he had been there when it was written down. Nice to have such certainty. As he told Robert, “Sometimes God has to find strange ways to tell you what you need to hear. Sometimes it’s a donkey talking to you.”

 

A logger, Arn, who came to blow up trees sang a song at night: “If the Lord was a redwood would you try to cut Him down? Or climb up His loving branches and look around?”

Robert asked Arn, “do you think bad things that you do follow you through life?”  Arn replied, “I don’t know, I’ve seen bad men raised up and good men brought to their knees. If figure that I could figure it out, I’d be a lot better-looking than you.” He did not feel connected to past mistakes.

The narrator said, “Grainier worried more and more that something terrible was following him, that death would find him out here, far away from the only place he really wanted to be.” That was his family. He was still connected but remotely.

When he got home and saw his daughter every time she seemed like a different person and he felt like he was missing his whole life. Which of course was true.

Even though money was tight, when he was home he later realized it was the happiest time of his life. Robert and Gladys just wanted to spend more time together with their daughter Katie.

Arn knew the work as hard. “That’ because it’s rough work, gentlemen, not just on the body but on the soul. We just cut down trees that have been here for 500 years. It upsets a man’s soul whether you recognize it or not.”  I agree. Lots of jobs are like that. Soul-destroying work.  Another logger said he would have $200 in his pocket after the work was done and that would not bother his soul. Who was right?

 

Arn said,  echoing John Muir, “This world is intricately stitched together. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. We’re but children on this earth, pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel, thinking ourselves to be gods.”

 

Another logger said there were “enough logs to cut for a thousand years. And when the last ones cut, well the first one will be growed up as big as anything around today. Arn said he thought the same thing when he was young. Arn said, “My family is everywhere there is a smiling face. Never been somewhere I didn’t have some family there. Except for Kansas.  That state is filled with savage lunatics.” Unfortunately, much of the modern world is filled with savage lunatics, not just Kansas. They are all around.

 

One day a large of a tree hit him in the head and he was not the same. Somedays he could not remember his name. Yet, Arn  looked around and said, “It’s beautiful aint it?”  “What part?” asked Robert. “All of it, “ he said. “Every bit of it.”

 

Another day he was no longer a logger.  “The last few years he expected some great revelation about his life would descend upon him. But as of yet, none had. And he was beginning to doubt that one ever would.” He met a young lady, Claire, who said others had told her he was different.  Robert asked, “Ain’t everybody different?”  “No”, he said. She said, “It’s good to be different.”  I agree, but it’s OK if you’re not. She loved the valley because it carved out all the mountains. alleys. It’s where all the lakes come from. Referring to the time when massive gushes of water from melting glaciers cut deep into mountains and prairies alike, she said, “It must have felt like the world was coming to an end.” Yup, I think. Then she asked, “That’s where did all those myths come from, you know?  All those flood stories. All those different religions all over the world. It’s just the same story. Different slants…I don’t mean to be disrespectful about anything you believe in. The world’s an old place. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now.” They are all connected.

 

Robert told Claire how his wife and baby did not make it through the fire. He tells her, “Sometimes it just feels like the sadness is going to eat you alive.” She has a similar story. She lost her husband a year ago.

 

Claire tells him:

 

 “…And when it was over, it was like there was a hole in the world…I had more questions than answers…When you go through something like that, nothing you do is crazy…In the forest every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins, if you really look at it. The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river. The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that.”

 

Robert asks her, “What if you haven’t got anymore to give?” Claire replies, “The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”

 

One day he went to the big city and “wandered the city without much direction or purpose, as if looking for something he had misplaced a long time ago.”  Meandering. Then he went to a theatre of mysteries. They advertised that there would be “Sun Tzu, the holy man, will read your dreams.” Are those train dreams? The shill said, “pay you a dime to see a monster…Inside this theatre the mysteries of the world flit about like bats and insects. Here, all the answers to everything.” That’s a pretty big promise. The monster was only a boy in a costume. A puny monster. It made him cry. He saw his face in a mirror for the first time in a decade and could see the toll the years had taken. He felt that he was only just beginning to have some faint understanding of his life, even though it was now slipping away from him.

 

For $4 he got an airplane ride “to see the world as only the birds see it.’

He died in 1968.  As the narrator said,

 

“His life ended as quietly as it had begun. He’d never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He had no idea who his parents had might have been, and he left no heirs behind him. But on that spring day as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt at last connected to it all.”

He really was face to face with a mystery.

This is quiet film. Too quiet for most viewers who prefer loud action and computer generated mayhem. Too quiet to win the Academy award, but I like quiet films, that make you ponder. My kind of film.

 

Inukshuk

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Affinity, art, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

 

At Dixie Lake, not far past Kenora I stopped the car at a rest stop and strolled in the south side of the highway about a ¼ km along the highway shoulder. I noticed a proudly installed Inukshuk on the north side of the highway at the top of a granite wall created by blasting the top part to of the Canadian Shield.  For generations young boys and other miscreants have been painting information no one is interested in, onto the rocks beside the road. Things like their initials and the initials of their current girlfriends. They used to mar the countryside. Lately, government employees diligently try to paint over these markings as soon as possible. And they do a pretty good job.  Frankly, I consider the messages a desecration. Rarely do we see the graffiti anymore.

 

Building an Inukshut is an entirely other matter. I appreciate everyone of them I see. These I think honour the history of Canada and the places in which they are found. They are respectful. They don’t mar the countryside like painted initials.

But I like them for another reason. A more philosophical reason.

The word “inukshuk” means “in the likeness of a human.” For generations, Inuit have been creating these impressive stone markers on the immense Arctic and sub-Arctic landscapes of Canada to show others where they have been and sometimes to let others know where emergency food can be found. Inukshuks really serve more than one function. They are used to guide fellow travellers sort of like a modern GPS is used. Some warn strangers of dangers. Some help assisting hunters and other to mark sacred places.

Sometimes they show how the people are part of the land and the land is part of the people. Even rocks. After all, as Carl Sagan said, “we are all stardust.”

Humans were created out of the dust of ancient stars. Whenever I think of life that way I am in awe. Imagine that each one of us is created by dust sent into the atmosphere by the big bang billions of years ago.

Inukshuts are really just piles of rocks. Nothing more. But they are places where people show reverence to nature.   They show us how we are all connected. I consider them holy messages. The opposite of desecrations. They are spiritual manifestations created by artists to suggest those connections that are the essence of religion.

Chief Seattle: An Old Attitude to nature can provide a New Attitude to Nature

Affinity, expansive religion, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature, Philosophy/Ideas, religion

 

A few years ago, in New Zealand I purchased a poster containing the complete text of the response by Chief Seattle to the President of United States to his offer to purchase land from his tribe, which I posted about yesterday.  I had only read part of it before.  It was one of the most eloquent statements I have ever heard about a genuine approach to nature that was, to some extent, the position of  many North American indigenous people.  It was radically different from the approach of the arriving Europeans.

I recognize that there is controversy over the extent to which this version or any other version accurately records what Chief Seattle said to the President, but I believe the general tenor of the letter records a profound philosophy which I am content to ascribe to Chief Seattle as I don’t know who better deserves the credit for it. I certainly think the thoughts deserve our attention.

The renowned English philosopher A. N. Whitehead once said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” I think the same things can be said about Chief Seattle. At least as far as environmental philosophy goes. And to think I learned absolutely nothing of it in 4 years of university studying philosophy, proving how deficient my education was at that time, nearly 50 years ago.

Chief Seattle was a Suquamish and Duwamish chief in what we now call western North America. The city of Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington, was named after him.

As Chief Seattle said,

 

“We are part of the earth and it is part of us.

The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers.

The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man—all belong to the same family.”

 

Another way of saying is to say we are all kin. All people and all creatures of the natural world are kin. This basic premise has profound philosophical consequences. For if we recognize that we are all kin we ought to treat each other, and other creatures too, with respect.  I will get to Darwin later, for he gave the scientific basis for this view. I cherish the idea that indigenous philosophy and western science are deeply interwoven. Realizing that also has profound consequences.

To many of the First Nations of North America, they saw themselves as a part of their world.  Their philosophies vary from tribe to tribe, but a common thread, is the recognition that the Earth is our Mother and we are all together. We are all connected. We are all part of Mother Earth. Earth is not separate and apart from us. We are woven together.  This is profound fellow feeling. This philosophy recognizes that what we do to nature we do to ourselves. That is what I call affinity.

 

This idea also has profound significance in the history of religious thought.  The Indo-European word “religio” , which is the root of the word religion, means “linkage” or “connection” and is in my view the basis of all major religions. In fact, it is the core of all religions. More on this later.

I never learned any indigenous philosophy while I pursued a 4 year Honours Arts program in philosophy and English literature. I never even heard of indigenous philosophy. I did not even think such a thing was possible.

This philosophy echoes or even sums up much of what I have learned over the years, starting with German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world.  Only Chief Seattle was much more clear and easier to understand, without being any less profound than Martin Heidegger.  The natives of North America often felt a deep connection to the land.  They felt that they were a part of it.  To the Europeans on the other hand, nature was a resource ready to be exploited.  And from these two disparate attitudes springs much that is wrong with western society.

This is an old attitude to nature, which I am proposing as a new attitude to nature. It owuld be a worthy replacement for the old western attitude,.

Chief Seattle’s statement is a stunning statement about humans and nature, and all the more amazing because a “savage” (as he was wrongly called made it in 1854. Who was the savage?

 

Why do we need a New Attitude to Nature?

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Affinity, New Attitude to Nature, Orchids of Manitoba, Pollution, Wild Flowers, Wild flowers of Manitoba

This is a photograph of one of Manitoba’s lovely little orchids that are blooming right now. I am a wild flower guy. I hate what is happening to flowering plants, and other plants, around the world!

Some people don’t–no make that most people–don’t think we need a new attitude to nature. They are content with the current attitude to nature that is deeply embedded in western thought. Fundamentally, this is the attitude that we humans are not part of nature.  According to the conventional wisdom, we are separate from nature and in fact superior to it, so that we can do with nature as we please. Nature is just a resource. When Europeans arrived in New World, as they called, even though there was nothing new about, they brought this attitude with.  That is a pity because the indigenous people had an entirely different attitude which I will comment on soon.

This is the western attitude to nature in a nutshell which has been with us for millennia and is supported by Christian scripture, though fortunately, some modern Christians are trying with heroic efforts to turn that ship around. I wish them luck.

There is some very recent history to support my contention that current attitudes have got us in big trouble. Recent studies have shown that pollution caused by humans is killing 9 million people a year around the world.

The recent study is based on data from the Global Burden of Disease Project.  That study found that air pollution caused 75% of those deaths. That means that air pollution is responsible for 1 in 6 deaths around the world!

 

The study was published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health and it said that toxic air and contaminated water and soil “is an existential threat to human health and planetary health.” According to the Guardian Weekly review of that research, “The death total dwarfs that from road traffic deaths, HIV/Aids, malaria, and TB combined!”

Of course, pollution is produced by humans the greatest serial killer on the planet. Humans produce it because they don’t care about nature.

Another recent study has shown that 80,000 plant species world-wide are currently categorized as “heading for extinction because people do not need them!” Many of these are flowers which as a flower child I lament of course, with special feeling.

And for those who don’t care about wild flowers or even nature, but care about money, and that includes a lot of people, here are the economics: “The researchers calculated the economic impact of pollution deaths at $4.7 tn., about $9m a minute.”

That should get their attention.

And in a nutshell, that is one reason why we need a new attitude to nature. But there are many.

We arm the Reasonable

2022 Inferior Trip to Superior, Affinity, Indigenous People After Contact, New Attitude to Nature

 

in the documentary film Spirt to Soar, Tanya Talaga’s mother asked her to stop at a place where she had lived. It was devastating to see the clear cut there. The loss of forest was visceral.

Jody Porter spent a lot of time in Thunder Bay. She knew it intimately. She knew its secrets. Even the dirty ones.  She described it there as follows:

 

“We don’t know how to put into context what we are doing here. And again if you want to talk about how Thunder Bay is unique it’s because we are at the raw edge of that existential angst of what it is to be a Canadian. When your presence is deadly to the people whose land you live on.”

 Tanya Talaga drove by the same place I drove by on my home from Thunder Bay, namely, the place where the watersheds split. Some water flows north from their to the Arctic ocean. Other waterways flow south to the Great Lakes from where it flows to the cities of North  America and ultimately to the Atlantic ocean. Talaga said, “the water makes a choice.”

Talaga went on a trip into the forest organized by the elders. The purpose was to take the youth on a hunting trip. And to learn about the land. Talaga said, “I didn’t realize why I was going back to the land. that took me a long time and all the pieces of my life came into focus…I began to understand my deep feelings of dispossession, of the pain of separation from the land, and what it means to reclaim and what it means to belong.”  Non-indigenous people often do not understand the deep attachment indigenous people feel to the land and how it pains them to see it desecrated.

 

Jody Porter said this:

“We need to sit with who we are and what we’ve done here. And in that space there could be room to flip that narrative. To hear stories and to tell stories that belong here. And are from people who belong here. And tell us a story of what’s possible. The kinds of relationships that would make us all healthy.”

 

Senator Murray Sinclair said this,

“My success would be on whether I can be the best human I can be based on my teachings. That’s my success and that will be our successes as well, because if we try to create structures today that are simply copies of what Canada’s governing structures are, then we will fail.”

 

Talaga also said the 7 fallen feathers–the 7 indigenous youth who lost their lives:

 “they are now part of us. They are part of the land. And the water. And our existence. They are part of creation. We need to listen to the voices of our ancestors to tell us which way to turn, which way to flow with river. By telling our stories, the stories of who we are, how we live and how we die, we arm the reasonable. Once our voices are heard, once our truths are spoken, Canada you can’t say you didn’t know. You can no longer look away.  You see all my relations. We have fought to overcome the realities of our past and now we must turn to the possibilities of our future. We were always here. We are not going anywhere. This is where we belong.”

 

That is what it means to live on Turtle Island–together. Where we are one.

Superiority and Race

Affinity, Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, ,

 

People of European descent have long had a grossly exaggerated sense of their own superiority to indigenous people around the world. After all weren’t they politically and technologically dominant around the world? They must be superior. What other explanation could there be? This is part of what I have called the Original Sin.

From that robust sense of superiority sprang the notion that they must have sprung from a superior race.  Even though that notion has been intellectually discredited, this feeling of superiority runs deep. It is easily sublimated when under siege, but invariably bobs up somewhere else.

At one time such notions were convenient. For example, they were used to justify first the destruction of native societies and then slavery and later more subtle forms of dominance over other races. That allowed Europeans to prosper unimaginably from an economic perspective.  It also allowed them to sleep at night, or perhaps, put their conscience to sleep.

It is difficult for us to comprehend objections to what is to our advantage. That is why slavery and  racial bias were so difficult to defeat.  These were convenient biases. Bias has in fact not been defeated in centuries of trying.

Yet this entire feeling of being a superior race is a feeling built on sand. There is no secure foundation for it at all.  Partly because the entire notion of race itself has been discredited. As Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis said in his book The Wayfinders, “science in fact suggests an end to race, when it reveals beyond any reasonable doubt that race is a fiction.” Of course racism is not a fiction!

Science has clearly demonstrated:

“The genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum.From Ireland to Japan, from the Amazon to Siberia, there are sharp genetic differences among populations. There are only geographical gradients. The most remote society on earth contains within its people fully 85 percent of our total genetic diversity. Were the rest of society to be swept away by plague or war, the Waroni or the Barasana, the Rendille or the Tuareg would have within their blood the genetic endowment of all of humanity. Like a sacred repository of spirit and mind, any of these cultures, any one of these 7,000 would provide the sees from which humanity in all its diversity might be reborn.

What all of this means is that biologists and population geneticists have at last proved to be true something that philosophers have always dreamed: We are all literally brothers and sisters. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth.”

This of course is a recurring theme in my blog. I come back to it over and over again. We are connected. None of this should come as surprise to anyone. After all, we are all descendants of a small group of humans, perhaps as small as 150 people, that migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago and proceeded to colonize the world. And guess what, those people were likely dark skinned! I remember when we were in Africa a few years ago in what was called “the Cradle of Humanity,” when I mentioned this fact to an evangelical Christian in our group, he was obviously disturbed by that possibility. Why should that be?

The consequence of this is, as Davis said,  “all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth—a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia—is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities.”

After all how can one say the people of the west who created a great technological society are superior to the indigenous people of North America who learned to flourish and not just live in North America where the Europeans who arrived on contact would have starved or frozen to death? Who can say Europeans are superior to the people of the Amazon rainforest who have learned to live with robust knowledge and experience amidst the natural splendors of their homeland? In particular, when modern industrial society, of which the West is inordinately so proud, has led to the destruction of about half of life on the planet, does it even resemble sense to hold the western ways superior?

Davis got it profoundly right when he said,

“There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the civilized, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited—indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial conceit that it was.  The brilliance of scientific research and the revelation of modern genetics have affirmed in an astonishing way the essential connectedness of humanity. We share a sacred endowment, a common history written in our bones. It follows, … that the myriad of cultures of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us.  They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?  When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7,000 different voices, and these collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species over the next 2,5000 generations, even as we continue this never-ending journey.” And we need that entire repertoire.

The ignorance of western cultures mired in the excrement of  feelings of superiority is magisterial in its colossal stupidity. There really is no ignorance like it–anywhere any time.

 

E pluribus unum

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Affinity, civilization, Television Shows, The Commons, World of ideas

 

 

Ken Burns has produced some magnificent television documentaries for Public Broadcasting in the US. Burns likes the traditional Latin motto of the United States E pluribus unum, which means  “Out of many, one.” I like it too.  It appears on the Great Seal of the United Sates. Arthur Schlesinger complained that the United States suffered from too much pluralism and not enough one. It was adopted in 1782 but since then another motto has been more popular: “In God we Trust.”  I don’t like that one quite as much. In 1956 Congress adopted it as the official motto of the country. What ever happened to separation of church and state?

Ken Burns said that too often we think we connected and we are actually disconnected from each other. There are no more town greens. PBS is part of the commons. It is part of the public square. Burns says it is one place where we can have rational discourse in difficult times when the tapestry of the commons is frayed. Times like these. I think that is a pretty good motto.

David Suzuki and the Indigenous Attitude to Nature

Affinity, Climate change, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, Nature, New Attitude to Nature

At the University of Winnipeg talk after showing the film Beyond Climate, Suzuki also discussed a new attitude to nature. He  began by talking about the American economy.

After World War II and the end of the Great Depression, America President Franklin Roosevelt realized that the war economy had saved capitalism from self-destruction. But a war economy carries with it enormous unpalatable costs far beyond mere economic costs. He realized that what it needs is consumption. Constant relentless consumption. That was his solution.

Of course what the United States has actually done is to maintain both a consumer economy and war economy. The U.S. spends as much on the military as the 9 countries that are next in line, spend combined.

Suzuki thought we needed a better way. Climate change was just one of the things such an attitude had ushered in. He said  he had learned a lot from indigenous people. In fact he said, “Indigenous people have taught me all I know.” This was important because much of the film dealt with the opposition of First Nations to the plans of Alberta and the Canadian government to build pipelines from the Oil Sands of Alberta to transport liquefied natural gas (LNG) or oil or bitumen to the coast of British Columbia. Alberta was upset that the federal government could not ram through the pipeline approval process. Of course that is just not feasible. Those days are done. The Supreme Court won’t put up with it.

In the late 1970s Suzuki realized that we needed a new attitude to nature. And he found it. He found it in the 1980s when he went to interview indigenous people at Haida Gwaii. He wanted to talk to them about the protests by indigenous people over logging on their land. He talked to forest company executives, environmentalists, politicians, and, most importantly Haida. That was how he met Guujaaw a young artist who was leading the Haida opposition to the logging.

Suzuki wondered why the Haida were so vehemently opposed to logging since many of their own people got jobs with  logging companies. And many of them badly needed jobs. Suzuki asked him, “What would happen if the trees were cut down?”  His reply was profound, but Suzuki did not realize at first how profound. Guujaaw said, “Then we’ll be like everyone else, I guess.”

A few days later Suzuki thought about that answer and it “opened a window on a radically different way of seeing the world.” As we keep getting reports from the World Wildlife Fund and others about the incredible impact humans are having on the world, I think a new attitude to nature is exactly what we badly need. Suzuki explained it this way,

“Guujaaw and the Haida do not see themselves as ending at their skin or fingertips. Of course they would still be around physically if the trees were all gone, but a part of what it is to be Haida would be lost.  The trees, fish, birds, air, water, and rocks are all part of who the Haida are. The land and everything on it embody their history, their culture, the very reasons why Haida are on this earth. Sever that connection and they become ‘like everybody else.”

Indigenous people around the world have similar attitudes. They  are based on a deep attachment to the land they occupy. They are connected to that environment. It is part of who they are. Suzuki like other people from the west had a different attitude to nature and that has made all the difference. To the Haida, and other indigenous people, and as Suzuki concluded,

 

“…there is no environment ‘out there,’ separate and apart from us; I came to realize that we are the environment. Leading science corroborates this ancient understanding that whatever we do to the environment or to anything else, we do directly to ourselves.The ‘environmental’ crisis is a ‘human’ crisis; we are at the centre of it as both the cause the victims.”

 Suzuki realized he had found the new perspective he needed. It allowed him to see the world through different eyes.  He realized, as the Haida had before him, that what we needed to survive and thrive was not more money in order to live rich and healthy lives. This new attitude to nature was reflected in all the Haida did and found its fruits in how they wanted to interact with the land. As Suzuki said, “Rather than being separate and apart from the rest of nature, we are deeply embedded in and utterly dependent on the generosity of the biosphere.” I use the word “affinity” to describe this new attitude to nature. I will comment on again in these blogs.

It is this attitude that Albertans don’t understand. It is not just a matter of paying the Indigenous people money. They want jobs, they want money, but not at any cost. They don’t want it at the cost of their identity. That is why some of the indigenous people, but not all of them, do not want pipelines on their land and will sacrifice the jobs if necessary. I know that seems bizarre to Albertans and most Canadians for that matter. Alberta and Canada have to learn to respect that. Only then will they be able to successfully deal with Canada’s first nations.  And perhaps Canada will learn something valuable in the process. Perhaps there is something of value in that new attitude to nature.