view of a heretic

Indigenous people can offer climate change solutions: IUCN …by Staff Writers…Geneva (AFP) March 14, 2008
Honduras' Quezungal farmers have an age-old trick to protect their crops from hurricanes -- planting them under trees whose roots would anchor the soil, thereby holding the crops steady. Not just these farmers, but many indigenous people around the world are sitting on a treasure trove of traditional knowledge that could be mined as the world seeks adaptation strategies to deal with climate change, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said on Monday.

"Indigenous people have a lot of techniques to adapting to climate change that we can learn from," the group's chief scientist Jeffrey McNeely told journalists in Geneva. These are strategies including crop diversification in order to minimise the risk of harvest failure, or change in food storage methods including drying or smoking foods according to climate variability.

While indigenous peoples inhabiting our earth possess a treasure trove of traditional knowledge that could be honestly and equitably mined as our world seeks adaption strategies to deal with a host of issues, the unanswered question, is are “we” – that’s you and me – given our contemporary America hubris, willing or able to hear them . . . ?

American hubris is sanctioned and given elevated status in our continued adherence to the reputed infallibility of “science,” all the while dismissing that much of what passes for science, is in reality nothing more than corporate purchased advertising.

How then might “we” legitimately be expected to see and hear “value” in the utterances of these “third-world” indigenous people whose way of life is so vastly at odds with our homogenized culture…? Certainly the benefits of our “science” are immensely superior to their ancient primitive food gathering and agricultural skills…?

Look…! Corporations have given us, through the use of their proprietary seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides the capacity to grow humungous crops of “generically modified” foods for your eating enjoyment. That this form of agriculture is “unsustainable” is summarily dismissed from discussion and anyone choosing to voice such an opinion or evaluation is quickly labeled a heretic.

How then can “we” be expected to see or hear any truth of value from words spoken by these primitives…?
In those quiet moments when “we” permit ourselves to hear our own “whisper voice” doubts fade and truth is revealed. Truth is, “we” are all interconnected … no man is an island unto himself …