Telling the Stories of Consumer Products

“We have to remember our source of nourishment. Or we will starve.”
Elizabeth Woody, Warm Springs Indian Reservation (A Song to the Creator)
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In spite of Elizabeth Woody’s warning, modern consumer society is geared to making us forget the natural sources of our nourishment.  Supermarket stacks of saran-wrapped hamburger packages disguise entirely their resemblance to their natural [...]

“When the Soldiers Come, the People Leave”: Life Under Israeli Occupation

“There is a Palestinian saying that all the politicians should be sent to the moon so that they can look back and see that we all live on one world”– a Palestinian-American teacher at BirZeit.
During the recent US election, Canadian Sabina Lautensach observed in her editorial in the Journal of Human Security that those [...]

Legal Rights for Nature

“We talk about the state sovereignty and the tribal sovereignty, but those ant communities under the big fir trees are sovereign too.. some nights you can’t see the stars at all [because of city lights]. That’s wrong.  Those stars are sovereign. They have a right to be seen”.
Billy Frank, Jr., in Messages from Frank’s Landing
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In [...]

Mixing Discovery and Conquest: A Recipe for Destruction

The worldview that links discovery with conquest has caused considerable social and environmental harm.   This attitude has deep roots in Western history.  Julius Caesar’s famous motto Veni, Vidi, Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered), featured on some  modern t-shirts, couldn’t be more clear on this point.  Discovery is a prelude to conquest.
Caesar himself didn’t [...]

Thomas Berry 1914-2009

On the occasion of the death of Catholic priest and theologian (or “geologian”, as he preferred to call himself) Thomas Berry at age 94, I would like to reflect upon his model of a morality centered in the earthly community of life.
Thomas Berry’s philosophy was strikingly immanent and earth-centered.  In his seminal Dream of the [...]

A Dangerous Reverence: Destroying What We Love

In Crossing the Next Meridian, Land, Water and the Future of the West, Charles Wilkinson notes two ideologies that resulted in the destruction of the salmon runs that once yielded 42 million pounds annually on the Columbia River alone.
The first is the sense of dominance that saw the land only as a resource for human [...]

On Knowing What You Want

What I’d like for Mother’s Day is for our children to get what they want. But first they have to know what that is.
And that isn’t an easy determination for any of us in the modern age–and especially for women. According to the authors of the Mother-Daughter Revolution, girls in our society start out with [...]

The Dangers of Pricing the Priceless

Land was something priceless–something that could not be bought or sold at any price– in the worldview of the traditional peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
The local peoples gathered at the treaty proceedings at Cosmopolis on the Olympic Peninsula expressed the utmost frustration in their negotiations with Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens on this point. They [...]

How can you not plant a rose in wartime?

“They always put social experiments in the easiest, most fertile places.  We wanted the hardest place.  We figured if we could do it here, we could do it anywhere.”
– Paolo Lugari (Gaviotas)
Some forty years ago, Paolo Lugari and a group of supporters founded the community of Gaviotas on the llanos-an aluminum-laced plain in Colombia situated [...]

Countering NIMBY with the story of a child in front of a tank: Seven generations and seven continents

Imagine the world we would live in (and what our children could look forward to) if we all held to the standard proposed by my student, Rachel Brinker, who recently wrote:
“Consider the effect of your actions on not only yourself, but your children, seven generations from now. I would like to base a paradigm shift [...]

Notes from the new generation on Inaugural Day

It seems appropriate that the post I wrote on Election Day ( “note to the next generation”) be followed up by a post written by Kelly McGuire, who is part of that new generation, on Inaugural Day:
Here are the eloquent words of my student, Kelly McGuire:
When you (the generation of Woodstock and the Viet Nam [...]

Caring and the “Fore-caring” of Precaution: Watching over the Commons

One day when I visited a Chehalis grandmother that I sat and spoke with many times, she called my attention to the prairie in front of her house. She loved that prairie which brought her the smell of wild strawberries in June and remembered images of her ancestors with their slender digging sticks prying camas [...]

Gaza invasion: ensuring Israel’s insecurity. There are alternatives

January 22 update.

Temporary ceasefire in Gaza.
Now there is a chance for the US as mediator to help broker in a fair peace in this area, but only if the media tells the truth and US government representatives know it.  When I lived under the Occupation, I was subject to the pressure of the Occupation to [...]

Partnering with the Natural World

In 1927 Chehalis elder Mary Heck testified on behalf of her people before the U.S. Court of Claims. She spoke in Chehalis, enumerating the things a non-Indian court might count in terms of value.
She listed the houses that had been destroyed by pioneers who wanted the cleared land on which they stood. She told how [...]

What makes a hero? Letter to the Israeli Defense Minister

What Makes a Hero?  A Letter to Israel’s Minister of Defense
To Mr. Ehud Barak:
You should be proud indeed that you have young people such as the Shminitism to secure the future of Israel. These young men and women poised on the edge of adulthood have the uncanny ability to discern and destroy the enemy, even [...]