Lessons from Yellowjackets: Speaking with the Natural World

Some years back, my then three year old daughter and I were sitting in our front yard when a decidedly threatening man appeared and insisted I hire him.
For what, he never said.
In fact, without listening to my answer–which was an instinctive “no”– he let himself through our side gate and went around to the back [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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
————–
“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 [...]

The NIMBY Lie, part II: self-destructive consequences

The NIMBY (not in my backyard) stance assumes we can obliterate an “enemy” without attacking our own well being in the process. The reasoning goes like this:  we are separate and distinct and very different from our enemies. We can build a fence to keep them out– or attack them given our superior intelligence/strength/higher status [...]

Breast Milk and Salmon Waters: shared contamination and what to do about it.

I recently reviewed Tainted Milk, in which Maria Boswell-Penc investigates why so little attention has been paid to the contamination of breast milk in the U. S. with dangerous chemicals such as endocrine disruptors.
After assessing the data, Boswell-Penc concludes that breast feeding is still the best way to nourish your baby, especially since organic [...]