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 [...]

The Dandelion Wars: The Costs of Lawn Cosmetics

“The earth wants peace.  The birds who eat the corn do not want poison…The wind does not want to carry the stories of death.”
–Linda Hogan, Dwellings
In many home improvement stores this spring, the first thing you will come upon is a display indicating that humans are engaged in a war against weeds and insects—a war [...]

How to Love a River

Lower Chehalis elder Henry Cultee obtained his own long life from sharing it with the river his people named themselves for. Hum-m-m-ptulips, that river was, its name humming along on the tongue the way its rifles hummed along, so that it cleaned itself out in three days after a rain.
His elders had taught him to [...]

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 [...]

Misusing Darwin: How a limited view of “Survival of the Fittest” Makes us Unfit for Survival

The competitive notion of “survival of the fittest” keeps us from understanding evolution and society–and acting accordingly.  The latter, also known as social Darwinism-and touted as Manifest Destiny in US pioneer history, asserts that societies on the side of “progress” are  destined to overcome and replace others as a matter of natural (or divine) law. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Belonging to the Land: Some Historical Perspective

“We immigrants who call ourselves ‘natives’ after one paltry generation on the land, can scarcely fathom what it means to the Indian to walk on a land in which a hundred generations of ancestors have been buried”.
Eugene Hunn, anthropologist writing on the traditions of the mid-Columbia River peoples
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“Drift people”, the indigenous peoples of southwestern Washington [...]

Gilgamesh and other pioneers in paradise

11,000 years ago the country where modern Iran is today was a “paradise”, according to the archeologists currently investigating the world’s oldest Stonehenge-type religious site there.  This site is thousands of years older than the famed one in the British Isles.  In the most recent issue of the Smithsonian, archeologists speculate that the landscape filled [...]

Blame Game or Natural Harvest?

Last night in the vice presidential debate Sarah Palin insisted we should not look to the past and play the “blame game”– but harvest time gives us another perspective.
Harvest time is time for pumpkins and apples and (at my house) figs and persimmons if we can beat the birds and squirrels to them. It [...]

Diplomacy with the Nations of Life

The perception of other natural life as nations with distinct ways of life, values, perceptions, rights, and territories of their own would allow us to see the natural world in a more holistic way. This is not a new idea. This perception inspired indigenous Northwesterners to treat the first salmon taken from a run with [...]