We all need to pitch in. "Now" is good; "yesterday" / decades ago would be lots better. If we all had been doing everything we could to live in harmony with our environment ("live green") for decades, now, we would not be facing annihilation from global warming now. Never doubt that we are.. Right now.
As the woman who Dances The Four Winds, it is my job to know this. This isn't 'superstition' or 'myth' or 'my personal perception' - it's something my bones know, right along with the rest of me.
There's a myth-conception, takoszja, that "one person's actions don't count". That's a lie. I don't know where it came from, but everybody's cultures have example of one person whose actions not only counted, they counted massively - and they still do. For that matter, there are such people alive today whose actions count, massively.
Historically, the majority culture has Joan of Arc. The English burned her as a heretic; the French got her canonized. 50 million Frenchmen "might" be wrong, but they weren't in her case.
There's Sitting Bull. He had a vision (which is different from a dream) in which he saw blue coat soldiers dying en mass, and sure enough, on June 26, 1876, they did. The majority culture calls it the Battle of the Little Big Horn. We call it the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Same river, just that the invaders have always insisted on renaming everything; it's part of their effort to destroy our ITI claim to Turtle Island.
There's the majority culture's Jesus Christ; we ITI have Crazy Horse, our Holy Mother the Earth and the Holy Woman Who brought us the Sacred Channunpa that is the center of Lakota spiritual Ways.
Islam has Mohammad; China has Confucius & Buddha.
On the down side, there's Hitler and Mussolini and Pol Pot; Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer and a host of serial killers. Each of them - good or bad - "just one person" - whose actions had a huge effect on large numbers of people.
If there's no one else, there is your mother and father and one or more teachers, aunties, and uncles.
Dr. Stephen Chu, Nobel Laureate of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has said in speeches that "...global warming is so much worse, and so much bigger a threat to continuation of life on the earth as we know it, than has been published in the media, that every engineer should be working on this problem right now. There is no time to waste."
What can you do? Use cloth shopping bags rather than getting plastic. Find uses for those bags instead of justing putting them in the trash and the landfill. Keep your tires properly inflated and your car's ignition system working properly. Drive diesel instead of gasoline.
It takes less petroleum to 'crack' diesel out of crude than it does to 'crack' gasoline and diesel engines give better mileage than gasoline engines. Otto Diesel designed his engine to run on peanut oil, and while modern diesel engines are more complex than the original, they are also easier to convert to "grease mobiles" and biodiesel than modern gasoline engines are.
Use a solar clothes dryer (a clothesline) whenever possible, rather than a dryer. Be environmentally conscious when you buy clothes.
Think. Think for yourself, and think ahead. Keep in mind the ancient saying of my People, which has come into considerable use of recent years - mitakuye oiasin. It means, "All, my relatives". My language doesn't have words like "are", but you can substitute the word 'are' for the comma. This saying is both a blessing and a reminder of where we Two-Leggeds "really" stand in the Grand Scheme of Things.
Up in New England, there's an old saying that makes excellent sense if we are to stop global warming - "Use it up, wear it out, reuse it, or do without". "Americans" consume entirely too much 'new' when they could recycle. This is a relatively recent development - within my lifetime, I know.
Encourage people to have fewer children. Human beings are not sacred, nor are we the most important life form on the planet. We Two-Leggeds are simply the species with the most capacity to make permanent changes in our environment. As we are seeing, these changes are not always good.
In the case of global warming, it will not be only species the majority culture calls 'lesser' that will go extinct. It will definitely include us Two-Leggeds; us humans. Which, if you think about it, is only fair, since we -especially of the majority western culture - are the ones who made it happen. What's sauce for the goose is still sauce for the gander, after all.
Remember the old story of Everybody, Somebody and Nobody? Everybody thought Somebody would take care of the problem, so Nobody did, and nothing got done to solve or prevent the problem. Everyone is part of that - You are either part of the solution, or part of the problem. There is no middle ground or fence to ride in this. And we are essentially at the eleventh hour. What you do - or don't do - does count. Mitakuye oiasin.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment